Despite the central role that the concept of God played in Kitarō Nishida's philosophy—and more broadly, within the Kyoto School which formed around Nishida—Anglophone studies of the religious philosophy of modern Japan have not seriously considered the nature and role of God in Nishida's thought. Indeed, relevant Anglophone studies even strongly suggest that where the concept of God does appear in Nishida's writings, such a concept is to be dismissed as a 'subjective fiction', a 'penultimate designation', or a peripheral Western (...) intrusion with no genuine relationship to the core of Nishida's thought. However, a careful study of Nishida's own writings reveals that for Nishida, in his own words, God is 'that which is indispensable and decisive'. For the first time in English, this present study reveals Nishida's view of God, especially examining Nishida's debt to the theologian Karl Barth and Christianity. (shrink)

The John Cage that the world came to know made his dramatic entrance in 1952, a year that Cage scholars generally refer to as his landmark year. Artistically, three of his works, in particular, stand as points of arrival, Music of Changes, 4’33”, and the multi-media Black Mountain Piece, but these works could also be seen as important vehicles through which Cage conveyed his new vision shaped by Eastern philosophies and Zen, particularly as taught by the Zen scholar D. T. (...) Suzuki. Of the teachings that Suzuki had imparted to his American audience, Cage seemed to have appropriated at least three: kegon, satori, śūnyatā. I will examine Cage's use of them by focusing on two religious texts that Cage had read and known: the Heart Sutra for its key teaching on Emptiness; The Ten Oxherding Pictures, a classic Zen pictorial depiction of the stages of Zen discipline that a Bodhisattva necessarily undergoes. I show that for all of Cage's lofty intentions, he had only romanced the idea of Shunyata in particular, and Buddhism in general. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThis paper examines Nishida’s later work on the historical world and religious transformation in an effort to clarify his political writings during the Pacific War. It sheds new light on the debate over the interpretation of Nishida’s wartime actions through reflection on a brief interaction Nishida had with the student Kiyoshi Kato during World War II. Shinran’s influence on Nishida will also be analyzed to reveal that the moral and religious insufficiency of the practitioner is a key aspect of his (...) view of religious consciousness. Considering Nishida’s view of religious transformation together with his political writings and his interaction with Kato will lead to a deeper understanding of his view of history. (shrink)

The paper provides an overview of the rise of Japanese philosophy during the period of rapid modernization in Japan after the Meiji Restoration (beginning in the 1860s). It also examines the controversy surrounding Japanese philosophy towards the end of the Pacific War (1945), and its renewal in the contemporary context. The post-Meiji thinkers engaged themselves with the questions of universality and particularity; the former represented science, medicine, technology, and philosophy (understood as ) and the latter, the Japanese non-Western tradition. Within (...) the context, the question arose whether or not Japan, the only non-Western nation to succeed in modernization at the time, could also offer a philosophy that was universal in scope? Could Japanese philosophy offer an alternative form of modernity to the global domination of Western modernity? In this historical context, the philosophies of Kitaro Nishida and Tetsuro Watsuji, two of the tradition's most prominent thinkers, are introduced. Nishida is considered the and his followers came to be known as the . The essay ends with a brief reflection on the influence of philosophy on culture, focusing on the aftermath of the tsunami catastrophe in 2011. (shrink)

This paper provides an analysis of the key term aidagara ('betweenness') in the philosophical ethics of Watsuji Tetsurō (1889-1960), in response to and in light of the recent movement in Japanese Buddhist studies known as 'Critical Buddhism'. The Critical Buddhist call for a turn away from 'topical' or intuitionist thinking and towards (properly Buddhist) 'critical' thinking, while problematic in its bipolarity, raises the important issue of the place of 'reason' vs 'intuition' in Japanese Buddhist ethics. In this paper, a comparison (...) of Watsuji's 'ontological quest' with that of Martin Heidegger (1889-1976), Watsuji's primary Western source and foil, is followed by an evaluation of a corresponding search for an 'ontology of social existence' undertaken by Tanabe Hajime (1885-1962). Ultimately, the philosophico-religious writings of Watsuji Tetsurō allow for the 'return' of aesthesis as a modality of social being that is truly dimensionalized, and thus falls prey neither to the verticality of topicalism nor the limiting objectivity of criticalism. (shrink)