







































17Issue V F Spring 2018

δι
αν

οι
α

17

IT WAS NOTHING
A Conversation with Heidegger and the Kyoto 

School on Nothingness

MATTHEW A. STANLEY 

In his exploration of anxiety, Heidegger remarks that once our anxiety has 
subsided we are inclined to say, “it was really nothing.” “This way of talking,” 

he observes, “indeed, gets at what it was ontically.”1 Heidegger takes the state of 
anxiety to reveal the nature of nothingness to us, and in this insight lies a complex 
story. The mundane appearance of nothingness often serves to conceal our failure 
to be clear on the true nature of nothingness. Though we think we understand 
nothingness plainly, we often find ourselves tied up in knots when we are questioned 
about it. These questions are only further complicated by the differing notions of 
nothingness that have developed in the philosophical conversations in the East and 
West. However, recent developments in the philosophical conversation in Europe 
have opened up new avenues for engagement between the two traditions. Beginning 
in the early 20th century, a handful of Japanese philosophers, who later came to be 
called the Kyoto School, sought to engage with the philosophical conversation that 
was taking place in Germany and France. In particular, the thinkers of the Kyoto 
School found Martin Heidegger to be a fruitful conversation partner, even going 
so far as to study under his tutelage in Germany.2 Though these Japanese thinkers 
1 Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. Joan Stambaugh (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 

2010), 165. (All pages are marginal pages from the 2nd edition of Stambaugh’s translation.)
2 As with any movement, speaking about the school as a ‘movement’ overlooks crucial nuances. However, one may 

broadly say the school is composed of Nishida Kitaro (1870-1945), his student Tanabe Hajime (1885- 1962), 



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were well trained in the texts of the Western conversation, their fundamental 
commitments remained with the Zen Buddhist tradition, which allowed them to 
arrive at a unique viewpoint on the West’s philosophical questions and to facilitate 
new ways forward in the midst of those struggles. In this paper, I will seek to explore 
Nishitani Keiji’s critique of Western nihilism—a critique that Nishitani extends to 
Heidegger’s thought. I will attempt a conversion project in order to allow for smooth 
and productive dialogue between these two parties. Due to deep differences between 
their respective traditions, however, Nishitani and Heidegger appear to eventually 
reach an impasse. I will attempt to identify the source of this impasse, and to sketch 
potential ways to move forward. In short, though this paper can only serve as a 
catalyst for further conversations, I hope that it will nonetheless clarify the terms of 
the conversation so as to bear fruit at a later date. 

Though anxiety provides us with an opportunity to engage in the conversation 
between the East and the West, the goal of this paper is not, ultimately, to comprehend 
anxiety. This paper's true aim is to understand the questions and concepts that gave 
shape to Heidegger and Nishitani’s thought. With that in mind, let us start with §39 
of Being and Time, where Heidegger proposes to determine the mode of attunement 
that presents Dasein to itself in the most naked manner possible.3 For Heidegger, a 
mode of attunement (or ‘mood’) reveals our orientation towards our thrownness4, 
which is our already having found ourselves having a world.5 We experience our 
particular situatedness in our world as thrown because we find ourselves already 
being there, rather than having chosen to be there. Essentially, we discover that we 
have already arrived at the place of having a finite set of possibilities. Attunement 
reveals Dasein’s structures of being-in-the-world through an examination of how 
Dasein orients itself to its thrownness. Heidegger proposes anxiety as that mode of 
attunement that can bring Dasein to presentation in the wholeness that it possesses 
primordially.6 In an intriguing turn, Heidegger surmises that those attunements, 
which involve a flight from Dasein, actually disclose Dasein with the least amount 
of pretense.7 Why would this be the case? Heidegger takes it that if Dasein flees 
from itself, then it flees precisely from itself, which is there disclosed. In fleeing from 
itself, Dasein recognizes itself as itself. In this case, anxiety serves as an orientation 
of Dasein that turns away from its thrownness with trembling, but does so precisely 
because it sees itself as thrown. 

and his other student Nishitani Keiji (1900-1990). There are others who trace themselves to this school, such 
as Abe Masao (who’s philosophy I will be employing in this paper). The Kyoto School tradition still remains 
a crucial part of the identity of the philosophy department at Kyoto University to this day. For an excellent 
introductory text to the Kyoto School, see James W. Heisig, Philosophers of Nothingness: An Essay on the Kyoto 
School. (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2001).

3 Heidegger, 181-182
4 Ibid., 139.
5 Ibid., 135.
6 Ibid., 187.
7 Ibid., 184-186.



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It Was Nothing

The illuminating nuance of Heidegger’s concept of anxiety becomes clearer when 
anxiety is contrasted with fear. When an individual experiences fear, Heidegger says, 
that individual becomes oriented toward innerworldly beings.8 For instance, I can be 
afraid of clowns or the dark. These phenomena are definite beings within our world, 
and are thus objects to Dasein. However, anxiety differs from fear in that anxiety 
does not have an object as such. Anxiety is anxious about nothing, for anxiety is 
Dasein’s being anxious about being-in-the-world itself.9 Anxiety confronts Dasein 
with the sheer possibility of possibilities that make up Dasein’s world and thus make 
up Dasein itself, because Dasein is essentially that being that understands itself in 
terms of its own possibilities for being.10 Because anxiety lacks an ontic referent, 
it transcends the realm of objective presence and alerts Dasein to its own fraught 
relationship with the world, which it has actively tried to anaesthetize by absorbing 
innerworldy beings into the forgetfulness of the horizon that determines those beings 
in their Being. Thus, when anxiety unmasks absorption in innerworldly beings as 
being essentially determined by nothing, Dasein finds itself unmoored at sea, in a 
world of pure possibility-for-being-in-the-world, which is to say, nothingness. All 
innerworldy beings have fallen away and have been revealed as ultimately meaningless 
by virtue of their lack of foundation. Dasein is awakened to the ipseity of its ownmost 
possibility for being-in-the-world. Dasein comes to realize that only it can choose the 
possibilities before it. Yet, Dasein also realizes that all those possibilities have been 
problematized by their essential lack of grounding. These possibilities hang over the 
abyss of nothing, and thus Dasein finds itself hanging over this same abyss. Naturally, 
Dasein finds itself terrified and seeks to flee from itself and back into the realm of 
innerworldly beings. This is precisely because Dasein has realized the depth of the 
nothingness that lies at the ground of the whole world, and even of itself. 

Heidegger’s account of anxiety allows us to bring the Kyoto School into the 
conversation, for the question of anxiety lies at the the heart of Buddhism. Nishitani 
says, “We become aware of religion as a need, as a must for life, only at the level of life 
at which everything loses its necessity and its utility…When we come to doubt the 
meaning of our existence in this way, when we have become a question to ourselves, 
the religious quest awakens within us.”11 Buddhism seeks to confront this problem of 
anxiety through an analysis of self-consciousness. When we find ourselves anxious, 
often we say that we are being ‘self-conscious’; that is, we are hyper aware of our 
own selves as selves. Abe Masao argues that this problem of being self-conscious is 
actually peculiar to humans. Plants and animals do not suffer from this problem; they 
simply are themselves. They do not present themselves to themselves so as to compare 
8 Heidegger, §40.
9 Ibid., 186 - 187
10 Ibid., 187-188.
11 Nishitani Keiji, Religion and Nothingness, trans. Jan Van Braght (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), 

3.



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Dianoia: The Undergraduate Philosophy Journal of Boston College

themselves to others, or as to cast judgments on themselves or others.12 A bird birds. 
The world worlds. However, humans suffer from this unique phenomenon where we 
compare ourselves to other people and are thereby conscious of ourselves as selves. 
Zen takes this to mean that we have objectified ourselves (and thereby others).13 I 
have become an object to myself, and I have made others an object to myself. I may 
only see myself from the “outside,” so to speak. In this realm of self-consciousness, 
I find myself on the plane of the subject-object relation. This plane is where self-
consciousness introduces a rupture in the primal unity of all things by relating to 
them as other, or as “outside” of self-consciousness. The world becomes a field where 
objects are given to subjects and viewed as objects because the subject takes itself to 
not be the object. Zen seeks precisely to transcend that plane in order to reside on the 
plane where all things are realized as absolute nothingness.

How does one break through this plane of the subject-object in order to realize the 
nature of all things as absolute nothingness? This process unfolds in three steps, 
each of which prepares the way for the next. In the first step, one must realize the 
nothingness that lies at the ground of the subject-object relation, and thus see this 
subject-object relation for the groundless relation that it is. One must discover its 
inadequacy before one can move forward. Abe proposes an exercise14 in which one 
asks, “Who am I?” He then asks, “Who is the one asking, ‘Who am I?’” He wants us 
to realize that there are now two ‘I’s. The I which is inquired after and the I which does 
the inquiring cannot be the same I, for one is the subject and the other is the object. 
One is offered to the other as object, yet it is precisely the ‘subject I’ after which one 
is seeking to inquire after. Thus, one is caught in an infinite regression of I’s asking 
who they are and offering themselves to themselves as objects. He compares this act 
to a snake attempting to eat its own tail.15 In this way, Zen becomes a practice that 
seeks to undermine and unsettle the individual’s conviction in the self ’s knowledge 
of itself. However, this unsettling can never become an end in itself, because this 
unsettling serves the ultimate purpose of preparing one to pass into the next phase.

When the self finally reaches the second stage, it becomes completely despairing of 
ever knowing itself. The self discovers the nothingness that resides beneath its feet. 
It suddenly must confront its own groundlessness. The self and everything around 
it become nothingness and meaninglessness. This nihilism Nishitani describes as the 
state of the welling up of “The Great Doubt,” where the entire self becomes doubt 
and, in fact, becomes the site where the world doubts itself.16 We can visualize this as 
a person hanging over an infinite abyss of nothingness. You can’t tell if you’re falling 
or not, which way is up, down, right, or left, and you have no idea where you are or 
how you got there. There is truly no place to stand, as nothingness becomes present 
12 Abe, Masao Zen and Western Thought (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1985), 223.
13 Ibid., 225-226.
14 Abe., 6.
15 Ibid., 226.
16 Nishitani, 18-19.



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It Was Nothing

both within and without. In this stage, one sees nothingness as encroaching upon 
oneself; nothingness flings one into a state of vertigo. Crucial for the account of Zen, 
however, is that one cannot remain in this stage. One must surpass this stage in order 
to break into the third stage, where all things become absolute nothingness. This is 
enlightenment. 

At this point, Westerners such as us may be asking, “Why does this second stage 
require surpassing?” Zen understands the second stage as problematic because, in 
this second stage, one still remains trapped within the subject-object relation. When 
the ego-self (the self in a state of attachment to itself as object) finally hits “rock-
bottom”, and must confront the abyssal nothingness that resides right at its feet, it 
has still only managed to make nothingness into an object, and still conceptualizes 
nothingness as that which opposes itself to being. Thus, one has only succeeded in 
constituting themselves as a self through confronting this nothingness as an object. 
However, the goal of Zen is to break through the plane of the subject-object relation 
altogether. In the second stage, one no longer objectifies things in general, but, rather, 
one objectifies nothingness itself. Thus, in order to pass to the third stage, emptiness 
must be emptied of itself. Even our representations of nothingness, as a something 
that is out there while I am in here, must be surpassed. 

In Religion and Nothingness, Nishitani offers an extended critique of Western 
philosophy, where he presents the philosophies of Descartes and Sartre as embodying 
the first and second stage of Zen, respectively. In order to better understand why 
the second stage must too be broken through, we will trace Nishitani’s progression 
from Descartes to Sartre. Nishitani takes it as given that Western humans understand 
themselves primarily as a Cartesian ego. In his critique, Nishitani reveals the 
problematic nature of Descartes’ cogito ergo sum by following a line of questioning 
that is similar to the state of aporia that Abe’s thought experiment seeks to create in 
the self. Nishitani does not question that the cogito seems to be the most self-evident 
truth. Instead, he calls into question whether or not the cogito is actually the proper 
standpoint from which to consider the cogito. He takes Descartes’ unquestioned and 
seemingly harmless presupposition to be far from self-evident.17 We can already see 
the cracks in the foundation of Descartes’ presupposition when Descartes describes 
himself as a thinking ‘thing,’ and thus reveals that he has only succeeded in calling 
himself before himself as an object. Nishitani observes that the nature of the cogito 
itself covers over this problematic. He says, “But because this ego is seen as self-
consciousness mirroring self-consciousness at every turn, and the cogito is seen from 
the standpoint of the cogito itself, ego becomes a mode of being of the self closed up 
within itself.”18 This means that the cogito can only secure itself through reference to 
itself.19 Through constantly mirroring itself, the cogito deceives itself into believing 

17 Nishitani, 14.
18 Ibid., 15.
19 Ibid., 15.



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that it has a pure and immediate understanding of itself. However, this sounds like 
nothing more than self-deception. Is it not rather the case that this endless cycle of 
securing the self through reference to the self is actually groundless? Much like in 
Abe’s experiment, the Cartesian cogito collapses in an infinite regression of mirroring 
itself. 

Thus, Nishitani believes that Western nihilism has arrived at the second stage of 
Zen, because the cogito—what Descartes describes as a thinking “thing”, and which 
enshrines the cycle of self-objectification—has had the rug pulled out from under its 
feet. Starting in the 19th century, many Western philosophers hit rock bottom and 
realized the bankruptcy of the attempt to make sense of the world in terms of the 
subject-object relation. In essence, Western philosophy is still figuring out how to 
live in the wake of the failure of the Cartesian ego. Thus, Nishitani wants to affirm 
thinkers like Sartre and Nietzsche for realizing the nothingness that lies at the ground 
of all things. While Nishitani believes that Jean-Paul Sartre and Friedrich Nietzsche 
have successfully entered the second stage, he also critiques them for remaining stuck 
in this phase. Nishitani believes that the West is fundamentally lacking the resources 
to advance to the third stage because the Western tradition is too deeply attached to 
the subject-object relation. However, Nishitani also hopes that his work will supply 
those resources that the West requires to finally break into the third stage.

In examining the nature of the second stage, Nishitani presents Sartre as one who has 
failed to break into the third stage, and as one who is paradigmatically unable to fully 
let go of Descarte’s cogito. Though Sartre rightly observes that nothingness resides 
at the ground of subjectivity, he takes this nothingness to be that which awakens 
us to our subjectivity and constitutes our freedom as subjects.20 Sartre’s atheistic 
project does not say that God is the ground and guarantor of our subjectivity (to 
which Descartes resorts), but instead asserts that nothingness should assume the 
function of God.21 If nothing undergirds us, then we are free to endlessly project 
ourselves out over that nothingness.22 This form of subjectivity, which Nishitani 
says is a type of ekstasis, casts itself forward endlessly and allows the self to affirm 
itself through its undertakings.23 Essence is a groundless illusion; there is only the 
courageous adventure of choosing whom you will be in the next moment. However, 
Nishitani sees in this the same failures of Descartes, only disguised by the language 
of nothingness. Though Sartre has realized that the project of consciousness being its 
own self-ground has become untenable, he has made the more sophisticated mistake 
of making nothingness into the ground of the self. 

When Nishitani himself says that nothingness is the ground of the self, he does not 
mean what Sartre means. Nishitani intends for us to realize that nothingness is the 
20 Nishitani, 31.
21 Ibid.
22 Ibid.
23 Ibid.



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It Was Nothing

self and that this nothingness is literally no place. It is not a ground in the sense that 
Sartre uses it. Nishitani sees in Sartre’s attempt to make nothingness the ground of 
the self a setting up of a floor that shuts the self up inside of itself. This rock hard 
nothingness becomes a wall at the bottom of the ego that traps the ego in its own 
private cave.24 He says, “As long as this nothingness is still set up as something called 
nothingness-at-the-bottom-of-the-self, it remains what Buddhism repudiates as 
‘emptiness perversely clung to.’”25 He sums up, “The self that sets up this nothingness 
is thereby bound by it and attached to it.”26 Whereas in Descartes, the Cartesian 
cogito was attached to self as self, Sartre’s ego has attached itself to an objectified 
nothingness that it employs like a “springboard” to endlessly extend itself precisely 
as a self. 

Where, then, do we find ourselves? Nishitani has accused Western nihilism of being 
stuck in the second stage of Zen. What does Nishitani propose as the way forward? 
What happens when we are emptied even of our representations of emptiness? What 
sort of an account of things does one give when one has broken through the plane of 
the subject-object relation to the plane of absolute nothingness? In order to begin to 
answer these questions, I will again begin with the more practically oriented answers 
of Abe before moving into Nishitani’s more philosophical formulations. This will 
help us to understand the translation project that Nishitani is trying to perform. 

In his essay, “Emptiness is Suchness,” Abe worries that the language of Zen has often 
posed an obstacle to mutual understanding with the West. Abe explains that the 
phrase, “‘everything is emptiness’ may be more adequately rendered: ‘Everything is 
just as it is.’”27 The third phase, which one enters upon breaking the subject-object 
plane, is precisely where this realization that ‘everything is just as it is’ takes place. 
Why could this realization not take place in the other two phases? In the first phase, 
one is still attached to the self and thus unable to see things as they are simply in 
themselves. As subject, one takes things to be for one or given to one as objects, but 
this means that a thing is only a thing in so far as it is for the self. Abe calls this “self-
centeredness,” an obstacle to truly knowing other things. This concept of the various 
modes of ‘centeredness’ will play a vital role in Nishitani’s own account. 

In the second phase, the objectification of nothingness is the ground of the self, a 
state that either vindicates or threatens the self. In either case, one still clings to the 
self, either through standing on nothingness and using nothing to extend the self as 
self, or fleeing from nothingness in hopes of preserving the self as self. However, in 
the third phase, these projects fall apart and the realization of the self as nothingness 

24 Nishitani, 33.
25 Ibid.
26 Ibid.
27 Abe, 223.



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Dianoia: The Undergraduate Philosophy Journal of Boston College

becomes true freedom. No longer is nothingness viewed as the ground beneath the 
feet of the self, nor is nothingness seen as an alien invader impinging upon the self ’s 
being, but instead the self becomes the site of the realization of nothingness, or, “the 
unattainable.”28 While one may have legitimately said during the second phase that 
‘the self is nothingness,’ the self, in this sentence, is still subject, and nothingness is 
still an object. In the third phase, by contrast, Abe believes it more proper to say that 
“Emptiness is the self.”29 The self becomes no-self because the unattainable is the true 
nature of the self. Only in this state of no-self (non-ego) can all things be precisely 
what they are. In a seemingly ironic move, this emptying of our representations of 
emptiness (the negation of a negation) becomes the positive and full affirmation of 
all things, but of all things in their suchness and with no competition between them. 

This emptied emptiness of which Abe speaks, Nishitani calls ‘absolute nothingness’ 
(sunyata), and this absolute nothingness forms the basis of his ontology. At the point 
that one breaks through to the third phase of Zen, one comes to realize that all things 
are the presentation of absolute nothingness. By this, Nishitani does not mean to 
express an objectified nothingness like Sartre, as if the ‘thing’ we encountered were 
composed of the material of ‘nothingness.’ Rather, things spring up on their home-
ground in union with nothingness, which is to say, things are nothing at all. Nishitani 
takes this to mean that the essential character of all things is ‘illusory.’ But he cautions 
us against taking this appearance as illusion to mean that there is something that dons 
an appearance, as if the things itself resided behind the appearance.30 No, the thing 
is itself precisely in its being mere appearance. To help us understand the identity 
of non-identity, Nishitani employs the analogy of fire. What makes fire fire? That 
fire burns things seems essential to what fire is. Yet, fire does not burn itself. So, fire 
is itself precisely in not being itself? Non-fire is fire.31 This means that we can only 
say that the fire we experience on the plane of sense or reason is an illusion—but an 
illusion with nothing behind it simply is itself. The shapes that these illusions present 
to us emerge when things are uprooted from their home-ground and transferred into 
our consciousness.32 In other words, the emergence of each thing is an emergence in 
ekstasis from itself. 33

Conversely, Nishitani maintains that a thing must be known from within its 
“Samadhi-being.” The word samadhi means ‘settling’ and refers “to the mode of being 
of a thing in itself when it has settled into its own position.”34 This concept was 
hinted at earlier, in relation to Abe’s critique of self-consciousness as ‘self-centered.’ 
In the first and second stages, the self is self-centered because it takes things to be 

28 Abe, 9.
29 Ibid., 13.
30 Nishitani, 129.
31 Ibid., 116.
32  Ibid., 130.
33 Ibid., 126.
34 Ibid., 128.



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what they are for the self; it makes itself the center. But Nishitani says that all things 
are already centered in themselves. Why, then, does Abe consider a human’s self-
centeredness to be a problem? Because self-centeredness presumes that other things 
are not settled within themselves and not sufficient unto themselves. The one who is 
self-centered has only understood half the truth and thus has missed the whole thing 
entirely. Instead, Nishitani says, “on the field of sunyata, the center is everywhere.”35 
If the center is everywhere, each thing dwells upon its home-ground precisely in its 
suchness, with no competition between any beings. Everything is exactly what it is.

How can the center be everywhere? The concept of ekstasis helps elucidate how this 
might be. If the center is everywhere, then each thing is completely and utterly unique. 
This means that each thing remains the absolute center of all things. It is as though 
each thing is the master of all things. This is the half-truth that the self-centered 
consciousness grasps. But the self-centered self-consciousness has missed the other 
half entirely, for Nishitani also says that each thing is simultaneously in the position 
of being the servant of all things.36 Thus, each thing is both master and servant to all 
things. How can this be? “To say that a certain thing is situated in a position of servant 
to every other thing means that it lies at the ground of all other things…making it to 
be what it is and thus to be situated in a position of autonomy as master of itself.”37 
Here, on the field of absolute nothingness, every thing empties itself into every other 
thing, and is thereby fully itself in being fully not itself. “To say that a thing is not 
itself means that, while continuing to be itself, it is in the home-ground of everything 
else.”38 The corollary of this is that, when a thing is on its own home-ground, every 
other thing is there with it.39 Every other thing becomes the constitutive element of 
everything else; all things are interconnected, and fully in harmony. We may think 
again of the example of fire being non-fire. Because fire burns everything except itself, 
we can see that the essence of fire arises only in its interaction with other things. This 
means that fires finds its identity through its illusory appearance as not-itself, for this 
is precisely to be itself. Everything is nothingness. Nothingness is everything. Every 
appearance is the appearance of nothing. Every appearance of nothing is an illusion. 
Every illusion is the true self. Nothingness is the true self.

We now have a clearer notion of what Nishitani wants to do when he engages in 
dialogue with Heidegger. Though Nishitani studied under Heidegger, and even 
had discussions with Heidegger about Buddhism,40 he still believes that Heidegger 

35 Nishitani, 146.
36 Ibid., 147.
37 Ibid., 148.
38 Nishitani, 149.
39 Ibid.
40 When Nishitani was studying at Freiburg in 1938, he gave Heidegger a copy of D. T. Suzuki’s Essays in Zen 

Buddhism and Heidegger invited Nishitani over to his house in order to discuss the book because he had already 
read it! Not only had he read it already, he was also eager to discuss it with Nishitani, see Graham Parkes, 



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remained stuck within this second phase along with the rest of Western Nihilism. 
Nishitani believes that, though Heidegger’s philosophy is superior to Sartre’s, 
Heidegger had not escaped the representation of nothingness as an object. In the 
following paragraph, Nishitani explicitly accuses Heidegger of failing in this respect:

Nevertheless, nihility is still being viewed here from the bias of self-
existence as the groundlessness of existence lying at the ground of self-
existence. This means that it is seen lying outside of the ‘existence’ of the 
self, and therefore also as something more than the ‘existence’ or distinct 
from it. We find this, for example, in Heidegger’s talk of self-existence as 
‘held suspended in nothingness,’ despite the fundamental difference of this 
standpoint from other brands of contemporary existentialism or nihilism. 
The very fact that he speaks of the ‘abyss’ of nihility already tells us as 
much. In Heidegger’s case, traces of the representation of nothingness as 
some ‘thing’ that is nothingness still remain.41

Let us return to Heidegger’s explication of anxiety in order to consider Nishitani’s 
critique: that Heidegger still represents nothingness as something that remains other 
than the self. As was said before, Heidegger takes anxiety to be a mode of attunement 
that most clearly reveals Dasein as that being that orients itself towards the world 
in terms of its possibilities. However, he notes that anxiety does this precisely by 
trembling and fleeing from manifest reality. In this way, the act of turning away 
would actually seem to be an act of objectifying nothingness, because any turning 
away always assume an object from which to turn away. However, doesn’t Heidegger 
say that this nothingness from which Dasein flees is ontically nothing and thus is not 
an object? This hearkens back to Heidegger’s earlier assumption that those modes 
of attunement that flee from Dasein reveal Dasein in its primordial wholeness. 
However, we now have reason to question this claim, for is it not rather the case 
that to flee from something, one must precisely see it as a thing from which one can 
distance oneself? When Dasein is awakened to its own nothingness in anxiety, it 
is awakened immediately to a nothingness from which Dasein believes it can flee. 
Anxiety labels the nothingness of pure possibility-of-being-in-the-world as a threat 
to its existence precisely because anxiety formulates this nothingness as that which 
it is not. This would seem to betray the fact that the nothingness called before the 
self in anxiety actually is an ontic representation of nothingness and not nothingness 
itself. This objectification serves only to enclose oneself in one’s self further, because 
anxious Dasein reacts by fleeing back into absorption in innerworldy objects. 
Anxiety as a mode of attunement reveals that nothingness is the ground of being, 
but objectifies this nothingness by turning away; thus, anxiety is unable to reveal 
absolute nothingness as Nishitani defines it. So, is Heidegger correct in stating 
that anxiety does reveal “nothing”? Yes, and no. Though Heidegger takes anxiety to 

“Introduction,” in Heidegger and Eastern Thought, ed. Graham Parkes (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 
1987), 10.  

41 Nishitani, 96.



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reveal ontically nothing, this nothingness, which is given ontically (and therefore as 
an object), remains wholly inadequate for the task of revealing nothingness to us. 
Anxiety cannot reveal the true nature of this nothingness because Dasein makes this 
nothingness an object in its turning away from it. Because Dasein has objectified 
nothingness, it will find itself endlessly anxious about itself—generating precisely the 
state that Zen seeks to transcend. 

With these considerations in mind, we can see that Nishitani’s criticism of Heidegger 
may have some teeth. However, a good Heideggerian might reply that while Heidegger 
does take anxiety to be the mode of attunement that brings Dasein before itself in 
its primordial wholeness, he does not take it to be the most authentic orientation 
towards that wholeness. What if it were the case that anxiety, by being an inauthentic 
mode of attunement, constitutes the second phase of Zen, but that an authentic 
orientation towards nothingness provides the path towards the enlightenment of the 
third stage? This reply would have us look at Heidegger’s concept of being-towards-
death, which he takes to be the authentic mode of being towards our thrownness and 
the way that one overcomes anxiety about being-in-the-world.

However, before we even have a chance to consider being-towards-death as a possible 
solution, we must immediately confront a preliminary consideration that seems to be 
an insurmountable obstacle. We must tackle a singular and fundamental difference 
between the thought of Heidegger and the thought of Nishitani before we can 
make an adequate reply by using being-towards-death as the path towards the third 
stage. This difference hinges on the unique status that Heidegger accords to human 
beings. If we were to phrase this problem as a question, we might ask, does the 
fact that Dasein’s mode of being differs from that of other beings fundamentally 
prevent Dasein from ever settling into its Samadhi-being and from finding its home-
ground in absolute nothingness? Can Dasein, as long as it remains Dasein, ever be 
truly emptied of self and comprehend its unity with all things in nothingness? This 
question arises due to the unique nature of Dasein as that being that is concerned in 
its being about its being.42 Heidegger takes Dasein to be that way and chairs to not 
be that way, thus introducing a fundamental difference between conscious beings and 
inanimate beings. Even though Heidegger, in Being and Time, does not conclusively 
say whether Dasein is simply a human mode of being or whether Dasein is how all 
humans already are,43 we can at least say that Heidegger intends to convey that the 
structures of Dasein are specifically and peculiarly human. Understanding (or “un-
concealment”) only happens for Dasein, and not for rocks. Dasein understands itself 
and other things in terms of a horizon, and can intend relations between itself and 
others. However, this account of the structural features of a human’s mode of being-

42 Heidegger, 191.
43 Edith Stein raises this insightful question in her masterful critique of Heidegger’s thought, Edith Stein, 

“Heidegger’s Existential Philosophy, translated by Mette Lebech,” Maynooth Philosophical Papers, no. 4 (2007): 
70.



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in-the-world displays a fundamental divergence between Heidegger and the Kyoto 
School—a divergence that threatens to halt the discussion altogether.

Returning to Abe’s diagnosis of why humans experience anxiety, we remember that 
Abe sees the problem of anxiety fundamentally in terms of self-consciousness. If the 
Zen practitioner takes self-consciousness to be the problem, what models of existence 
do we look to instead? Zen leans heavily on examples from the natural world, 
employing earthy images like fire, water, trees, and stones. For Zen, the problem is 
that anxious humans are not like these natural things. Abe makes this clear when he 
contrasts human beings, who grow anxious through judging, with plants and rivers, 
which have no such problem. Nishitani’s account of things as always already being 
settled in their Samadhi-being explains why things like plants and rivers are without 
anxiety. In this way, we see that Zen is interested not in explicating that humans are 
unique, but in explicating that humans cannot quite seem to fit in, and that they 
live in continual denial of how things actually are. They are anomalous, not special.

If this is the case, Heidegger seems to have found himself in a tight spot. As long 
as he is convinced that Dasein is this being with this particular mode of being that 
is concerned in its being with its being, how can Dasein possibly abandon that 
self-centered way of being-in-the-world, and become totally emptied so as to be 
constituted on the plane of absolute nothingness? Is not Dasein’s problem that it is 
Dasein? For now, I have no answer to this question. I take this to be a fundamental 
rupture between these two thinkers and between their traditions. With that said, 
there are paths along which we may proceed to further our analysis and to inspire 
future dialogue. 

The path forward will lead us to explore how ekstasis functions in Heidegger’s thought. 
In particular, Heidegger’s account of the structure of Dasein’s understanding as 
ecstatic warrants further investigation. The discovery that ekstasis is the primordial 
unity between Dasein and the world may bear more fruitful dialogue with the Kyoto 
School. That all things are absolute nothingness does not preclude the possibility that 
this nothingness is a dynamic nothingness. Indeed, Nishitani speaks of this absolute 
nothingness as a ‘force,’44 and a force bespeaks movement and process. A process can 
be nothing and everything at the same time, and Dasein’s ecsatic movement may 
paint for us a useful picture of nothingness’ perpetual perichoretic motion. 

Heidegger’s account of understanding finds its underlying motivation in the desire 
to articulate understanding, not as the correlation of beings understood in terms of 
object as mere presence, but as the un-concealment of Dasein’s prior unity with other 
things.45 These relations are uncovered through care, which is another way of saying 
that what we care about commands our attention and thereby gives shape to our 

44 Nishitani, 163.
45 Heidegger, 144-145, 200-201.



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understanding.46 This orienting ourselves towards objects in terms of what concerns 
us reveals those underlying relations that were always already there. Conversely, those 
relations that are brought to presentation through care must be grounded in a unity 
which is prior to the subject and the object in this relation.47 If one begins from the 
standpoint of either subject or object, one will find that neither subject or object can 
reach far enough to meet the other in the middle. Both must possess a primordial 
oneness that founds the subject-object relation. This is essentially to say that the 
experience of knowing cannot be built up from the totality of the experience’s parts—
as if the experience were a mere aggregate of information bits—but that knowledge 
arises only from the foundational plane of the oneness of all things.48

For Heidegger, then, knowing is not merely an intellectual act but actually a coming 
to expression of our fundamental interconnectedness with the world. “[W]e must 
remember that knowing itself is grounded beforehand in already-being-alongside-
the-world.”49 Knowledge can only arise from being-in-the-world, and thus being-in-
the-world is prior to the plane of subject-object where knowledge gives an account 
of things. What role does ekstasis play in this account? Heidegger describes the 
paradoxical nature of knowing in terms that strongly evoke notions of ekstasis:

In directing itself toward… and in grasping something, Dasein does not 
first go outside of its inner sphere in which it is initially encapsulated, but, 
rather, in its primary kind of being, it is always already “outside” together 
with some being encountered in the world already discovered…even in 
this “being outside” together with its object, Dasein is “inside,” correctly 
understood; that is, in itself is as the being-in-the-world which knows.50

Thus, he says, “Dasein that knows remains outside as Dasein.”51 So, Dasein understands 
by being outside itself but is itself precisely in this being outside of itself? Dasein’s 
inside is its outside and its outside is its inside. Here I see a clearing toward which 
the thoughts of Heidegger and Nishitani may converge. Heidegger’s statement that 
Dasein knows its inside by being outside of itself calls to mind Nishitani’s articulation 
that all things are related as both master and slave. If Dasein knows by being outside 
of itself, then Dasein can be said to be itself through residing in the home-ground of 
every other thing. Yet by residing on the home-ground of everything (and thus being 
outside of itself ), Dasein finds itself right at home on its inside. Only because the 
center is everywhere can Dasein simultaneously be its own center and also be in the 
center of everything else. 

46 Ibid., 145.
47 Nishitani, 149 – 150.
48 Heidegger, §44.
49 Ibid., 61.
50 Heidegger, 62.
51 Ibid.



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We may take another step further by connecting the master and slave paradox to the 
dynamic perichoretic movement of hermeneutics. Paul Ricoeur’s statement that, in 
hermeneutics, “I exchange the me, master of itself, for the self, disciple of the text,”52 
conveys the ecstatic structure of hermeneutical understanding. I exchange the me, 
the ego-self, for the no-self, the servant of all things. When this exchange is made, 
one discovers how the hermeneutical circle traces the flow of nothingness. One is 
master of the text by being a servant of the text, and in becoming the servant of the 
text, one becomes its master. I lie at the home-ground of the text and the text lies at 
my home-ground. Through our continually being constituted ecstatically, the unity 
we already had with each other and with all things can come to proper presentation. 

In the end, the conversation between Heidegger and Nishitani seems to run aground 
on the question of what sort of problem self-consciousness actually poses to us. Is 
self-consciousness ultimately the problem, or is the problem a certain sort of self-
consciousness? Nishitani seems to want to say that self-consciousness itself cannot 
be the plane on which the truth of things can be faithfully articulated, because self-
consciousness is the plane of discursive thought that traffics in the subject-object 
relation. Heidegger seems to want to say that we have been dominated by one mode 
of self-consciousness (the metaphysics of presence), but that we, therefore, must seek 
the more primordial mode of self-consciousness that allows Being to be un-concealed 
in understanding—that is, in care. However, the difference between Heidegger and 
Nishitani seems to originate in their respective religious traditions, rather than in 
mere philosophical disagreements. Nishitani’s commitments reside in an ancient 
Buddhist debate about whether plants can attain Buddha-nature. In re-phrasing this 
question so as to reveal its underlying import, one might ask, “is enlightenment 
attained through practice or is enlightenment simply realizing what all things already 
are?” Though initially there was debate between the Tendai and Shingon schools in 
Japan, Japanese Buddhism eventually reached a consensus that all things already are 
Buddha-nature (emptied of self ) and that enlightenment is simply realizing that one 
already is Buddha-nature (a view referred to as hangaku53). Standing in this tradition 
of Japanese Buddhism, Nishitani sees the natural world as the exemplar from which 
we ought to learn, and to which we ought to conform. 

Heidegger, on the other hand, displays the traditionally Christian intuition that there 
is something fundamentally unique and special about human beings; that is, their 
being made in “the Image of God.” The centrality of the imago Dei in the Jewish 
and Christian faiths helps explain the Western reflex to posit humans as somehow 
distinct in the community of beings. This idea that humans occupy some unique 

52 Paul Ricoeur, Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences, trans. John B. Thompson (Cambridge: Cambridge 
University Press, 2010), 73.

53 William LaFleur, “Saigyo and the Buddhist Value of Nature, Part 1.” History of Religions 13, no. 2 (1973): 93-
128. My account of this question and historical debate comes from LaFleur’s article, which does a masterful job 
at locating these questions in the historical tradition of Buddhist reflection and then tracing them through the 
debates in Japanese Buddhist schools, which ultimately culminate in the Buddhist poetry of the monk Saigyo.



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It Was Nothing

role amongst beings is evident even in the thought of the atheist Sartre, who writes 
that humans are condemned to freedom—a phenomenon which seems to constitute 
the exciting risk and glorious terror of being human. Heidegger’s account of Dasein 
fundamentally presupposes that the way humans are in the world differs from the 
way that other objects are in the world, and that those different structures that we 
humans possess are actually to be celebrated. 

Ultimately, this disagreement indicates that we can only answer these questions by 
thoroughly analyzing and re-envisioning the nature of the role of humans in the 
world of things. Are they unique? How are they unique? Is that a problem? Is the 
difference perhaps not fundamental, but merely situated on a continuum that loops 
back on itself like a Mobius strip? Is the concept of “humans” itself a problematic 
concept? Are we more like a process than a substance? We will need to confront such 
penetrating questions such as these if we desire to have any success dialoguing across 
the historical lines of East and West, and to secure a more just and beautiful way of 
being in the world. F

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Abe, Masao. Zen and Western Thought. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1985.

Heidegger, Martin.  Being and Time. Translated by Joan Stambaugh. Albany, NY: 
State University of New York, 2010.

LaFleur, William. “Saigyo and the Buddhist Value of Nature, Part 1.”  History of 
Religions 13, no. 2  (1973): 93- 128.

Nishitani, Keiji.  Religion and Nothingness. Translated by Jan Van Bragt. Berkeley: 
University of California Press, 1982.

Parkes, Graham, “Introduction.” In Heidegger and Eastern Thought, edited by Graham 
Parkes, 1-14. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1987.

Ricoeur, Paul. Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences. Translated by John B Thompson. 
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016.

Stein, Edith. “Heidegger’s Existential Philosophy. Translated by Mette 
Lebech” Maynooth Philosophical Papers, no. 4 (2007): 55-98.


