I HAVE explained in some detail how Nishitani’s thought represents a radical challenge to self-consciousness and that it arrives at Śūnyatā by way of nihilism, but it is worth exploring what Śūnyatā itself actually means.

Although Nishitani was the first to employ the term in a fashion that was designed to address the human condition throughout the world, viewed from the more traditional perspective of Theravāda – the oldest school of Buddhism – Śūnyatā is used to denote the “non-self” that rejects the notion of a permanent, unchanging essence. Within the multifarious layers that comprise Mahāyāna Buddhism, on the other hand, the concept of Śūnyatā amounts to the idea that everything within nature and experience is empty. Finally, the scholastic literature pertaining to what is known as “Buddha-nature” uses the term to describe the condition of emptiness that awaits those who attain a state of Buddhahood within the context of the adaptation or readjustment of the mind.

It is important to remember that Śūnyatā is not an object that is separate from being, but an absolute emptiness in which all representational material has been dissolved. Whilst Śūnyatā may initially appear as objectified being, the process demands that it also empties itself.

As we have seen, Nishitani is adament that Western thinkers such as Martin Heidegger and Jean-Paul Sartre did not go far enough and simply created forms of philosophy in which emptiness appears as a mere representation of nothingness. Nishitani criticises Sartre, especially, for initiating the kind of futile existentialism that solely distracts man from his disillusioned condition through a continual spur to “action”. This strategy is designed to offer the self a window of freedom, but in reality it is a form of subjective nothingness that is centred wholly on the ego:

“Sartre considers his nothingness to be the ground of the subject, yet he presents it like a wall at the bottom of the ego. This turns his nothingness into a basic principle that shuts the ego up within itself. By virtue of this partition that nothingness sets up at the ground of the self, the ego becomes like a vast and desolate cave.”

This is a purely relative emptiness that is based, not on freedom, but entanglement, and cannot be compared to Nishitani’s absolute emptiness that seeks to breaks the illusory spell of attachment completely.

As for Heidegger’s analysis of nothingness, Nishitani argues that it is little different to that of Sartre on account of the German presenting his nihilist “abyss” as a representation across which existence is suspended. In other words, Heidegger posits nihilism as something that stands in opposition to existence as a purely conceptual negation and therefore the possibility of achieving Śūnyatā is still mired in the same old dichotomy of subject and object.

By contrast, the “self-emptying” Śūnyatā that Nishitani uses to expose the fallacies of Western thought presents everything as it should be. All “things” are melted down to the core of their true being to the degree that emptiness becomes the basis of their existence. Subject and substance are united in a field of Śūnyatā that makes it possible for everything to attain its “suchness,” or authentic mode of being. Nishitani compares this to the role of fire as it reaches fulfilment through the act of combustion. There is, however, a fascinating twist:

“Of course, this non-combustion is not something apart from combustion: fire is non-combustion in its very act of combustion. It does not burn itself. To withdraw the non-combustion of fire from the discussion is to make combustion in truth unthinkable.”

Unlike the Aristotelian “substance” that is provided with an existence that lies outside the self, as an object, Nishitani’s version is a self-identity that appears non-objectively, from within, and it is the realm of Śūnyatā that makes this possible.