ABSTRACT
Emptiness and Nothingness are among the most important philosophical terms in East Asian thoughts. Emptiness, as a philosophical term, has an Indian origin; it is nyat in Sanskrit, and was formulated in Mahyna Buddhism, particularly in the Paramta stras and the Mdhyamaka school. On the other hand, nothingness came from Chinese Daoism, especially the doctrine of reverence for nothingness in Neo-Daoism. Keiji Nishitani's strategy also belongs to an established tradition of the Kyoto school; that is, to construct an alternative philosophical position to one or another Western counterpart by means of Mahayana ideas, especially those of Zen Buddhism. Nishitani applied this strategy to existentialism, proposing his Mahyna existentialism as an alternative to the older versions of existentialism. According to Nishitani, the ontological realization or manifestation of the self and that of the world are also merely two aspects of one and the same event.
