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Biddhist Emptiness in the Ethics and Aesthetics of

Watsuji Tetsurō

William R. Laeur

Religious Studies / Volume 14 / Issue 02 / June 1978, pp 237 - 250

DOI: 10.1017/S0034412500010714, Published online: 24 October 2008

Link to this article: http://journals.cambridge.org/abstract_S0034412500010714

How to cite this article:

William R. Laeur (1978). Biddhist Emptiness in the Ethics and Aesthetics of Watsuji
Tetsurō. Religious Studies, 14, pp 237-250 doi:10.1017/S0034412500010714

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Rel. Stud. 14, pp. 237-250
WILLIAM R. LAFLEUR
Assistant Professor, Princeton University

BUDDHIST EMPTINESS IN
THE ETHICS AND AESTHETICS
OF WATSUJI TETSURO*

During the past few decades a growing interest in what is often called the
'Kyoto School' of philosophy has evidenced itself here and there in the West,
especially in discussions of comparative religious thought and in the pages
of journals which are sensitive, in the post-colonial world, to the value of
giving attention to contemporary thought that originates outside the Anglo-
American and continental contexts.1 What has made the so-called Kyoto
School especially interesting is the fact that those thinkers identified with it
obviously possess a wide acquaintance with Western thought but also have
a programme of clarifying points at which they, as Japanese philosophers,
find Western philosophy either in sum or in its parts inadequate or objection-
able. Moreover, inasmuch as the philosophers of the Kyoto School have
deliberately reached back into the Mahayana Buddhist component in
Japanese civilization in order to find terms, perspectives, and even found-
ations for their own analyses and constructions, Western students of com-
parative religion and comparative thought have in the study of this school
a unique aperture for observing how a group of thinkers, while sharing
modernity and its problems with us, relates both of these to a religious
tradition which is in many ways strikingly different from that of the West.
Watsuji Tetsuro (1889-1960) is usually considered to have been a thinker
who occupied a position somewhere on the periphery of the Kyoto School;
Piovesana summarizes the consensus with his statement that Watsuji '. . .is
considered to have a system of his own. . .'.2 Part of the reason for this is the
fact that Watsuji was a younger colleague of Nishida Kitaro (1870-1945)
* An earlier version of this paper entitled ' Watsuji Tetsuro's Social Philosophy and the Arts'
was presented in absentia to the Topical Seminar on Time and Space in Japanese Culture sponsored
by the Social Science Research Council and held at Yale University 29 January-1 February 1976.
I am grateful to the Social Science Research Council and to the Japan Foundation for support in
the initial stages of this study. I am also very grateful to Professor Abe Masao for his comments on
this paper. Note should be taken of the fact that throughout the text I have rendered Japanese
names in Japanese fashion, that is, with the surname first. Unless otherwise indicated, translations
are my own.
1
Most notably in the pages of Philosophy East and West. In this journal, Religious Studies, attention
to the Kyoto school can be found in Masao Abe, ' Non-Being and Mu: the Metaphysical Nature of
Negativity in the East and the West', vol. 11, number 2 (June, 1975), pp. 181—92 and in Frederick
Sontag, 'Freedom and God: the Meeting of East and West', vol. 11, number 2 (Dec. 1975),
pp. 421-31.
2
Gino K. Piovesana, S.J., Recent Japanese Philosophical Thought 1862-1362: a Survey (Tokyo:
Sophia University Press, 1968), p. 86.

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238 WILLIAM R. LAFLEUR
in the department of Philosophy at the University of Kyoto and, since he
was, therefore, never a direct student of Nishida, the acknowledged founder
of the Kyoto School, his position would tend to be never more than tangen-
tial within that school. But a more substantive reason for the difficulty of
including Watsuji in it is the fact that, in contrast to Nishida and Nishida's
direct followers, Watsuji, at least initially, appears to have depended much
less upon the religious perspective of Mahayana Buddhism as a basis for his
philosophical thought. For instance, in an important essay on Watsuji,
David Dilworth notes that readers might be reminded of Buddhist ideas in
Watsuji's use of terms, but goes on to make this judgement: '. . .it should
be stressed that Watsuji's position was not essentially a Buddhistic or religious
one such as worked out in the Kyoto school'.1 Dilworth continues: 'Watsuji
. . .seems to have refused, at least philosophically and methodologically, to
embrace the solution of religion.'2
It is the purpose of this present paper, first, to challenge at least part of
Dilworth's assessment in order to clarify certain issues at stake. That is,
irrespective of whether Watsuji should or should not be included in the
Kyoto school, it is possible, I think, to demonstrate that Dilworth errs in his
judgement that Watsuji did not philosophically and methodologically
embrace the solution of religion. I wish to show that the Buddhist notion of
sunyatd or emptiness is the kingpin of his thought, something without which it
would make no sense and have no value. My second purpose will be, on the
basis of this analysis, to give a presentation of what I take to be Watsuji's
unique contribution to international philosophy, that is, his system of
normative ethics and aesthetics based on Buddhist ideas. My procedure will
be to analyse the issues involved, selecting and translating along the way key
portions from Watsuji's voluminous works in order to support my argument.

Dilworth's assessment, as noted above, is that Watsuji '. . .refused, at least

philosophically and methodologically, to embrace the solution of religion'.
My judgement is exactly the opposite: not only does Watsuji embrace a
religious solution but he does so, I think, philosophically and methodological-
ly. This being the case, it is important to see the grounds for Dilworth's
judgement first of all. The principal ground seems to be Watsuji's stress upon
ethics; Dilworth chooses, it should be noted, the terms ' ethician' and ' cul-
tural phenomenologist' to designate the poles around which Watsuji's
intellectual concerns revolved. It certainly must be granted that Watsuji's
best-known work in Japan is his Rinrigaku or Ethics and that matters of
cultural history, both Eastern and Western, are matters to which he directed
1
David Dilworth, 'Watsuji Tetsuro (1889-1960): Cultural phenomenologist and ethician',
Philosophy East and West, vol. 24, number 1, pp. 3-22; quotation from p. 17. Another important
essay on Watsuji is Robert N. Bellah, 'Japan's Cultural Identity: Some Reflections on the Work of
Watsuji Tetsuro', The Journal of Asian Studies, vol. 24, number 4 (August 1965), pp. 573-94.
8
Dilworth, ibid.

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 BUDDHIST EMPTINESS IN WATSUJI TETSURO 239
1
many of his analyses. Nevertheless, I think that Dilworth errs when he
judges that, because Watsuji laid much stress on Confucian values and on
other moral qualities prized in traditional Japanese society, he should be
interpreted as showing '. . . syncretistic tendencies bridging the spiritual
traditions of the East in the broad multivariate framework of Neo-Confucian-
ism rather than Buddhism. . .' 2 This characterization does not, I think, do
justice to the conceptual coherence which was so important to Watsuji. But
more importantly, it obscures the crucial fact that it was in the Buddhist
notion of emptiness that Watsuji found the principle that gives his system
that coherence. Because Dilworth does not recognize this as having central
importance for the understanding of this philosopher, he slips into the error
of assuming that, inasmuch as both the title of a major work and a major
subject of concern for Watsuji was 'ethics', we should not think of him as
someone who embraced a solution of religion. Here, I think, is a case of
misidentification: Dilworth mistakes the subject for the solution.
However, another aspect of Dilworth's evaluation may be essentially
correct. The suggestion of uncertainty here is due to the ambiguity in the
wording of Dilworth's statement that '. . .Watsuji's position was not essenti-
ally a Buddhistic or religious one such as worked out in the Kyoto school'.
I do not know where the emphasis is intended in this sentence. Thus, in
order to clarify things, I add my own in order to make it a sentence with
which I can concur. That is, I think it is accurate to judge that 'Watsuji's
position was not essentially a Buddhistic or religious one such as worked out in
the Kyoto school''.
This touches the issue of Watsuji's relationship to Nishida and Nishida's
followers such as Tanabe Hajime, Hisamatsu Shin'ichi, Nishitani Keiji, and
Abe Masao. The successors to Nishida, those who continue the tradition and
interpret it to students in the West, generally view Watsuji as peripheral or,
perhaps, not even capable of being included in the Kyoto school. Among
these there would be a tendency to view Watsuji's relationship to the Buddhist
religious tradition as quite different from that of Nishida. This difference is
important and worthy of analysis. However, first, it should be noted that
Kosaka Masaaki, in an important book he wrote on both Nishida and
Watsuji, reminded the followers of the former that the thought of Watsuji
depends much more on religion than they, the students of Nishida and main
line of the Kyoto school tradtion, are usually apt to grant. 3 A distinction
drawn by Kosaka seems, at least to me, to be very important. It is not that
Nishida pursued a religious solution whereas Watsuji did not. Rather, each
had a different understanding of religion. Kosaka explains as follows.4 ' The
1
The collected works of Watsuji, Watsuji Tetsuro zenshu, 20 vols., are published in Tokyo by
Iwanami shoten, 1963. ' Dilworth, ibid.
* Kosaka Masaaki, Nishida Kitaro to Watsuji Tetsuro (Nishida Kitaro and Watsuji Tetsuro),
Tokyo: Shinchosha, 1964, p. 102.
4
Kosaka, op. cit. pp. 109-10. Based on Watsuji, Rinrigaku, vol. 1 (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten,
1970 ed.), pp. 559 ff.
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24O WILLIAM R. LAFLEUR
difference is that while for Watsuji religion, just like scholarship and the arts,
is to be included within "culture", for Nishida religion is not considered
to be something simply cultural.' Obviously, this is a distinction not at all
uncommon among students and interpreters of religion in the West as well.
The value of Kosaka's observation here, I think, is that it helps us get a
better grasp both on Watsuji and on the intellectual position of the Kyoto
school. We see the substantive reason why he might be excluded. And this
turns on the problem of whether religion is properly understood as being never
more than a part of culture or, on the contrary, as that which, while being
in culture, also challenges and transcends it. This is not the place to retrace
the arguments, familiar also to students of religion in the West and stated with
clarity in Niebuhr's Christ and Culture, as to which of these - or any of the
other formulations - is preferable. It is the place, however, to take note of
the fact that an a priori taking of religion as something which, while in
culture, also transcends it, may not be used to disallow the legitimacy of
Watsuji's employment of the Buddhist religious tradition in his philosophy -
even though Watsuji's own understanding of religion is that of something
which does not transcend culture. These distinctions help us understand the
assumptions and orientations of Watsuji on the one hand and of the main line
of the Kyoto school on the other. They clarify why it is that he cannot be in-
cluded in that school 'in the narrow sense'.1 But they also make plain why
it does not follow that Watsuji refused to embrace the solution of religion.
A note here on Watsuji's intellectual biography will both support the
points made above and facilitate the transition to the next area of discussion.
Any overview of Watsuji's work cannot but notice that, after early attention
to Western thinkers, he very self-consciously and deliberately turned back
to indigenous religious and intellectual traditions.2 His earliest writings
introduced existentialism and two important Western thinkers to Japan: his
Niichie Kenkyu (Nietzsche Studies) in 1913 and his £eren Kierukegoru (Soren
Kierkegaard) in 1915. But then something happened. Something about the
direction of Watsuji's thought altered course. In 1918 he published a book
entitled Guzo Saiko (Resurrecting Idols), the programmatic statement of his
intention to appreciate anew the Eastern and Buddhist traditions as these
were articulated specifically in the ancient religious art of East Asia and more
generally in the values of Watsuji's own, traditional, society as opposed to
modern, Westernized, society. Accounting for his change of mind, Watsuji
wrote in the preface of this book that it was occasioned by ' the death of
someone which fortunately brought out in me a sense of the wonder of
Buddhism'. Most commentators agree that the 'someone' referred to here
must be Natsume Soseki, the novelist Watsuji most admired.
1
I owe the notion that Watsuji does not belong to the Kyoto school 'in the narrow sense' to
Professor Abe Masao.
2
For a more complete intellectual biography of Watsuji see both Dilworth and Bellah essays
cited above.

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 BUDDHIST EMPTINESS IN WATSUJI TETSURO 24I

Dilworth and Bellah both, rightly I think, see this turning point as one
due to a crisis in Watsuji's pursuit of Western ways and Western indivi-
dualism.1 Soseki's later novels had indicated that individualism was not the
way for Japanese to pursue. But Watsuji, it should be noted, coordinated
this turn from individualism with a turn to Buddhism; in 1923 he published
important essays on the thirteenth-century Zen master Dogen, essays which
reintroduced this thinker after nearly seven centuries of neglect and single-
handedly brought modern Japanese thinkers back to the study of what now is
generally agreed to have been the most sophisticated thinker in the earlier
religious tradition of Japan. And this is only a part of the attention which
Watsuji now directed towards the study of Buddhism both on the Asian
continent and on the Japanese archipelago. It is clear that he was deeply
involved in the study of the Buddhist tradition.
But this cannot be more than external evidence for the argument which will
be put forth here. It is necessary now to go on to an exploration of Watsuji's
principal work in order to show from internal evidence that Buddhist
religious thought in general and the concept of emptiness in particular
became the fulcrum for the structure of Watsuji's philosophy. Here my
purpose will be to discover the conceptual coherence in the mature expression
of Watsuji's thought. My initial focus will be upon his Rinrigaku or Ethics not
only because it is Watsuji's most important theoretical work but also because
I wish to show that, even when the subject under discussion is ethics, the
central concept employed by Watsuji is a Buddhist one, the notion of
emptiness.

The edition of Watsuji's Rinrigaku (Ethics) in use today is the product of

revisions by the author. As Robert N. Bellah points out, the earlier editions
of this work reflected the nationalist mentality of the war years.2 Watsuji
seems to have happily excised the jingoism from it once the war was over.
I take the final edition of 1949 as the one which both met his own deepest
intentions and has the conceptual balance that was always important to
this thinker.3
And it was because of imbalance in Western philosophies that Watsuji
originally felt compelled to reject them and articulate his own view of man.
Inasmuch as Watsuji defined ethics as the study of man, the focus of his
critique of Western systems of thought deserves attention; he held that they
defined man inadequately. Modern Western individualism, Watsuji thought,
is the expression of this inadequate and imbalanced view. Concerning
individualism he wrote that i t ' . . .is that which would replace mankind as a
whole with that which is no more than a part, namely, the individual'. 4 In
the preface to his book Fudo (translated and entitled A Climate) Watsuji tells
1 2
Dilworth, op. cit. pp. 7-11 and Bellah, op. cit. pp. 586-7. Bellah, op. cit. p. 591.
* Kosaka notes this as a point of contrast to Nishida, for whom such balance and aesthetic of
expression was much less important. * Rinrigaku, vol. 1, p. 11.
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242 WILLIAM R. LAFLEUR
of his disappointment when studying with Heidegger in Berlin in 1927 to
find that even in Sein und £eit there is this partial view of man. In Watsuji's
reading of that work it is flawed finally because Heidegger's '. . .Dasein was
the Dasein of the individual only'. 1
We can probe more deeply into Watsuji's thought by noticing that he
not only objected to a definition of man which lopsidedly stressed the indivi-
dual but also held that Western thought placed undue emphasis upon the
category of temporality and, as a consequence, slighted that of spatiality.
He saw Western thought having no difficulty in noticing that time is for
man tied intimately to the subjective side of existence; space, however, tends
in the West to be thought of as a part of nature or environment and is thus
only objectified. And for Watsuji the one kind of imbalance was linked to the
other; in fact, they supported one another.
Concerning German Idealism he wrote:2
In German Idealism, which rejected the mutuality of the relationship between
both receptivity and spontaneity and turned, instead, to a type of explanation
which would see all things from the side of the initiating subject, spatiality was
made into that acting subject's products or deeds.
Citing Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel as the targets of this critique, he goes on:
' In the thought of each of these spatiality is ordinarily dealt with as that
through which the subject is objectified or externalized.'3 But Watsuji located a
similar eclipse of the important dimension of spatiality in Heidegger.
Although Heidegger had intended to place importance on the spatial and
social side of human existence, he did not carry this through. Dilworth
summarizes Watsuji's objection very well in the following:4
According to Watsuji, Heidegger ultimately lost sight of this insight in the second
half of Sein und £eit when he stressed the radical temporality of Dasein's ' Being-
towards-death.' In the individual's experience, Sein is existence for death; but
from the perspective of the whole of society, while individuals die, mankind lives
and man's world continues.
Thus an inordinate emphasis upon temporality fits the excessive stress on the
individual side of man in Western thought. When philosophy is on the skew
the need for coherence causes imbalance all along the system.
The constructive side of Watsuji's thought was one he himself viewed as
having balance and proportion. The structure of his study of ethics itself
manifests this; Rinrigaku never fails to balance temporality with spatiality,
the individual side of human existence with the social side, and so forth. He
deliberately, as we noted above, looked into the religious and philosophical
traditions of the East for forms of the balance he desired to articulate.
1
Fudo (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1967 ed.), p. 2. English translation of this work is by Geoffrey
Bownas, published by the Japanese National Commission for UNESCO and entitled A Climate:
a Philosophical Study (Tokyo: 1961); quotation from pp. v-vi.
2
Rinrigaku, vol. 1, p. 178; original emphasis.
8
Ibid.; original emphasis. * Dilworth, op. cit. p. 16.

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 BUDDHIST EMPTINESS IN WATSUJI TETSURO 243
The definition of man was at the heart of the problem according to
Watsuji and the flaw in the Western conception could be detected even
philologically.1 Words such as avOpcoiros, homo, man, and Mensch refer, first
of all, to individual man; the fact of communal existence is not immediately
present in these words themselves.2 That is, communal existence or the
notion of man in relationship is a secondary, derived step in the way of
thinking about man in the West. By contrast, in the Sino-Japanese compound
ningen (Afti) is found a linguistically more successful expression of the kind
of balance he felt necessary to have when thinking about man. He took this
term as one which embodies in itself the important things in the thinking
about man found in the Confucian classics and in the Buddhist sutras.3
What is indicated by this term? The term ningen generally functions in
the Japanese language as a classifier, designating man in distinction from
other kinds of beings. But according to Watsuji the term is a very rich one;
he points out the significance of the two Chinese characters which together
make it a Japanese word. One of these, A , refers to ' m a n ' and the other,
fa\, refers to 'relationship'. Thus the poles of singularity and plurality are
built into the way in which the word ningen is written; man is both. Thus,
according to Watsuji, both sides of human existence, man's existence as an
individual and his existence as society, are coequal and thought of as such.
The important point is that the notion of being in relationship is not secon-
dary or an afterthought but, along with the individuated aspect, constitutive
of man from the outset. In such a context it would be a redundancy to speak
of man 'and his relationships'. Nevertheless, to define man only as a set of
relationships would upset the balance in the other direction and lose the
individual side of things.
This is the point which, according to Watsuji, Western thought never
seemed able to grasp and the reason for its individualistic bias. He wrote:4
A grasp of man's two-sided nature — that is, as individual and as society — and the
discovery of man's deepest essence in this double dimension never even comes up
for discussion when it has already been assumed that a clear distinction between
man and society is to be part of the very definition of terms.
His point that relatedness ought to be part of the definition of man is
illustrated by him through certain examples, the terms of which are easily
traceable to classical Confucianism. For instance:5
On the one hand a person exists in a certain role denned for him by his place in
his family. But then, on the other hand, he, jointly with his parents and siblings brings
into being that relationship called the 'family'. This being the case, here is a relation-
1
On the importance of philology for Watsuji see Umehara Takeshi, 'Kaisetsu' (Commentary)
in Umehara Takeshi, ed., Watsuji Tetsuro shu (Tokyo: Chikuma shobo, 1974), p. 415.
2
Rinrigaku, vol. 1, p. 16.
* Rinrigaku, vol. i,p. 18. It may be that in this term ningen Watsuji saw the retention also of certain
values in the Chinese ethical and philosophical term jen.
4 e
Rinrigaku, vol. 1, p. 16. Rinrigaku, vol. 1, p. 59; original emphasis.
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244 WILLIAM R. LAFLEUR

ship of mutual dependence. The relative positions of parent and child as well as
those of elder and younger siblings are defined by relationships in the family;
however, the relationships of the family are made between parents and children
and between younger and older siblings. These relationships are accepted already
as obvious matters of common-sense. For instance, someone without children is
never referred to as a 'parent'. A 'parent' can only be so by being a 'child's
parent'. Likewise, a 'child' can only be so by being a 'parent's child'.
Watsuji summarizes this discussion as follows:1
These mutually dependent relationships come into being simultaneously; we
cannot explain them in terms of one being temporally prior to the other.
What is especially interesting in this is that, although the specific term-
inology would seem to be that of the paired sets of relationships - parent
and child, elder child to younger child, etc. - fundamental to Confucianism,
Watsuji puts these into a conceptual framework which, in my opinion,
derives much more from Mahayana Buddhism. His emphasis upon a finely
balanced mutuality of dependence is decidedly not Confucian; nor is his dis-
missal of priority as being philosophically unimportant. On the other hand,
these emphases are conceptually akin to the notion of emptiness set down
originally by the Indian Buddhist philospher Nagarjuna. Before explicating
this claim, however, there is value in simply taking note of the fact that
Watsuji, for whom philology is always important, deliberately uses the Sino-
Japanese character £ (Chinese, k'ung; Japanese, ku), that which in East
Asia was used to represent the Indian notion of sunyata or emptiness, as
a basic term in his system. That is, the very reason why man is both in-
dividual and social is because, according to Watsuji, the individuated
dimension of existence ' empties' the social dimension and, conversely, the
social dimension ' empties' the individuated one.
But what exactly does this mean and how is it all related to the thought
of Nagarjuna? These questions can begin to have an answer by taking
note of the fact that Nagarjuna's philosophical enterprise was directed to
the rigorous analysis of entities which someone might somehow assume to
have svabhava, self-existent reality or existence in and of itself. Nagarjuna
radically rejected any such possibility and attempted to demonstrate that
each and every entity was 'empty' of such self-existence. Another term, then,
for this would be ' dependent origination' or, even preferably, ' co-dependent
origination'. In his Mulamadhyamakakdrikds, Nagarjuna stated it thus: 2
The 'originating dependency' we call 'emptiness';
This apprehension, i.e., taking into account (all other
things), is the understanding of the middle way.
Since there is no dharma whatever originating independently,
No dharma whatever exists which is not empty.
1
ibid.
2
M&amadhyamakakarikds 24: 18 and 19 as translated by Frederick J . Streng, Emptiness: a Study
in Religions Meaning (Nashville and New York: Abingdon, 1967), p. 215.

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 BUDDHIST EMPTINESS IN WATSUJI TETSURO 245

He allowed of no exceptions; for instance, the notion of deity as self-existent

and having being prior to other beings is, according to Nagarjuna, un-
tenable.
Therefore, the notion of priority is undercut and production is always
mutual. In a classic example, one immediately related to Watsuji's argu-
ment, Nagarjuna states in the Vigrahavydvartani1:
If a son is produced by a father, and if that (father)
is produced by that very son (when he is born),
Then tell me, in this case, who produces whom?
You tell me! Which of the two becomes the father, and
which the son -
Since they both carry characteristics of ' father' and
'son'? In that case there is doubt.
The point is that a son, by being born, makes a 'parent' of his father and in
that sense ' produces' his parent. Mutuality is always characteristic of pro-
duction; priority is an illusion.
The ascription of priority is what, in Watsuji's view as well, misrepresents
reality and, in addition, puts philosophy off balance. In keeping with the
tradition of Buddhism derived from Nagarjuna, Watsuji holds that every
trace of the notion of independent existence must be voided. The negations
themselves are mutual and it is only in this kind of dialectic that an adequate
understanding of man can, he holds, emerge. He writes :2
Man's existence in relationships is an existence which comprises both the individual and
society through mutual negation. Therefore, human existence cannot be explained as
a situation in which we first have individuals and then the establishment of relation-
ships among them; nor can it be explained asfirsta society and then the emergence
of individuals out of that society. In both of these explanations it is the ' priority'
which is the impossibility.
Abe Masao has lucidly demonstrated how this rejection of priority, a
rejection derived from Nagarjuna, goes against the grain of Western thought.3
In the case of Watsuji we have an Eastern philosopher consciously articulating
the ethical implications of a definition of man which has the notion of
emptiness as co-dependent origination at its core.

Watsuji is so well known as the leading ethicist of modern Japan that his
concern for the arts and aesthetics is usually somewhat neglected. Yet these
concerns not only constitute a large part of his writing but also provide
a vantage point for looking at Watsuji's notion of emptiness since, at least
in my reading of him, it is emptiness which is the central concept in this
area as well.
Like other thinkers concerned with the relationship between Buddhism
1
Vigrahavyaoartani, part 11: 49 and 50 in Streng, op. cit. p. 226.
2 3
Rinrigaku, vol. 1, p. 107; original emphasis. Abe, op. cit.

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246 WILLIAM R. LAFLEUR
1
and the arts of East Asia, Watsuji finds himself engaged in asking questions
about the particularity of these. He wonders why certain rather unique
genres or matrices developed under the aegis of Zen, for instance gardening
as an art, the tea ceremony, and what is called renga, that is linked-verse or
poetry composed by a group of persons. He answers his own question in the
following way :2
As arts under (Zen's) influence we can cite the No drama, gardening, tea ceremony,
sumie painting, and so forth. Every one of these arts has a common point that the
moment of negation lies at its core.
Exactly what he means here by ' the moment of negation' is the critical
point. My argument will be that he does not simply mean that these arts have
as a characteristic of them what is sometimes called ' negative expression' -
that is, the prolonged silences and empty spaces that can be found in them.
That is, they do not simply provide us with some kind of aesthetic embodi-
ment of un, 6v, the Nihil, or ontological negation. Watsuji, I think, has a more
sophisticated view and in it the meaning of 'negation' is intimately linked
to the notion of emptiness as co-dependent origination.
Nevertheless, we meet something unexpected here. Having so much
emphasis on conceptual balance in his theory, Watsuji in his discussion of
the arts presents us with something of a conundrum inasmuch as he makes
much of the rejection of symmetry in the arts influenced by Zen Buddhism. The
reasons for this are interesting and of importance to this discussion, but
first there should be some direct quotation from Watsuji on the arts. In the
following passage, having noted that the gardens of Europe present a formal
symmetry whereas those of Japan are asymmetrical, he explores the reasons
for this difference:3
Japanese landscape architects pay much attention to the relationship in the
Japanese garden between the soft, undulating moss and the hard stepping-stones.
They create a contrast between, on the one hand, the stepping-stones, their cutting,
shape, and placement - for even when they make the stones square with a flat sur-
face it is to express this contrast — and, on the other hand, the soft, flowing moss;
but it is not some kind of academic 'symmetry'. Therefore, when the contour of
the moss is elongated and narrow, the rocks will be positioned in a straight
line; but when the moss is in a loose and expansive shape, the rocks, whether they
be large or small, will be agreeably but unevenly dispersed here and there. The
unity achieved in this is not one of geometrical proportion but, rather, a harmon-
ization of forces which appeals to our sensibilities - what I would call an accord of
'spirit'. Just as between two human beings there can be a point in their relation-
ship at which the ' spirit' of the one gets into accord with that of the other, so we
can see a similar kind of relatedness between a garden's rocks and its moss or
even between one rock and another.
1
The other major figure here would be Hisamatsu Shin'ichi. See his Zen and the Fine Arts (New
York: Kodansha, 1971).
2
Watsuji Tetsuro, 'Japanese Literary Arts and Buddhist Philosophy', trans, by Hirano Umeyo,
The Eastern Buddhist, n.s., vol. 4, no. 1 (May 1971), pp. 88-115; quotation from p. m .
3
Fudo, p. 190; translation mine.

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 BUDDHIST EMPTINESS IN WATSUJI TETSURO 247

Obviously, Watsuji, in what is in fact a long tradition in East Asian Buddhism,

had no reservations about the attribution of sentience or quasi-sentience to
what in Western thought would be classified as non-sentient or inanimate
objects.1 He not only adopts what was called the 'pathetic fallacy' but seems
to see a principle involved in the adoption of it. In my judgement this is
related to Watsuji's insistence, noted above, that the environment of man
should not be simplistically objectified by viewing it as mere spatiality.
But his major point in this quotation is that art of the type described here
brings into special focus the underlying relatedness of things, the mutuality which
exists in spite of differences between hard and soft, great and small, observer
and observed, etc. He makes a similar point in his discussion of painting,
in this case the Zen-influenced ink painting of China and Japan. He writes:2
The closest thing to these gardens in terms of having a similar way of bringing
things together into a unity is the art of painting - an art form from which
gardening architects probably learned a good deal. One such painting would be as
follows. A rectangular space has on its upper left side four or five bamboo leaves,
variously shaded and in India ink. Beyond these is the faintly executed shaft of the
bamboo plant running down from the leaves to the left edge of the painting. As
for the remainder of the canvas it is almost entirely blank except for a single
sparrow painted rather darkly a little below the bamboo leaves. To speak of
' symmetry' in such a painting would be absolutely meaningless. Nevertheless, one
has the feeling that there is a harmony which pervades the entire composition. There
is a relationship between the void on the canvas where nothing is painted - a wide
and deep space - and the dark silhouette of the sparrow. And there is also a
reciprocity between the energy embodied in the sparrow and that in the two or
three bamboo leaves which stand out because they were painted more forcefully
than the others. In this way each element in the painting seems to occupy its
necessary and unchanging position in the whole. Through a pattern of relationships,
one in which there occurs a balancing of various spiritual intensities, things are
brought into a complete and perceptible harmony - in spite of the fact that the
painted portion is all off on one side of the composition.
If we ask how this advances our understanding of Buddhist emptiness, we
need at the outset to reject an interpretation which recommends itself as
obvious but is, in fact, wrong and misleading. As was suggested above, we may
not identify emptiness with some kind of non-being which has been reified and
now has managed to be mirrored by and through blank spaces on an artist's
canvas. Such an interpretation would not only involve a facile mimeticism
but would also involve a fundamental misunderstanding of the meaning of
emptiness. For Watsuji's point about the void on the canvas is not that it
makes palpable and concrete something metaphysical called 'non-being' but
that it operates to make possible a series of relationships and reciprocities.
The understanding of emptiness here, then, is entirely consistent with
Nagarjuna's exposition of it; it is co-dependent origination. And this co-
1
For a discussion of this in East Asian Buddhist history see my ' Saigyo and the Buddhist Value
of Nature, Part I ' , History of Religions, vol. 13, no. 2 (Nov. 1973), pp. 93—128.
2
Fudo, pp. 191-2; translation mine.

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248 WILLIAM R. LAFLEUR

dependence involves, as Abe Masao has argued, a recognition that being and
non-being are themselves totally co-dependent. 'Only when the positive
and negative principles have equal force and are mutually negating is the
dialectical structure of Sunyatd possible.'1 Abe points out that the Sino-
Japanese terms for 'being' and 'non-being', unlike their Western counter-
parts, are completely balanced in relation to one another. ' They are entirely
relative, complementary, and reciprocal, not being one without the other. ' 2
Thus to give any kind of priority to something such as the Nihil would be as
much a violation of the principle of emptiness as would be its counterpart,
the lopsided attribution of priority to being.
But then why does the art so conspicuously avoid and reject any repre-
sentation through symmetry? The reason is, I think, that in Watsuji's view
co-dependence is dynamic and multiple rather than static and single. In
formal symmetry the balance and reciprocity is limited to the single and
exact counterpart of a line, angle, or whatever. The observer can always
designate the formal counterpart. But in the notion of emptiness there is
reciprocity between forms and entities which are in no way mirror-images
of each other. The mutuality is total even between rocks and moss, what is
vast and what is minuscule. This mutuality is also open-ended and multiple.
Surely it is one for which the formalized and objectified balance achieved in
'symmetry' is inadequate. 3
The whole notion of co-dependence, however, is in Buddhism a logical
extension of the tenet that there is no real atman or self. Thus the arts under
study here are, without a doubt, shaped and formed by the intention of
providing contexts within which the fiction of independent 'selves' is over-
come. In view of this it is important that especially two genres of art are
singled out as especially expressive of this intention. They are both forms of
art in which the ordinary bipolarity of ' artist' and ' audience' or ' creator'
and ' appreciator' is negated and overcome - and this negation of the
distinction is, in fact, part of the purpose of the art itself. That is, it would
not be possible to think of these two arts as successful if the distinction had,
in the course of their execution, not been at least temporarily in abeyance.
The first of these two arts is renga, what is often called ' linked verse', a form
of art in which a group of poets jointly compose an extended poem according
to very precise rules but still in such a way that the product is a coherent
whole and uniquely unified; those involved, according to a leading
literary critic, are 'both the poets and the audience'. 4 The second art
discussed here by Watsuji is cha-no-yu or the tea ceremony.
1 2
Abe, op. cit. p. 186. Ibid.
3
For a different view of asymmetry in. Zen arts see Hisamatsu, op. cit. pp. 29-31; Hisamatsu
attributes this to the fact that these arts ' . . . are imperfect and worldly in the sense of going beyond
perfection and holiness'.
1
Konishi Jin'ichi, ' T h e Art of Renga', trans, with an Introduction by Karen Brazell and Lewis
Cook, Journal of Japanese Studies, vol. 2, number 1 (Autumn 1975), pp. 29-61; quotation p. 33.

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 BUDDHIST EMPTINESS IN WATSUJI TETSURO 249
It is in the context of his discussion of these that Watsuji is able to link his
ethics closely to his aesthetics and at the same time demonstrate how both are
informed by Buddhism. He writes:1
(in renga). . .a group creation becomes possible only if there is more than merely
the link between verses, when there is a bond between one person and another as
well. In this way the making of renga is at the same time the expression of man's
communality. A renga comes into being organically only when there is the con-
crete realization of a dialectic and unity between the individual person and the
body of poetry composers. There is such a dialectical unity in the saying ' the entire
company has become one entity'. This being so, if there happens to be a self-
centred person in the group, a certain 'distortion' will be felt and the spirit of the
group will not be elevated. However, when someone lacks individuality and is only
influenced by the suggestions of others, a certain ' lack of power' will be experienced
and the creative enthusiasm will not come into being.
Watsuji carries the discussion forward in another section:2
Renga is a form of art which does not recognize any type of' appreciation' from the
standpoint of simple objective contemplation. One can say the same for the tea
ceremony. If the guest at tea would merely appreciate such things as the decor-
ations of the room and the host's activities in the ceremony, he does not really
penetrate into the art of the tea ceremony. Unless the guests who have come into
the tea room actually live together with what is going on in the ceremony, there
is not a real artistic accomplishment. The particular marvel of the tea ceremony
is that in it the guests too participate in the activity of artistic creation. Therefore,
on the host's part there must be a mental set which causes the guest to forget all
the affairs of everyday life and at the same time, on the part of the guest, there must
be a readiness to enter deeply into the mind of the host. This is to say that there
must be personal unification of minds. It is the same in the case of renga. There
too the locus of creativity is simultaneously one of appreciation. When it has come
time for a person to add his lines to those parts of the poem created earlier by
others, he must appreciate the words they uttered. When he so immerses himself
in this appreciation of the other's words and when he forgets his 'self, then
suddenly the words and lines he is to add will rise up to the surface of his con-
sciousness. Therefore, creation is appreciation and appreciation is creation.
Through this meeting and union of minds - that of the person who has just com-
posed and of the person who is now composing - an indescribable joy is experienced
by all those who are in the company of poets. This is the ecstasy of art and at the
same time an ecstasy expressive of what is called ' self-and-others/not two' (jita
funi). Thus, it is a religious ecstasy of the great emptiness.

Watsuji, it should be noted, takes pains to point out that he is not describing
some kind of experiential process in which particularity and multiplicity are
simply cancelled out in favour of merger and undifferentiated unity. This
would involve the error of assuming that some higher reality lies in the one
behind multiform existence. In the arts and in ethics Watsuji wants to retain
the dialectical tension. For instance, renga must be asfollows:3
1
Watsuji Tetsuro, 'Nihon no bungei to Bukkyo shiso', in Umehara Takeshi, ed., op. cit. pp. 108-
2 3
131; trans, mine. Op. cit. p. 130. Op. cit. p. 129.

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25O WILLIAM R. LAFLEUR
A oneness-together of individual and individual (in renga) does not mean that they
have become fused into one. For only through the fact that humans remain
individuals for ever is the oneness-together between person and person capable of being
expressed.
It was important for Watsuji to retain an older Buddhist formulation and
to write of these arts as those in which there is jitafuni (fj ih^Z-) - which
I render as 'self-and-others/not two'. It takes us back, I think, to Watsuji's
starting point in the definition of man as ningen and his principle that' man's
existence in relationships is an existence which comprises both the individual
and society through mutual negation'.
For Watsuji is, in my opinion, a remarkably consistent thinker, one for
whom ethics and aesthetics are both informed by similar structures of thought
and types of analysis. He provides unique insight into the uniqueness of
intention in the arts inspired by Zen Buddhism and these, at least in Watsuji's
interpretation of them, are part of a religious dimension which is at the
same time totally social. Mutual negation becomes that process through which
both the individual and society are protected. The balance of mutuality,
based on an interpretation of emptiness as co-dependent origination, is
fundamental to what Watsuji considers important.
Finally, note should be taken of the fact that, at least in my opinion, the
notion of 'absolute negation' is not functionally significant in Watsuji's
thought. This is not to deny that he ever uses such a term; it is merely to judge
that it is never integrated well into the architecture of his philosophy. It is a
term which, as others have noted, was probably borrowed from Nishida Kitaro,
the doyen of the Kyoto school. It may, in fact, be precisely because this notion
of ' absolute negation' is never integrated fully into Watsuji's thought that
his position is bound to remain somewhat ambigous within the intellectual
ambit of the Kyoto school. There is, I would suggest, a consistency on both
sides: the Kyoto school 'in the strict or narrow sense' makes much of absolute
negation for the same reasons that it ultimately views religion as something
which, while included in culture, also transcends it. Watsuji, by contrast,
holds that religion is to be understood as a part of culture and, therefore,
the need for an 'absolute negation' in his philosophy would seem moot.
Nevertheless, the Buddhist notion of emptiness functions as the fulcrum
of his thought. He holds it in a way totally in keeping with its explication
as co-dependent origination in the thought of Nagarjuna. For even though
it is intracultural balances, such as those between the individuated and social
sides of man, which are the concern of Watsuji, he envisions such balance
and reciprocity as possible only because a dialectic of negation brings such
into being. For the social side of human existence 'empties' the individuated
side of any possible priority or autonomy and the individuated side does
something exactly the same and exactly proportionate to and for the social side.
There can be no doubt, I think, that for Watsuji emptiness is the key to it all.

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