ABSTRACT
Japan emerged from a long period of sakoku or isolation in the middle of the nineteenth century CE, beginning a period of cultural exchange and exploration which is still going on. The Japanese began not only to make their achievements known in the West (Suzuki was a leading figure in this area), but also to absorb and evaluate the achievements of western culture, including philosophy. The achievement of Nishida Kitaro was to be the first Japanese to use the methods and findings of western philosophy as a means to articulate a philosophical outlook profoundly coloured by Zen. This is itself an intellectual project of exceptional boldness. Many writers in the Zen tradition contend that the crowning nondual experience of Zen is in principle inarticulable in conceptual terms (cf. Dogen and Hakuin), but this Nishida declined to accept. Impressed by the powerful metaphysical systems of the West, he set out to investigate whether the central experience of Zen, and the world-picture
associated with it, could be given a conceptual articulation. It is to be stressed that Nishida is not a follower of any one western school, even less merely an eclectic. He explores the great systems of the West, even that of Hegel to which he owed the most extensive debt, from a single, consistent point of view, i.e. their adequacy as frameworks for the articulation of Zen experience. What emerges in the end is a unique world-picture which is his own, in which the points of convergence and divergence betwen the two intellectual traditions appear with peculiar sharpness.
