“There must be an overturning, a radical conversion of mind, in any religion. Without it there is no religion. I say, therefore, that religion can be philosophically grasped only by a logic of absolute affirmation through absolute negation. As the religious self returns to its own bottomless depths, it returns to the absolute and simultaneously discovers itself in its ordinary and everyday, and again in its rational, character. As a self-determination of the absolute present, it discovers its own eschatological character, as a historical individual” (Nishida Kitaro, “The Logic of the Place of Nothingness and the Religious Worldview,” Last Writings, 91).
“In any religion, it is the effort of self-negation that is necessary.”
The one thing that has been most misunderstood about religion is whether God is outside of us as a higher power who created the world and is still controlling it, or is really a power within us, which inspires us to love and act for the benefit of others. There have been those who have feared that any talk of a God within would mislead some individuals into stating that they “are” God.
To clarify the dual apprehension of God as both within and without, Nishida turns to a distinction familiar to anyone living in Japan, that between the way of other power – tariki – which is that of the Pure Land School, and the way of self-power – jiriki – which is that of Zen. Nishida asserts that at bottom, self-power, the Zen approach, is the same as other-power. In fact, he says, Zen is not really a religion of self-power. He writes: “The religious consciousness does not arise out of our own selves; it is simultaneously the call of God or Buddha. It is the working, the operation, of God or Buddha welling up from the bottomless depths of the soul” (Nishida, “The Logic of the Place of Nothingness and the Religious Worldview,” Last Writings, 78). He adds: “Essentially, then, there can be no religion of self-power. This is indeed a contradictory concept. Buddhists themselves have been mistaken about it. Although they advocate the concepts of self-power and other-power respectively, the Zen sect and the True Pure Land sect, as forms of Mahayana Buddhism, basically hold the same position … In any religion, it is the effort of self-negation that is necessary” (80). In the end, Zen cannot be described as a religion of self power, because it does not rely on the self, but on the negation of the self, like any other religion. What this really means is that the self becomes itself through negating itself, and it can do so because as no-self, it is nothingness, and nothingness is the activity of self-determination as the forms of the world. “The self, we must say, possesses itself through its own self-negation … At the ground of the self, therefore, there must be that which, in its own absolute nothingness, is self-determining, and which, in its own absolute nothingness, is being. I believe this the meaning of the ancient Buddhist saying, “Because there is No Place in which it abides, the Mind arises” (82).
Religious life as “constituted in the contradictory identity of the self and the absolute”
That the self possesses itself through its own self-negation implies that, at the ground of the self, or, as Nishida would prefer to say, “in the depths” of the self, there is nothingness, and nothingness is the activity of self-expression according to the process of contradictory identity – “the One into the many and the many into the One.” These depths of the self are bottomless, so there is really no ground, that is, no place where the self can rest, so it arises as mind, that is, heart-mind, loving energy and self-determination of the world of forms. “When I say depths (or ground) I refer to bottomlessly contradictory identity of existential life. This involves an entirely different logic – the logic of affirmation through absolute negation” (83). The logic of affirmation through absolute negation is the logic of the place of nothingness, and this is the logic at work in the religious worldview. “ This logic conceives of the religious form of life as constituted in the contradictory identity of the self and the absolute” (83).
The religious life requires an overturning of the mind whereby the self negates itself in order to be itself. “There must be an overturning, a radical conversion of mind, in any religion. Without it there is no religion. I say, therefore, that religion can be philosophically grasped only by a logic of absolute affirmation through absolute negation. As the religious self returns to its own bottomless depths, it returns to the absolute and simultaneously discovers itself in its ordinary and everyday, and again in its rational, character. As a self-determination of the absolute present, it discovers its own eschatological character, as a historical individual” (91). As the self negates itself, it allows the self-determination of the historical world, and this is what Zen points to when it states that to live a Zen life is to live an ordinary life. Nishida quotes Lin-chi: “The Buddha-dharma has no special place to apply effort. It is only the ordinary and everyday; relieving one-self, donning clothes, eating rice, lying down when tired. The fool laughs at us, but the wise understand” (Quoted by Nishida, 108). Acts of ordinary living are as such what Christians would refer to as eschatological, that is, they are expressions of the absolute. In Zen, however, what this entails is that our own acts, and not only those performed by Jesus, and perhaps a small elite of prophets whose prophecies were recorded in the Bible, can be the self-expression of the historical world. In other words, religious consciousness is not a special kind of consciousness, as the privileged place given to the prophets’ sayings in the Bible seems to imply. “But when I speak of religion, I do not refer to a special kind of consciousness. “’There is no mysterious power in the true Dharma’ …. ‘The true Way cannot exist apart even for an instant; what can do so is not the true Way’. Again, ‘when we run, we are on the true Way, when we stumble and fall, we are still on it’.” Religion is not apart from common experience” (115).
Religion is not a special kind of consciousness
To those who might confuse enlightenment with some sort of alternative state of consciousness, one has to say that it is not a “special kind of consciousness,” but it nevertheless is what one could call a self-less self-consciousness. Carter explains: “Human consciousness is a spectrum which extends from the unaware and beastly natural, to the enlightened awareness of kensho as the bottomless identity of contradictories of self as absolute, of absolute as self. The enlightened is preferable, but all are equally moments in the divine creation” (Robert E. Carter, The Nothingness Beyond God, 154). Doesn’t Nishida state that animals, plants and rocks are also self-expression of the world? These are conscious too (even rocks) in the sense of reacting to, as well as impacting, their surroundings. In fact, one could say they express the world better because they are not hampered by conceptual representations. It is only in humans that an issue arises, because humans have self-consciousness, and live their lives surrounded by representations of the world. People who do not question these representations spend their lives under the spell of these representations, using them to justifying whatever they “pick and choose,” and consequently their expression of reality is distorted by their attachments. Only humans, because of self-consciousness, require a spiritual practice to return to pure consciousness, to see things as they are.
Sources:
Nishida Kitaro, “The Logic of the Place of Nothingness and the Religious Worldview,” Last Writings
Robert E. Carter, The Nothingness Beyond God, An Introduction to the Philosophy of Nishida Kitaro