Speaker：Dennis Stromback (Center for Global Education, The University of Tokyo

Title：Nishida and Shin Buddhism

résumé：This presentation will discuss the influence of Shin Buddhism on Nishida Kitarō’s thought. The standard view within the literature on Japanese philosophy is that Nishida was a Zen Buddhist thinker, with sympathies toward Shin Buddhism. This view has a long history in the scholarship on Nishida, spanning from Nishitani’s bibliographical pieces written on Nishida’s life and thought that were published between 1936 and 1968 to James Heisig’s Philosophers of Nothingness that was published for a more popular Western audience in 2001. What I will discuss in this presentation is how the standard view overlooks the influences of Shin Buddhism on Nishida’s philosophy and thereby reduces his thought to the logic(s) of Zen Buddhism. Nishida was not a provincial thinker, but rather a cosmopolitan one, who sought to transcend any doctrinal thought by disrupting the epistemological and ontological binaries of reality. The implication of this presentation is to frame Nishida as someone who worked to overcome the duality between Shin and Zen Buddhism.

Language: English

Moderators:
Cheung Ching-yuen (EAA), Kuwayama Yukiko (UTCP),
Dennis Stromback（GlobE）

Organizers：East Asian Academy for New Liberal Arts, the University of Tokyo; The University of Tokyo Center for Philosophy