Lia’s Reviews > Japanese and Continental Philosophy: Conversations with the Kyoto School > Status Update

Heidegger’s “conversation on a country path” in which a scientist, a scholar, and a guide converse their way down a path toward “releasement” as the authentic way of being human; and ... the classic Zen text, The Ten Ox-herding Pictures, which illustrates and comments on a search for the elusive “Ox” that represents one’s true self or “Buddha nature”—a provisional image which is itself cast aside along the path...

TOC if anybody is curious about this:

[Ueda’s self] exists in “twofold being-in-the-world.” ... the self exists simultaneously in a concrete, contingent place, as well as in the “infnite openness of Nothingness,” Ueda’s phenomenology of the self is both a phenomenology of the life-world and paradoxically a phenomenology of “that which does not appear”—namely, the all-embracing place of emptiness or absolute nothingness.

... Nishitani’s project of “overcoming nihilism by way of passing through nihilism,” ... Whereas Nietzsche primarily sought to affirm the ubiquity of the will to power after the death of God, Nishitani claims that Zen’s “Great Death” takes one beyond all standpoints of will to a rebirth of non-egoistic freedom and compassion.