Religion and Nothingness

I'm unsure how to approach this review of Keiji Nishitani's collection of essays on the relationship between religion and nihilism.  

From a comparative philosophy perspective, they form a deep reflection on the connection between the Buddhist concept of emptiness and the way Nietzsche saw the history of Western philosophy dead-ending in nihilism.  Exploring this connection, and especially examining Nishitani's reading of Eternal Recurrence as, "... breathing ... the same pure mountain air that we felt in approaching the the standpoint of Dōgen ..." (RN, 215), could easily be a review in itself.  It's the only time I've seen anyone transpose Nietzsche's idea to a Buddhist context and ask the rather obvious question -- does the Eternal Return describe samsara or nirvana, the greatest weight, or the most unbearable lightness of being?  Yes.  

But there's so much more to the book than this question that it seems unfair to focus on it exclusively.  In fact, even if we stick with a purely philosophical lens, there are so many point of correspondence with The Fold and Nietzsche and Philosophy that the book also deserves its very own chapter in my forthcoming magnum opus The NonDual Deleuze.  Nishitani reinvents emptiness as the plane of consistency, a field of force that holds everything together in a "non-being that is not the being of the negative".  He insists that this field of experience only arises on the far side of our personal ego, after a journey through the center of an impersonal nihilism again to a Great Death.  He discusses various syntheses of time that lead us to see every instant as a "monad of eternity".  I could go on, but it's clear these two are breathing the same mountain air of non-duality.  

And yet, even this longer review would fail to do the essays complete justice.  Because ultimately Nishitani doesn't even see his point as purely philosophical.  As a devoted Zen practitioner himself, his point is also deeply religious or "existential" -- he is concerned with that aspect of our human experience where we necessarily call into question just who we are and what it means to experience, where we begin to look outside of ourselves in an attempt to understand what's happening on the inside, and thus begin to blow apart the nice stable contained self we imagine is our birthright.  This vertiginous exploration of the ground of our existence is for Nishitani the essence of the religious impulse and directly explains it connection to nothingness.  Colloquially speaking, it's that moment of quiet reflection when we wonder, "what does it all mean?"  When we live, rather than theorize, this search, we find ourselves starting into the same groundless abyss that stared back at Nietzsche. And only by crossing this river of absolute nihilism, this gulf where nothing really means anything, can we reach the far shore where the abyss converts 'full circle' into the empty suchness of the present.  In other words, at the deepest level, I think Nishitani is trying to construct a philosophy adequate to his lived experience of sitting zazen.  In a sense, we might see it as asking what is the transcendental condition of possibility of Zen -- who or what are we that sitting still and doing nothing can have such a profound effect on our experience?  The answer of course is that we are the world, and the world is a field of infinite emptiness.

There's so much more that could be said here.  For example, another interesting review would focus on how Nishitani continues Heidegger's line of thought about technology and the fixation of human telos as mechanism.  He illuminates this question by bringing it into connection with Nietzsche's ideas about the master-slave 'dialectic' and Buddhist thinking about freedom and dependent origination.  Yet another review would be needed to address the theory of Christianity that Nishida develops, which centers on a mystical interpretation of the circumincessional unity of the trinity as another expression of what Thich Nhat Hanh called interbeing.  But since it's clear that I'm not going to write all these reviews, or in fact any of them, I think I'll just leave it here and start rereading the book.