Japanese philosophy philosophy in Japan, beginning with Buddhist thought and proceeding to academic ‘philosophy’ (tetsugaku), which emerged in Japan only during the Meiji Restoration period beginning in 1868. Among representatives of traditional Japanese Buddhist philosophical thought should be mentioned Saicho (767–822) of Tendai; Kukai (774–835) of Shingon; Shinran (1173–1262) of Jodo Shinshu; Dogen (1200–53) of Soto Zen; and Nichiren (1222–82) of Nichiren Buddhism. During the medieval period a duty-based warrior ethic of loyalty and self-sacrifice emerged from within the Bushido tradition of the Samurai, developed out of influences from Confucianism and Zen. Also, the Zen-influenced path of Geido or way of the artist produced an important religio-aesthetic tradition with ideas of beauty like aware (sad beauty), yugen (profundity), ma (interval), wabi (poverty), sabi (solitariness), and shibui (understatement). While each sect developed its own characteristics, a general feature of traditional Japanese Buddhist philosophy is its emphasis on ‘impermanence’ (mujo), the transitoriness of all non-substantial phenomena as expressed through the aesthetic of perishability in Geido and the constant remembrance of death in the warrior ethic of Bushido.
Much of twentieth-century Japanese philosophy centers around the development of, and critical reaction against, the thought of Nishida Kitaro (1870–1945) and the ‘Kyoto School’ running through Tanabe Hajime, Nishitani Keiji, Hisamatsu Shin’ichi, Takeuchi Yoshinori, Ueda Shizuteru, Abe Masao, and, more peripherally, Watsuji Tetsuro, Kuki Shuzo, and D. T. Suzuki. The thought of Nishida is characterized by the effort to articulate an East-West philosophy and interfaith dialogue within a Buddhist framework of ’emptiness’ (ku) or ‘nothingness’ (mu). In his maiden work, A Study of Good (1911), Nishida elaborates a theory of ‘pure experience’ (junsui keiken) influenced especially by William James. Like James, Nishida articulates ‘pure experience’ as an immediate awareness in the stream of consciousness emerging prior to subject– object dualism. Yet it is widely agreed that Nishida reformulates ‘pure experience’ in light of his own study of Zen Buddhism. Throughout his career Nishida continuously reworked the idea of ‘pure experience’ in terms of such notions as ‘self-awareness,’ ‘absolute will,’ ‘acting intuition,’ ‘absolute nothingness,’ and the ‘social-historical world.’ From the Acting to the Seeing (1927) signifies a turning point in Nishida’s thought in that it introduces his new concept of basho, the ‘place’ of ‘absolute Nothingness’ wherein the ‘true self’ arises as a ‘selfidentity of absolute contradictions.’ Nishida’s penultimate essay, ‘The Logic of Place and a Religious Worldview’ (1945), articulates a theory of religious experience based upon the ‘self-negation’ of both self and God in the place of Nothingness. In this context he formulates an interfaith dialogue between the Christian kenosis (self-emptying) and Buddhist sunyata (emptiness) traditions. In Religion and Nothingness (1982), Nishitani Keiji develops Nishida’s philosophy in terms of a Zen logic wherein all things at the eternalistic standpoint of Being are emptied in the nihilistic standpoint of Relative Nothingness, which in turn is emptied into the middle way standpoint of Emptiness or Absolute Nothingness represented by both Buddhist sunyata and Christian kenosis. For Nishitani, this shift from Relative to Absolute Nothingness is the strategy for overcoming nihilism as described by Nietzsche. Hisamatsu Shin’ichi interprets Japanese aesthetics in terms of Nishida’s Self of Absolute Nothingness in Zen and the Fine Arts (1971). The encounter of Western philosophy with Zen Nothingness is further developed by Abe Masao in Zen and Western Thought (1985). Whereas thinkers like Nishida, Nishitani, Hisamatsu, Ueda, and Abe develop a Zen approach based upon the immediate experience of Absolute Nothingness through the ‘self-power’ (jiriki) of intuition, Philosophy as Metanoetics (1986) by Tanabe Hajime instead takes up the stance of Shinran’s Pure Land Buddhism, according to which Nothingness is the transforming grace of absolute ‘Other-power’ (tariki) operating through faith. Watsuji Tetsuro’s Ethics (1937), the premier work in modern Japanese moral theory, develops a communitarian ethics in terms of the ‘betweenness’ (aidagara) of persons based on the Japanese notion of self as ningen, whose two characters reveal the double structure of personhood as both individual and social. Kuki Shuzo’s The Structure of Iki (1930), often regarded as the most creative work in modern Japanese aesthetics, analyzes the Edo ideal of iki or ‘chic’ as having a threefold structure representing the fusion of the ‘amorousness’ (bitai) of the Geisha, the ‘valor’ (ikuji) of the Samurai, and the ‘resignation’ (akirame) of the Buddhist priest. Marxist thinkers like Tosaka Jun (1900–45) have developed strong ideological critiques of the philosophy articulated by Nishida and the Kyoto School. In summary, the outstanding contribution of modern Japanese philosophy has been the effort to forge a synthesis of Eastern and Western values within the overall framework of an Asian worldview.
See also BUDDHISM , CONFUCIANIS. S.O.