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thezensi te Place And Being-Time:

Spatiotemporal Concepts In TheThought Of Nishida Kitaro And Dogen

Kigen Rein Raud: Institute of Asian and African Studies, University of HelsinkiPhilosophy East and West - Volume 54, Number 1, January 2004, pp. 29-51 University of Hawai'i Press further reading: Henry Rosemont Jr: Is Zen a Philosophy? Is Zen a Philosophy? Dogen Kigen: The Complete Shobogenzo The Complete Shobogenzo KevinSchilbrack:: Metaphysics in DogenMetaphysics in Dogen

It is not accidental that many East Asian thinkers have expressed their views on reality interms that relate to the perception of space and time views that are markedly differentfrom the Newtonian/common sense model accepted by most Western thinkers, in whichspace is uniformly empty and filled with discrete objects, while all distances and durationsare clearly measurable. Perhaps the best known among such basically spatiotemporal EastAsian concepts are the notions of place (basho) of Nishida Kitar (18701945) and thebeing-time (uji) of Dgen Kigen (12001253). This article is an effort at a comparativeanalysis of these notions, focusing especially on Nishidas philosophy as a synthesis ofWestern and Asian philosophical discourses.

Nishidas thought is certainly oriented toward an abstract system, a description of our waysof thinking about reality, and it is not part and parcel of a practical lifemodeling system as isthe Buddhist doctrine of Dgen. In its spatiotemporal grounding, however, it remains firmlyembedded in the Asian tradition, which does not allow the separation of the subject of theobserver from the world observed and thereby moves spatiotemporal concepts into theontological domain. This particular position places Nishidas thought between Western andAsian philosophical discourses, making it simultaneously part of both and of neither. Thus,perhaps the best place from which to approach Nishidas ideas is their language, their form.

Nishida: Philosophical Discourse Between East and West

The texts of the late Nishida, and in particular his last major work, Bashoteki ronri toshkyteki sekaikan (The logic of place and the religious worldview) (1945), present anumber of problems, not the least of which is their style. Although constantly speaking aboutlogic, they are not in the least systematic in exposing their message rather to thecontrary, their text is a flow of an almost oral character, as described by Walther Ong,1seemingly repetitive and sometimes formulaic. The form of the text, however, is not evenvirtually that of a transcript of an oral discussion, since it employs the grammatical markersof the usual neutral written style; but in addition to the oral traits in its general character it

also occasionally contains curious indications of an oral speech situation remarks such asI shall give you the details some other day2 instead of elsewhere, et cetera. The textalso uses a quite limited vocabulary. Indeed, it seems that the knowledge of perhaps two orthree hundred carefully selected Chinese characters is quite sufficient to carry the readerthrough about 90 percent (if not more) of the text.

It should be noted that the relationship between oral and written language had been morethan problematic during the years of Nishidas maturation. The radical difference betweenthe heavily sinicized written language in which Nishida had received his education and thespoken language came to be erased as a result of the gembunitchi (unification of speech andwriting) movement, which resulted in the construction of a new, more phonocentric writtenlanguage. This so-called kgo (spoken [written] language) was introduced to schooltextbooks only in 1903, when Nishida was thirty-three years old. Karatani Kjin has stressedthe link between this movement and the urge to construct a Western-style civilization basedallegedly on phonetic writing,3 proposing that it was the formation of the genbun itchisystem that made possible the so-called discovery of the self.4 Karatani is speaking abouta process that evolved in literature and drama, but, along these lines, much of Nishidasphilosophy with its focus on subjectivity can be read as a continuation of or a reaction to theproject of self-discovery.

The flowing nature of the text also overwhelms the structural level of its organization. Veryfar from being in ordine geometrico demonstrata, the Bashoteki ronri thus possesses anumber of formal characteristics that are typically present in mystical texts, as analyzed byNiklas Luhmann and Peter Fuchs.5 They write:

The articulated non-articulation of the mystical experience can exploit this form[of paradox] because it is not concerned with logic-controlled communication.The decisive factor is that the communication of paradoxes produces results. Theconnection of the unconnectables . . . lets communication rotate. It returns againand again and passes itself by and cannot stand still. The establishment of afoundation onto which something could subsequently be added is hinderedthrough paradoxes: sense that can be grasped appears only indirectly, in jumpingoff the carousel, as the insight into the impossibility of grasping this sense that isprocessed. . . . [Mystical discourse] produces negative concepts that denotenothing, and treats them as concepts that denote something and to which furtherconcepts can therefore be attached.6

At first glance, this seems to be a rather adequate description of the form of Nishidas text aswell, and yet his pronounced goal is the elaboration of a kind of logic (ronri). Nishida himselfhas pointed this out with some concern in his last, unfinished text, Watakushi no ronri nitsuite (About my logic) (1945), where he expresses his fear that his work might be rejectedby the philosophical field as an articulation of religious experience and not a genuine logicat all.7 This fear is not quite unreasonable, because Nishidas logic proposes a rather radicalbreak with the forms of thought hitherto considered logical, as he writes: The problems thathave been unthinkable in former logics because of their form have become thinkable [inmine].8 The quality of the content is thus necessarily reflected in its form as well, which iswhy we have to remember that the rigor associated with logic in the Western sense of thisword is not necessarily a characteristic of Nishidas ronri. Even some translators of this text,notably David Dilworth, who, in their own testimony, attach great value to it, have seeminglyfound it impossible to accept it in its original form and therefore have seen fit to correctNishida with insertions, interpolations, and technical terms so that it would look more

philosophical to the Western reader. This leaves us with the idea that Nishidas thoughtitself has also been shaped predominantly in a Western framework, which is clearly not thecase. These distortions amount, at a certain level, to a kind of rejection, if not of Nishidasthought then at least of its form, and they also obscure the original conceptual apparatus heis using by superimposing their own. Dilworths translation seems to have become thestandard English version of the Bashoteki ronri and is being used also by philosophers whodo not read Japanese, although it should rather be read as an idiosyncratic interpretation of,not the first introduction to, the late Nishida.

To be sure, during his entire career, Nishida made use of Western-style philosophicalterminology to express ideas fundamentally indebted to the Buddhist worldview, in particularZen, which he himself had practiced. In a letter to Nagayo Yoshir (6 November 1939) hewrites: I, too, have a deep interest in the vision of emptiness. Isnt the vision of emptinesssomething that shines at the bottom of the whole of our Eastern culture? At the bottom ofreligion as well as of art? Upon this vision of emptiness I have tried to build myphilosophy.10

Widely read as he was in Western philosophy, one of Nishidas main concerns was to findpossible points of contact between his own heritage and the philosophical background of themodern civilization that was taking shape in Japan during his lifetime. Nishida was born in1870, two years after the Meiji restoration, and thus grew up during the years of intensivecultural and technological import. This was also a period of intense intellectual andideological activity. The traditional Japanese worldviews were clearly unable to respond tothe challenges of the times, and the technological superiority of the West was easilyexplained by the differences in conceptualizing the world. For some Japanese intellectuals,like Niijima Jand Uchimura Kanz, this led to the acceptance of Western thinking (in theircase, Christianity) out of patriotic duty, but without reservations;11 for others, likeTachibana Ksaburor Nakano Seig, this was the cause for violent revolt against Westernideas that seemingly threatened the basis of Japanese society.12 Although the politicalpositions subsequently embraced by some representatives of the Kyto school align themwith the supporters of Japanese particularism up to the point of endorsing the aggressivewar effort, the initial philosophical position taken by Nishida should in my mind still rather beseen as motivated by an honest attempt to find the intellectual ground for a new Japansomewhere between the Western and traditional Asian conceptual systems.

Although Buddhist ideas in dialogue with Western philosophy are manifest already in his firstmajor work, Zen no kenky (An inquiry into the Good) (1911) the zen of the title meansthe good and has nothing to do with the zen of Zen Buddhism Nishida did not actuallyintroduce much in the way of Buddhist terminology or direct references to Buddhist sourcesuntil the final period of his life. At least in part, this must have been caused by theorganization of the field of thought. Nishidas discipline was tetsugaku, or philosophy, a wordcoined by Nishi Amane (18291897) to designate the specifically Western way of philosophicinquiry, somewhat similarly to Tsubouchi Shys concept of shsetsu as an equivalent toWestern-style prose literature, as opposed to the Japanese literary tradition. Since tetsugakuis the science of clarity, not the love of wisdom, in such a distinctly determined field,certain rules obviously had to apply and certain conventions to be followed. It is thusimpossible to assess to what extent Nishidas avoidance of Buddhist terminology orreferences to Buddhist sources in his earlier works are a conscious choice, but the relationsbetween his own thought and the Buddhist tradition are fairly obvious from the start: even ifthe term junsui keiken (pure experience) might have been adopted from William James, it isdescribed in the opening pages of Zen no kenky, without using Buddhist terms or referring

to Buddhist sources, in apparent analogy with the original enlightenment taught by variousschools of Mahyna Buddhism and by Zen in particular.

In view of this it should be clear that when Nishida expresses his views on reality,subjectivity, et cetera in the Bashoteki ronri and contrasts them with particular standpointsof earlier Western philosophers, it is not strictly from within the Western terminologicaltradition that he is speaking but it is not from the outside (or traditional Asian thought),either. It seems that the position he ascribes to the subject, on the border between theinternal and the external,13 is in its liminality similar to the position of his own verbal self-expression, the inside being his traditional heritage and the outside the Western-stylemodern, expressive apparatus he is using. Of course it should also be remembered thatapart from aptly designating Nishidas position on the field of thought, the notion of inbetween (aida) has traditionally had an important role in Japanese spatiotemporalthinking,14 where the transition from one clearly marked point to another is normallygradual and involves the crossing of several boundaries as well as several zones of varyingbetweenness. One of the aims of this article is to show, through a close reading of Nishidastext, that there is, indeed, a more or less strict conceptual apparatus at work in it. It willconcentrate on the notions of time and space, introducing other concepts only inasmuch asthese are necessary for the elucidation of these two (and some others closely related tothem), and it will therefore only marginally touch upon the central issues of the text, such asNishidas notion of subjectivity. It should therefore be seen as an attempt to justify theoriginal form of Nishidas text (or, for that matter, the text of any thinker) and not as a full-scale interpretation of his late thought, although I hope to clarify his notions of temporalityand spatiality in the process. I shall also try to elucidate Nishidas philosophical position bycomparing his views to those of Dgen and by demonstrating their similarity in severalimportant aspects.

Space, Time, and Reality in Nishidas World(s)

In order to talk about Nishidas ideas of time and space, it is perhaps useful to start with thebroader notions of reality and world. Usually he prefers to speak about worlds, of whichthere are many, rather than about reality as a whole. The question of reality emerges mostclearly when Nishida opposes his own view of it to classical logic, or the logic of objects. Themain difference between the logic of objects and Nishidas approach lies in the fact that thelogic of objects presupposes a unique, ready-made reality wherein changes and movementsare of a secondary nature and can be observed as if from the outside,15 whereas the logicof place positions the individual directly into the process of reality and lets it emerge andchange only in interaction with it:

In order for the self-awareness of an entity (mono) to emerge, it has to be exposed (taisuru)to the absolute Other. I think that the mutual determination of entities that are facing eachother is what makes them explicit. When people think about things (butsu), they base theirthoughts on the logic of objects, but in fact we think from the standpoint of the mutualexpression of entities facing each other.16

That is to say, the person thinking about a thing is constituted through opposition to thething, and subjects only emerge in interaction with the reality that, as subjects, theyperceive. This reminds one of the Hegelian dialectic, but according to Nishida, Hegel stilldoes not go far enough:

I am never thinking from the standpoint of the logic of objects. What I amproclaiming is a dialectic of absolutely contradictory self-identity. Even the

dialectic of Hegel still adheres to the standpoint of the logic of objects. This iswhy leftists have claimed him to be a pantheist. The only place where a trulyabsolute dialectic can be found is the Buddhist teaching of praj. Buddhism isnot pantheistic, as Western scholars think.17

To take this as a commitment to the position of the texts known collectively as thePrajpramitstras would be incorrect. These texts emerged not merely as the result ofabstract speculation, but had concrete practical functions, and the logic articulated in themwas meant to be a tool with which one could deconstruct the logic of objects in the mind ofan adept who was guided by these texts in meditational practice. Their goal is not theexplanation of reality but the attainment of a state of mind in which all explanation becomessuperfluous. This is not what Nishida had in mind. As Frdric Girard writes: The philosophyof Nishida presents itself as a rationalism that proposes to analyze reality, which is bestgrasped through religious experience. But Nishida wants to empty that experience of allmystery with the help of a logic that wants to think the illogical.18 Thus, to suggest, asAgnieszka Kozyra has done,19 that Nishidas philosophy is basically an upya, a device forexpounding Buddhist doctrine to those who are unable to understand it in its true form andcan accept it only through the use of familiar Western philosophical language, is perhaps notquite fair. Although Nishida identifies himself with the logical position of these texts, his ownphilosophy, concerned though it is with the workings of the religious mind and expressinghis own experience, still remains, as he emphatically states in his final manuscript,20predominantly a reflection on thinking rather than a practical manual of self-deconstruction.This is another articulation of the betweenness of his position, which is well reflected in hisdiary entry of 23 July 1903: I am not practicing Zen for study. I am practicing it for mymind, for my life. Until seeing the essence I do not think of religion or philosophy.21

In this context, one should also note the use of first-person pronouns in Nishidas text. Todesignate himself as the person whose thoughts he relates, he uses watakushi or watashi,but to refer to a community of individuals, to which he himself also belongs together with thereader, he uses wareware. Watakushi has the connotation of a separate subject, as inshiritsu, private, which is written with the same character, whereas ware has the additionalmeaning of self and can be used of persons other than the first in idiomatic expressionssuch as ware o wasureru, to forget oneself. The text is thus a statement by watakushiabout the condition of what is aware the discourse of an internally constructed observerabout the world-conditioned self.

To return to the question of reality, obviously reality is paradoxical only in the sense that ittranscends the doxa, or, in other words, it is our way of perceiving reality such that it canappear as paradoxical to us. Nishida prefers to treat reality as an assemblage of worlds, oroverlapping levels of reality, on which different circumstances obtain. This is also a Buddhistnotion that goes back to abhidharma metaphysics, where it appears in the doctrine oftridhtu, the triple world of passions, forms, and formlessness, but it has been developedinto its most influential form in the Tendai doctrine of three thousand worlds, which are firstdistinguished by intellectual exercise and then reunited and reduced in meditational practiceto each single particle of the universe.22 But the grounds of the same idea can also befound in Ngrjunas distinction and subsequent relativization of the immanent and theultimate 23 and its development into the Tendai theory of threefold truth immanent,ultimate, and middle 24 which also posits different levels of reality with different rulesholding, at the same time stressing their fundamental unity. On the other hand, Nishidasthreefold world is no less indebted to Western philosophy, in particular the levels of matterposited by Leibniz, as Jacynthe Tremblay has made clear.25

Nishida defines his concept of a world in the following way:

The term world . . . does not mean, as it is usually the case when people thinkabout the world, this world that stands in opposition (tairitsu) to us as selves. Itis used for nothing else than expressing an absolute place-like existence;therefore one could also call it the absolute. When I discussed mathematics, Icalled it the system of contradictory self-identity.26

The word absolute is used here to designate the absolute Other with which one must standin relation in order to be constituted as a subject, and not a preexisting entity of the kindHegel describes in his Logic ( 194, add.1).27 Leaving aside, at this point, the centralconcept of place that appears here in the compound bashoteki, place-like, we can thusdefine Nishidas notion of the world as the reality in which one is inasmuch as one is. Inorder for one to be, to exist in the first place, one needs this first place to exist in although these paraphrases probably do not make matters any clearer.

There are three immediately distinct worlds, or layers of reality, in which one is: the material(busshitsuteki) world, the life-world (seimeiteki sekai), and the historical (rekishiteki) world.Apart from these three, in which one is through being, there is also the world ofconsciousness (ishikiteki sekai), in which one is through being conscious; the intelligible(eichiteki) world; the world of creation (szteki), in which one is by interacting with it invarious ways; et cetera. But these worlds are postulated through ones relation to them andare thus secondary to the worlds of being. Although all of them overlap, there are importantdistinctions to be made between them, and especially important for the present purposes isthe hierarchy that links the first three. It should be noted, however, that Nishida uses theword world in two ways: strictly as a term, as in the three worlds of being, and occasionallyalso ad hoc to designate an aspect of reality or the historical world itself from aparticular point of view, as, for example, in the expression zettaiteki ishi no sekai (the worldof absolute will),28 et cetera. The world of consciousness and other similar expressions aremore stable uses of this second kind.

The first world is the material one:

Two things, which both retain their uniqueness, oppose each other, negate eachother, are simultaneously linked with each other and are united in one form, or,conversely, they relate to each other, are then linked to each other, and are thenunited in one form it is this process that is always necessary for things tobecome individual and unique as they are, for things to become themselves. It isaccording to this model that we think of the world of things in interaction, of thematerial world.29

Note that the material world, thus defined, is something we think of, not something thatexists as such, that is, independently of the other worlds or layers of reality, although thereare certain characteristics pertinent to this world only that distinguish it from the next level,the world of life:

I think that in the material world, time is reversible. When we come to the life-world, time becomes irreversible. This is because life is singular, and the dead donot return to life. . . . Acting entities create forms. This world is the world ofpurposes. As I have written in my essay Life (Seimei), the life-world, differentlyfrom the material world, includes within the individual self also its self-expression, and because the inside of the self is its own reflection, in this world

action proceeds from the created to the creator, in balance between the insideand the outside.30

Several points are of interest here. First of all, the distinction between the material worldand the life-world brings us to the notion of time, to which I shall return below in moredetail. Life, which entails birth, growth, and death, all irreversible processes, is whatdetermines the direction of time in this framework, whereas in the material world timeseems to be akin to the C-series of J. McT. E. McTaggart, a series of the permanent relationsto one another of those realities which in time are events 31 an order like the one of theletters in the alphabet, which stays the same regardless of whether it is read forwards orbackwards. A thing in which the quality of life is not noted may thus appear from a certainbackwards-looking perspective at the moment of its death, decrease gradually, and finallydisappear at the moment of its birth. As soon as we perceive it as a form of life, however, itcannot be distinguished from its unique, directional trajectory. Moreover, according toNishida, the living thing contains its own expression in itself; this can probably beunderstood as the totality of all the trajectories it could possibly follow a newborn mousecan only grow into an adult mouse, not into an elephant which is why it contains all thephases of its self-manifestation along the irreversible axis of time in itself at the moment ofits birth.

This quality of life takes the form of action. A more readily accessible definition of action(hataraki) as Nishidas technical term has been given in his essay Kkan (Space): To actmeans to change the world while being at the same time just one point of it, no more thanan extremely limited particular to set the form of the world into movement from one of itscorners.32 In the Bashoteki ronri he is more technical:

Our selves are acting entities (mono). What does this mean? Action is thought ofin the context of the mutual relationships between things (butsu). . . . Actionmeans in the first place that the One negates the Other and the Other negatesthe One. This relationship of mutual negation is necessary. But not any kind ofmutual negation can be called action. This mutual negation must entail mutualaffirmation.33

But even this is not enough: Truly to act is not just to be moved or move because of theother, for that is to move the other by oneself / ones self, to act by ones self. This is whythere is no true action in the material world. There, everything is relative and all force is[merely] quantitative.34

This is clearly a distinction that cannot be made in terms of the logic of objects. Thepostulation of the world of life in these terms already entails the shift of perspective fromthe totally outside observer into the process itself, in which we as selves take our positionsbefore there is any talk of consciousness, that is, before we can actually begin to observe which, in fact, corresponds quite closely to reality. The third level of reality, the historicalworld, is distinguished from the previous ones by this very token: Our selves are corporeal,living things. The actions of our selves pursue the goals of living things. But since our selvesare the singular particularities of the historical world of absolutely contradictory self-identity,our actions are not merely pursuits of some goals, but of goals that we know and pursueself-consciously. These are the true acts that come from within the individual self.35

We can thus distinguish between three levels of being that correspond to the three worlds, orlayers, of reality: in the world of matter there are things (mono; the Japanese word aptlyincludes both lifeless objects and living things, although Nishida makes a distinction

between the word written in hiragana and with the Chinese character butsu that designateslifeless things); in the world of life there are already selves (jiko) that strive to fulfill theirdestinies; and in the historical world there are individual selves (jikojishin). This usageseems to be more or less consistent in Nishidas text. The distinction between jiko andjikojishin, however, seems to be rather strict and, in my mind, also essential for theunderstanding of several otherwise obscure statements. This difference is evident from suchsentences as our selves must first become the predicates of our individualities (jikojishin),no, predicates about (ni tsuite) our individualities36 where he speaks, it appears, abouttwo different stages of selfhood and asserts that the life-world-level self must become thepredicate of the historical-world-level individuality. A few lines later he writes: To beoriented toward a goal does not mean by far that something reflects its individuality(jikojishin), or is aware of itself a statement that again opposes the jiko of the life-worldand the jikojishin of the historical world, thus supporting my reading. A more thoroughanalysis of Nishidas views on subjectivity falls beyond the scope of this article, which is whywe shall now return to the question of time and space. I have already pointed out thedifference in the phenomenon of time between the material world and the world of life, inwhich time becomes irreversible. But there can be time without this characteristic as well:Of course, speaking about the material world we cannot say that time does not possess itscharacter. In a place where time does not have its character there is no such thing as force.However, in the material world time is self-negating, spatial.37 A clearer definition oftemporality and spatiality is to be found in the essay Kkan:

Usually, from the point of view of the conscious self, in abstract terms, we thinkof time as the order (keishiki) of succession, and of space as the order ofjuxtaposition, thus as of two orders that oppose each other. And we think ofspace from within time. When things that have previously appeared to us in acertain succession are repeated in the inverse order, we think of them as spatiallyorganized. This is not unreasonable. The action of our consciousness is temporal.Looking from the standpoint of consciousness, time is primary.38

This usual view thus opposes time to space as the inside order inherent in consciousnessto the rules that obtain outside. Clearly this view is itself only possible when we acceptNishidas terms and place the subject of consciousness immediately into the stream of theworld, where the opposition arises, and we do not try to think, with Kant, of time and spacein a priori terms. Under such circumstances, anything that we would habitually call a spatialobject is in fact spread out in time in order to perceive a cube, for instance, we shouldhave access to it from different sides, which we cannot do in a single instant. Accordingly,our perception of the cube is spread out in time, and so is the cube itself, seen from thepoint of view of the perceiving consciousness that does not yet operate with the category ofspace.

We have seen above that this primacy of time is, in fact, only a relative one, since itpresupposes the consciousness of a perceiver. But in Nishidas world the latter is not a given.This situation is not possible, according to the Aristotelian view, which, according to MartinHeidegger, underlies all Western theorizing on time until his own.39 For Aristotle, timecannot exist without the perceiving subject:

We still face the problem of whether, if there is no soul, time would exist or not, because ifthe entity that counts is not there, then there cannot be anything that is counted either.Clearly that means that numbers would not exist, because a number is something eitheralready counted or countable in principle. And if nothing else can do the counting except the

soul and the reason in the soul, it is impossible for time to exist without the existence of thesoul. . . . The before and after exist in motion, and time exists inasmuch these arecountable.40

Aristotles reality thus becomes time only in consciousness, but this reality is alreadytemporal for Nishida, because he associates it with force, that is, the source of action thattakes place in the material world. We can thus describe the time of the material world with aspatial model where causes precede results, but one can move freely from results to causesas well, and the words before and after have the same degree of relativity as above andbelow. This is not at all paradoxical for a discourse one of whose constantly repeatedformulas is from the created to the creator (tsukurareta mono kara tsukuru mono e) used to describe the direction that creation takes, and not only in this spatial time.

The distinction between spatiality and temporality arises when we move on to the world oflife, as noted above. It seems to be the same thing to say that the irreversibility of timeappears in the world of life, or that the world of life is constituted by the irreversibility oftime, since this world is in any case just a term to designate a layer of reality, not a realityapart. Nishida uses two words to denote order: To be able to think of true action, it isnecessary to introduce the concept of order (chitsujo) or at least sequence (junjo). This isbecause we now need the concept of irreversible time.41 The hierarchy of the conceptssuggested by the text implies that order (chitsujo) is a higher concept that holds sequence(junjo, which could normally also be translated as order) within its borders. The latter,being sufficient to produce the idea of irreversible time, is accordingly of temporal nature.The former, higher notion of order, does not, however, indicate some more advanced formof spatiotemporal organization, but pertains to a dimension that already includes an elementof subjectivity:

The world includes self-expression in the self and proceeds by giving form to theindividual self. It is from this point of view that the world of life emerges. Ithappens in the contradictory self-identity of time and space, from the created tothe creator. The acts of mutual determination of individuals/particulars, as thingsthat are in such a world, are goal-oriented. A particular is not merely opposinganother particular; they stand in order (chitsujo). This is where the acting entityappears for the first time.42

Thus, when time and space are separated by the lower order of junjo, they are broughtback again in contradictory self-identity (mujunteki jikoditsu, one of Nishidas most basicconcepts) through the higher order of chitsujo, whereas time does not lose its irreversiblecharacter in the latter.

The irreversibility of time is thus a matter of change of perspective: what we have hithertoperceived to be merely material is now seen not just to move but to move toward certaingoals, and the movement is measured by changes of qualitative nature, up to the point ofthe irreversibility of death. The transition that corresponds to the phenomenon of death inthe material world should thus not be irreversible; because the quality of life is absent therein any case, it is just matter that changes shape. This offers an interesting perspective forcomparison with the concept of time formulated by one of Japans most sophisticated Zenthinkers, Dgen Kigen.

Dgens Being-Time

One of Dgens central ideas is his notion of being-time (uji, a deliberate misreading of aru

toki, at a time), advanced against the common view of time that he sums up as follows:

[T]he understanding of an ordinary man who has not studied the Buddhistteaching is such that on hearing the word being-time, he thinks: At one timesomeone had become an asura [three-heads-eight-arms], at another time he hadbecome a Buddha [six-j-eightshaku]. This is just like crossing a river, passing amountain. Even if the mountain and the river still exist (tatoi aruramedomo), Ihave passed them, my place is now in this jewel palace and vermilion tower. Meand the mountains-rivers are like heaven and earth to each other. 43

This passage appears to make perfect sense to us if read against a Cartesian or even anAristotelian understanding of the subject and its world: there is the I, the Cartesian subjector the Aristotelian counting soul, who sets itself apart from the independently existing, self-identical material world, the mountains and the rivers of the text. The criticized point inthis view seems to be precisely the split of I-consciousness from this material world, whichwe know to be canceled in Buddhist doctrine.

However, Dgens contemporaries did not hold Cartesian or Aristotelian views. If we read thispassage against the background of the culturally constructed living-world of the late Heianand early Kamakura aristocracy, there is a slight change of accent. In their aestheticpursuits, the court nobles had pushed the expressive capacities of poetic language, throughthe use of multiple associative encoding and play on ambiguity, almost to its limits, and thestandards of courtly conduct also required the observation of a multitude of situation-dependent rules of linguistic behavior. In this world, the perceiver does not perceive anobjective, self-identical material world that is separate from him/herself, but the flux ofimpermanence, and this world can only be observed from within, not from an outsideperspective as is the case with the transcendental cogito. Moreover, this world is not acontinuous, three-dimensional whole that is, it is not conceivable as such from the point ofview of the observer but rather a conflux of intersecting trajectories, cycles, routes, andscripts, governed by constantly shifting centers of gravity and represented in semanticallyoverloaded, but grammatically underdetermined, ambiguous, situation-dependent linguisticcodes. There is absolutely no way of separating the I-consciousness from this world, becauseit is conscious of itself only through being conscious of this world mere consciousness ofoneself as the starting-point of world-construction would be unimaginable both for earlierBuddhist theory and for the sociocultural practice of late Heian and early Kamakura Japan.

Read along these lines, the common view of time that Dgen criticizes consists of threepoints. First, it holds that there is an axis of irreversible difference between single momentsof time somebody is an asura at one time, a Buddha at another. This difference is theprecondition of any kind of change and also the temporal form of impermanence, the movingforce behind the continuous flux. Second, ones personal consciousness is the center of onesworld, and the shape that one has, that of an asura or a Buddha, that of an outcast or anaristocrat, is determined by the position of the I in the world hence the analogy betweenthe bodies of asura and Buddha and ones wandering through the mountains into the jewelpalace. And finally, only what is present in the consciousness at a given moment is relevantor real even though mountains and rivers might exist independently of the perceiver, justas sound reason should suppose that a scenic spot with a seasonally encoded name mightalso exist out of season, the whole world is relevant only to the extent that it engages theindividual consciousness that is anchored in the flux of impermanence.

Dgens argument is directed against these three points and is based on the notion of being-time, a single reality that is stretched out in space and (our conventional) time and is

directly accessible to the enlightened mind in its entirety. The reality of being-timesurpasses the world as we perceive it from our limited, unenlightened perspectives. Thisdoes not mean, as it is sometimes assumed, that being-time exists only for theenlightened mind, because that would imply that reality is different depending on how it isperceived. The difference between the enlightened and unenlightened perspective meansonly that reality is accessible to the enlightened perspective as it is, but for theunenlightened it remains clouded by the common views about it.

Since being-time encompasses the whole time, it contains the past, the present, and thefuture. Within this reality, there can be no essential difference between single moments oftime, because they are contained within each other. The relation between single moments oftime is passage, which is not irreversible:

Being-time has the quality of passage. This is to say it passes from today intotomorrow, it passes from today into yesterday, from yesterday into today. Itpasses from today into today, from tomorrow into tomorrow. Because thispassage is a quality of time, the times of past and present do not pile onto eachother.44 Firewood becomes ashes, and there is no way for it to become firewood again.Although this is so, we should not see ashes as after and firewood as before.You should know that firewood abides in the dharma-configuration of firewood,for which there is a before and after. But although there is a difference betweenbefore and after, it is within the limits of this dharma-configuration. Ashesabide in the dharma-configuration of ashes, and there is a before, and there isan after. Just like this firewood, which will not become firewood again after ithas become ashes, a human being will not return to life again after death. . . .This is like winter and spring. One does not say that winter has become spring,one does not say that spring has become summer.45

This view is absolutely different from the Aristotelian view of time, which also speaks aboutpassage. Aristotle sees the before and after as two distinct instances of now, the distancebetween which, fully analogous to distances in space, is what constitutes time.46 ForAristotle, the now is not a segment of time at all,47 similarly as a point is not a segment ofa line, because a segment of something measurable must itself be measurable and haveborders, and a now, or a point, being indivisible, does not.48 For Dgen, however, theabsolute now is the point of departure for the examination of the passage of time.

But this tenet is the most problematic one in Dgens view of time. On the one hand heascribes to time the quality of passage (kyryaku), while on the other he asserts thateverything exists as it is only when it abides in its dharma-configuration (hi): firewood doesnot become ashes any more than spring becomes summer. This creates an apparentcontradiction: if all entities are confined to their dharma configurations and have no enduringessence, then exactly what is it the passage of that is involved in time, which has noexistence apart from being either?

Addressing this issue, Hee-Jin Kim notes that a Dharma-position does not come and go, orpass, or flow as the commonsense view of time would assume. This is a radical rejection ofthe flow of time, or the stream of consciousness, or any other conceptions of time based onthe idea of continuity and duration. That is, time is absolutely discrete and discontinuous,and accordingly, continuity or passage, in this view, is not so much a matter of a successionor contiguity of inter-epochal wholes, as that of the dynamic experience of an intra-epochalwhole of the absolute now in which the selective memory of the past and the projected

anticipation of the future are subjectively appropriated in a unique manner. In brief,continuity in Dgens context means dynamism.49 Kims solution of the problem is thusbased on the reinterpretation of the word kyryaku as dynamism, which is perfectlypossible. However, if we are to remain faithful to Dgens text, this dynamism should beseen as a concrete phenomenon, because it occurs from today to yesterday, which stillallows one to doubt whether the notion of kyryaku is fully compatible with the radicalrejection of the flow of time that Kim ascribes to Dgen.

But this is not an insurmountable difficulty. Following a certain tradition,50 Kim takes theword dharma in hi (translated as dharma-position) to refer, at least connotatively, todharma as teaching. What makes a particular position of time a Dharma-position is theappropriation of these particularities in such a manner that they are now seen non-dualistically in and through mediation of absolute emptiness, writes Kim,51 as if firewoodcould at a certain moment not abide in its dharma configuration, for example when itsparticularities are not seen non-dualistically. It seems much more plausible, however, that ahi is nothing more than a particular configuration of dharmas as existential particles; onesuch configuration yields firewood, another one yields ashes, and no person of anenlightened observer is involved. On the contrary, such observers themselves are alwaysyielded by particular dharma-configurations. In such a reading, the before and after thatare inherent in a dharma-configuration do not mean the selective memory of the past andthe projected anticipation of the future52 but the arising and the perishing of the dharmasthat are configured. The instantaneous existence of the dharma configuration in the absolutenow contains them both, as Dgen says: Although it is taught that past, future, and presentare impermanent, not-yet-arrived, or extinguished, one should definitely also apprehend theprinciple of how past, future, and present are in what is not yet there [and so on].53 Whenthings are, at each single moment of absolute now, in their dharma-configurations, theyarise and perish simultaneously as the moment passes. This is where the absolute now andpassage are linked. In the words of Kevin Schilbrack, the two ideas do not contradict eachother, but rather serve to make the same point that things do not become.54 There ispassage even in the absolute, unseizable single moment, and this is precisely what makes itabsolute. In this sense kyryaku truly means dynamism it is movement within anindivisible instant, the same movement that brings about the configured dharmas again andagain. But this dynamism is a characteristic feature not only of the passage of time in theconventional sense of the word but of beingtime, existence as such. To be is in this view tobe dynamically. To be is a transitive verb that includes in itself the senses of to construct,to affirm, to express, to manifest itself as, and also to set in question ones own existenceas. When things are in their respective dharma-configurations, they are not they, butthem.

This has been noted by Kim also in connection with Dgens doctrine of Buddha-nature,which is maintained in the dynamic and creative mode in which any single act (dying,eating, and what-not) is totally exerted contemporaneously, coextensively, coessentially withthe total mind not with a fragment of that mind.55 Buddha-nature, in Dgens view, isat once beings and being itself.56 However, Kim still seems to link this dynamic mode ofbeing with the enlightened state of mind: The absolute now consists, not in statictimelessness that enables us to accept the given reality as it is, but, rather, in a dynamicactivity that involves us intimately in time, hence, transforming our deeds, speech, andthought.57 This passage seems to imply, as some scholars also suppose,58 that reality hastwo coextensive modes of existence, depending on the state of ones mind, a dualism ofillusion and enlightenment. While this is seemingly concordant with the view that the tripleworld is nothing but mind,59 it still seems more plausible to think that dynamic being

involves the total reality and mind regardless of its state that the emancipation of themind consists of its apprehension of its own nature and that of reality, which is alwaysthere, or the act-cum-totality of dynamic being, which is precisely what Dgen callsBuddha-nature. The traditional Zen view that enlightenment is the realization of onesinherent Buddha-nature is thus reasserted: to be enlightened means to live the dynamism ofbeing.

The second point of the common view of time, the clinging to ones self as the center of theworld, although consistent with the principle of impermanence as it functioned in Japanesearistocratic culture, is the main object of criticism in much Buddhist thought, and Dgen hasmade frequent statements of it; for example:

When somebody aboard a moving boat looks around and watches the shore, hemight err to think that the shore is moving. If he looks closely at the boat,though, he will know that it is the boat that moves. Similarly, if one observes themyriad things with a confused mind and a strained body, it might appear thateverything has a nature of its own, a mind of its own. But if one adjusts onesmind and returns his thought to the point of origin, the logic that none of themyriad things has a self will become apparent.60

Thus, the operation that produced, for Descartes, the transcendent subject of the cogitoyielded the opposite result for Dgen, to whom a fixed, unmoving position of an observervis-a`-vis the world was not conceivable.

For us, it is certainly much easier to agree with the third point of Dgens criticism of thecommon view of time, namely that things exist in the same way regardless of our perceptionof them, but he asserts this only from the perspective of the reality of being-time:Mountains are time. Oceans are time. If there were no time, there would be no mountainsand no oceans. One should not think that mountains and oceans are not time at this verymoment. If time would collapse, mountains and oceans would collapse, too, and since timedoes not collapse, mountains and oceans do not collapse either.61 The existence ofmountains and oceans is thus not irrelevant to the mind, because they are also being-time,and mental divisions of any kind that we might effect in our world tamper with reality,although they make it culturally habitable. Reality is truly experienced only in its undividedtotality, and therefore the parts of the world that are not directly presented to the perceivingmind also engage it when it tries to seize the whole. From this standpoint it is probable thatthe Newtonian world is not much closer to Dgens reality than the living world of Heianaristocrats, because access to true being-time is not available via conceptual constructions.

Dgens vision of time is one that has already transcended the ordinary, irreversible time(the time of Nishidas life-world), which is also the framework for goal oriented action (forBuddhist discourse, the only goal worth pursuing is, of course, enlightenment or realization):

Now the point of view of the ordinary man, and the causes of this view, may wellbe what the ordinary man sees, yet they are not his law. Only for a while, the lawis the cause of the ordinary man. As you realize that this time, this being, is notthe law, you grasp that the six-j-long golden body [of the Buddha] is not yourself. But, having realized that the self is not the six-j-long golden body andtrying to escape from it, all that is left are splinters of the being-time.62

From this passage it is evident, however, that in Dgens view the attainment of thatparticular goal is impossible in such a goal-oriented framework, and it is precisely the

concept of irreversible time that makes it so. Therefore, one should transcend the logic ofgoal-oriented practice and direct ones efforts at coming to terms with the being-timedirectly: Everything is nothing but the unimpeded manifestation of being-time. It ismanifested in the Four Heavenly Kings and all beings in the worlds on the right and on theleft, who are all the being-time of my ultimate effort right now. The being-time of all beingseverywhere else, in water and on land, is manifested in my ultimate effort right now.63

This effort of right now transcends temporality and obtains access to the entire being-timein its reversible, spatial form, in which there is being, but not becoming: In each moment oftime there is the entire being, the entire world.64 This view of reality follows from thedoctrine of dharma-configurations discussed above. In classical abhidharma it became apoint of controversy what degree of reality should be attached to the momentaryconfigurations of existence the Sarvstivdin view that everything exists, that is, that theabsolute presents of past and future times also have a degree of reality, being rejected bylater thinkers.65 For the present purposes, however, the question of the reality of thesemomentary configurations is irrelevant, since they are in any case the only form in whichexistence is immediately accessible to the perceiver, who is, unavoidably, a part of theseconfigurations him/herself. Moreover, it is not impossible to conceive of the mutualnoninterfering interpenetration of things (the Huayan doctrine of jijimuge) in discursiveterms, without resorting to transcending intuition. Richard Taylor has proposed the idea oftemporal parts of things in analogy to spatial ones: just as a street might be broad at oneend and narrow at another, an apple may be green at one moment and red at another. Onepart of the street is broad, another narrow, one part of the apple is green, another red.66Developing this idea, Judith Jarvis Thompson has proposed the notion of a superobject, athing as a process in its entire existence-span, with its whole trajectory of the movementsand changes it goes through.67 It is clear that superobjects may penetrate each other easilywithout interfering: their parts that occupy the same positions in space are temporal. Thisidea of superobjects, which Thompson herself rejects, is fully compatible with Buddhistthought which prefers to operate with things as static processes rather than discrete,self-identical entities or, for that matter, with any thinking that rejects the logic ofobjects.

Dgen and Nishida: Self-realization Transcending Time and Space

Most of Dgens views as presented above resemble Nishidas. Having rejected the logic ofobjects Nishida adopts a view of reality that is analogous to the abhidharmic one, althoughhe uses a metaphor borrowed from Nicolaus of Cusa68 to describe it:

When I speak of our selves being singular focal points of the world anddetermining our individualities through self-expression, this does not mean that Iconceive of the self necessarily in terms of the logic of objects. It is, rather, asingular center of the absolute present that includes in itself the eternal past andfuture. This is why I call the self a momentary self-determination of the absolutepresent. . . . And the world of the absolute present is the sphere with infiniteradius and no circumference, which has a center everywhere.69

Nicolaus of Cusa uses this metaphor to describe God, but Nishida applies it to the absolutepresent, which is thus described in spatial terms and is content-wise very close to Dgensbeing-time, to which access is gained in a single moment, and also to this view of therelation of self to being-time. This absolute present is opposed to the dichotomy of spaceand time that obtains in the world of objective actions, conceived exclusively from thestandpoint of a conscious self,70 since Nishida describes the world similar to the way Kant

would describe it: Such a world [like the one of Kant] of which the center is the self-contradictorily identical focal point of the self, is temporal inasmuch as it negates the selvesof the Many, and spatial inasmuch as it negates the self of the One.71 In such a world, timeand space are opposed to each other, since the world is perceived differently depending onwhich of the two one chooses to look at the world from objectively in space orsubjectively in time. To transcend this dichotomy, one has to unite these perspectives intoone contradictorily self-identical point of view, which should not be posited outside thecontext of reality itself.

We have seen that this has already happened in the life-world and it is even more relevantfor the historical world: in the truly concrete real world, that is, the historical world, timealways negates space, and, simultaneously, space negates time. In this absolutelycontradictory self-identity of time and space, of the One and the Many, no, of Being andNothingness, proceeding from the created to the creator, is boundless creativity.72 In sucha world one has thus attained the stage where one is finally capable of realizing oneself inboth senses of the word through action oriented toward the world, and through consciousactivity oriented toward ones own being. This double sense indicates why, as Yoko Arisakahas shown,73 the word jikaku should be translated as self-realization and not as self-consciousness. To use Nishidas favorite term, these two aspects of self-realization areunited in contradictory self-identity and therefore are also premises of each other. Thispossibility is the expectable sequel to the movement that has taken us from the materialworld, through the life-world, to the historical one.

Nishida defines this realization in terms that sound almost like paraphrases of Dgen:

Self-realization occurs only when our self transcends itself and faces the Other. Atthe moment of self-realization, our self has already transcended itself.74Therefore, I always say: become things and you think, become things and youhappen. I and things are relative to each other in contradictory self-identity.However, when one thinks about the things one faces merely in spatial terms,ones self will also be just another thing. The relation between the two will be arelation between two things, a mere act. Even human knowledge will be a mereact, I think.75

Nishida here uses the word thing (mono) and being/becoming a thing in a rather hair-splitting fashion. In the first case he means, of course, that ones self should identify withthe things of the world, but in the second case he means that the spatial view causes oneto assume a separate thing-identity of ones own, which will make self-realizationimpossible. At the same time, it is evident that the things in the world remain the same inboth cases, because the worlds are overlapping, and the difference between the material andthe historical world is that of perspective: we think of the physical world, but we shouldthink of it already as one aspect (men) of the absolutely contradictorily self-identicalhistorical world.76 It is spatial thinking that distorts the perspective.

The concept that opposes this distorted spatiality, in the same way that absolute presenthas been opposed to temporality, is, of course, Nishidas central term, basho or place. Thisword is used to translate the topos of Aristotle, and the cognate ba means field, as inphysics. Unlike abstract space, basho is loaded, it is the locus of tension, where thecontradictory self-identities are acted out and complementary opposites negate each other space is thus hierarchically inferior to place, and not vice versa, as would be expected in theNewtonian world, because in the terms of place, space is the complementary opposite oftime, and it appears in place together with time, interlocked in mutual negation: strictly

speaking, time and space are not independent forms, but only two directions of self-determination in place.77

Spatiality is directly opposed to placeness,78 which becomes the quality of time from thelife-world onward, and Nishida even uses the words place and world occasionally assynonyms79 to designate where the self-determination of the individual self takes place. Itseems that the closest conceptual equivalent to basho is the dharma-configuration of thesingle moment of Buddhism, the momentary thusness of existence, which is new every nextinstant, expressing itself by coming into being and negating itself by passinginstantaneously. In a word, basho is the place where impermanence happens.

The argument above could be summed up in Table 1. Although time acquires the characterof placeness in the life-world by becoming irreversible, place opens itself to the perceiveronly after he/she becomes aware of the goal-oriented character of his/her actions andthereby opens up to the possibility of self-realization in both senses of the word. In place,the mutual negation of time and space fuses them into one reality, which is place itself. Andsince one of the tensions in place is released along the line that runs from the created tothe creator it also means that the act of self-realization in the middle of historical reality alsoreleases one from the perceptive irreversibility of time.

Table 1

WorldEntity Chronotope

MaterialLife-worldHistorical

thing self

individuality

reversible (spatial) time timeless spaceirreversible time spacenegated by timeBasho of the self-determination of theindividual self in the absolute present

Concluding Remarks

If we now ask why both Dgen and Nishida use terms related to space and time to expressfundamental ideas about being, then it seems that the answer is relatively simple: it isbecause both of them see the subject as not outside but inside the world, and therefore theideas of space and time are constitutive also of the subjects form of being. An objectivesubject, an independent observer who analyzes reality from a timeless and extraspatial,absolute standpoint, is for them an illusory construction, and when time and space areviewed from such a standpoint the illusion is perpetuated and spread over the whole view ofreality. An undistorted view of reality can be attained solely from within it, but each availablepoint of view initially presents only a limited perspective. This is why spatiotemporal thinkingis crucial for any philosophical effort that accepts these premises: in order to grasp theontological foundations of reality, it is necessary to transcend ones perspective, but this hasto be done, without leaving ones place, through (self-)realization. This is also whereNishidas views converge with Dgens: in order to attain self-realization one must transcendthe ordinary reality not by rising above it, and thereby separating oneself from it, but bybecoming it, realizing oneself in it and the totality of the world of being-time together

with it.

To conclude, we should briefly return to the question of the form of Nishidas philosophicdiscourse. If we now ask why, after all, Nishida has chosen to express himself in such amanner, a number of possible answers present themselves. I think we can dismiss theunderlying assumption of his correctors that he was incapable of doing otherwise. It couldalso be suggested that this form of writing is typical of Japanese traditional thought. Butalthough it is true that Japanese thinkers sometimes express their ideas in a similar manner,Nishidas heritage comprises also Buddhist texts of Indian and Chinese origin, which aremuch more systematic. And his placing of his work within the field of Western-stylephilosophy (tetsugaku) severed the formal link with classical Asian thought from thebeginning. The only plausible answer, to my mind, is that he saw this form as most suitablefor conveying his ideas. By rejecting the object logic and the transcendental subject that isplaced outside the world-process he also rejects the unmovable standpoint from which asystematic view of his conceptual apparatus could be presented and admittedly thisstandpoint also invalidates any attempt to justify his form in the manner that the presentarticle has been trying to do. Nishida puts the reader right in the midst of the discursive flowwhere he himself is, because otherwise he could not speak without invalidating himself. Theform of the text is an integral part of his message. Instead of leading the reader through aready, stopped world whose conceptual architecture can be observed slowly, accurately,and in a logical order, he has to jump from one standpoint to another even within the fieldof his own views, because every statement he makes from a particular position has alsochanged that position itself, and it is not the same place where he was a moment ago, andthe only permanent aspect of himself as the speaker and the self whose experiences hespeaks about is his absolutely contradictory self-identity.

NotesI would like to thank Professor Frdric Girard, Ms. Uehara Mayuko, Ms. Triin Kallas, and theanonymous reader for Philosophy East and West for valuable comments and suggestions, aswell as the Academy of Finland, the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies, and the coleFranaise dExtrme-Orient for grants that made the research for this article possible.

1 Walther Ong, Orality and Literacy (London and New York: Routledge 1982, 1988),passim.2 Nishida Kitar, Bashoteki ronri to shukyteki sekaikan, in Nishida Kitarozensh(hereafter NKZ ) (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1979), vol. 11, p. 388.3 Karatani Kjin, Origins of Modern Japanese Literature, trans. Brett de Bary (Durham andLondon: Duke University Press 1993), pp. 4561.4 Ibid., p. 61.5 Niklas Luhmann and Peter Fuchs, Reden und Schweigen (Frankfurt a.M.:Suhrkamp,1989, 1992), p. 9296.6 Ibid., pp. 9495.7 NKZ, 12 : 265266.8 NKZ, 12 : 266.9 Nishida Kitar, Last Writings: Nothingness and the Religious Worldview, trans.with anintrod. by David A. Dilworth (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press,1987, 1993), p. 2.10 NKZ, 19 : 90.11 Hirakawa Sukehiro, Japans Turn to the West, in Bob T. Wakabayashi, ed.,ModernJapanese Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1998),pp. 5154, 90.12 Najita Tetsuo and H. D. Harootunian, Japans Revolt against the West, inWakabayashi, Modern Japanese Thought, pp. 222226.

13 NKZ, 11 : 377 and elsewhere.14 See Kimura Bin, Aida (Tokyo: Kbund, 1988).15 NKZ, 11 : 382383.16 NKZ, 11 : 381.17 NKZ, 11 : 399.18 Frederic Girard, Logique du lieu et experience unitive de labsolu: Nishida lecteurdu Buddha? in Augustin Berque, ed., Logique du lieu et depassement de la modernite,vol. 1 (Bruxelles: Ousia, 2000), p. 234.19 Agnieszka Kozyra, Eastern Nothingness (Tyteki mu) in Nishida Kitar and Lin-Chi,in Berque, ed., Logique du lieu, p. 168.20 NKZ, 12 : 266.21 NKZ, 17 : 117.22 See Leon Hurwitz, Chih-I: An Introduction to the Life and Ideas of a Chinese BuddhistMonk, Melanges chinois et bouddhiques 12 (Bruxelles: lInstitut Belge des Hautes tudesChinoises, 962): 271284.23 Daigan and Alicia Matsunaga, Foundation of Japanese Buddhism (Los Angeles andTokyo: Buddhist Books International 1976, 1996), vol. 1, pp. 7072.24 See Paul L. Swanson, Foundation of Tien-Tai Philosophy: The Flowering of the TwoTruths Theory in Chinese Buddhism (Berkeley: Asian Humanities Press, 1989).25 Jacynthe Tremblay, Nishida Kitar: Le jeu de lindividuel et de luniversel (Paris: CNRSEditions, 2000), pp. 119125.26 NKZ, 11 : 402403.27 G.W.F. Hegel, The Encyclopaedia Logic: Part 1 of the Encyclopaedia of PhilosophicalSciences with the Zusa tze, trans. with introd. and notes by T. F. Geraets, W. A. Suchting,and H. S. Harris (1830; Indianapolis and Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Co., 1991), pp.272273.28 NKZ, 11 : 403.29 NKZ, 11 : 374.30 NKZ, 11 : 375.31 J. McT. E. McTaggart, Philosophical Studies (London: Edward Arnold and Co., 1934), p.116.32 NKZ, 11 : 194.33 NKZ, 11 : 74.34 NKZ, 11 : 374375.35 NKZ, 11 : 376.36 NKZ, 11 : 381.37 NKZ, 11 : 375376.38 NKZ, 11 : 193.39 Martin Heidegger, Die Grundprobleme der Phanomenologie, in Gesamtausgabe, II Abt.Band 24 (1927; Frankfurt a.M.: Vittorio Klostermann, 1975), p. 327.40 Aristotle Physica 4.14.223a2329.41 NKZ, 11 : 375.42 NKZ, 11 : 383.43 Dgen, 2 vols., ed. Terada Tru and Mizuno Yaoko, Nihon shistaikei, 1213 (Tokyo:Iwanami Shoten, 1970), vol. 1, p. 257.Rein Raud 4944 Ibid., 1 : 258.45 Ibid., 1 : 36.46 Aristotle Physica 4.11.219a1530.47 Ibid., 4.10.218a6.

48 Ibid., 4.1.231a2429.49 Hee-Jin Kim, Dgen Kigen: Mystical Realist (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1987),pp. 150, 154155.50 See, for example, Abe Masao, A Study of Dgen: His Philosophy and Religion (NewYork: State University of New York Press, 1992), p. 114.51 Ibid., p. 149.52 See Kim, Dgen Kigen: Mystical Realist.53 Terada and Mizuno, Dgen, 1 : 273.54 Kevin Schilbrack, Metaphysics in Dgen, Philosophy East and West 50 (1) (January2000): 39.55 Kim, Dgen Kigen: Mystical Realist, p. 119.56 Ibid., p. 123.57 Ibid., p. 157; italics added.58 See for example, Trent Collier, Time and Self: Religious Awakening in Dgen andShinran, Eastern Buddhist 32 (1) (2000): 61.59 Terada and Mizuno, Dgen, 2 : 11.60 Ibid., 1 : 36.61 Ibid., 1 : 261.62 Ibid., 1 : 258259.63 Ibid., 1 : 259.64 Ibid., 1 : 257.65 Matsunaga and Matsunaga, Foundation of Japanese Buddhism, 1 : 3639, 4243.66 Richard Taylor, Metaphysics (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1963, 1992), pp. 6971.67 Judith Jarvis Thompson, Time, Space and Objects, Mind 74 (293) (1965): 45.68 Nicolaus of Cusa, De docta ignorantia, 1.21.69 NKZ, 11 : 379.70 NKZ, 11 : 388.50 Philosophy East & West71 Ibid.72 NKZ, 11 : 384.73 Yoko Arisaka, System and existence: Nishidas Logic of Place, in Berque, Logique dulieu, p. 50.74 NKZ, 11 : 378.75 NKZ, 11 : 381.76 NKZ, 11 : 379.77 NKZ, 11 : 389.78 NKZ, 11 : 376.79 For example, NKZ, 11 : 386.

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