Abstract

Nishitani was a Japanese student attending Heidegger's Freiburg lectures on Nietzsche's nihilism in the late 1930s. As a young thinker he absorbed western philosophy and literature, focusing especially on the growing tide of nineteenth- and twentieth-century voices expressing the collapse of traditional Western values and the advent of nihilism. Recognizing that the phenomenon of nihilism encompasses our human situation in a way that transcends any particular cultural tradition, the self-overcoming of nihilism became fundamental to his lifetime philosophical project. A progressively deepening understanding of the role of the Mahayana Buddhist tradition in comprehending the possibility of a breakthrough beyond nihilism culminated in the 1961 publication of what may be Nishitani's magnum opus: Religion and Nothingness.