I've been pondering Nishitani's work, Religion and Nothingness, for the umpteenth time (partly for the course I'll be teaching this semester), and without fail, it has provoked me to think of something... this time the nature of temporality (not as an abstract idea, but our experience of it). I'll post my reflections soon, but first a little preamble:
Without going into the details of his arguments, Nishitani claims that 1) religion is an "individual affair," i.e., it is a personal thing, 2) understanding religion requires that the person undertake the religious quest, and 3) the precondition for truly understanding religion is the experience of nihility. Nishitani defines nihility as "...that which renders meaningless the meaning of life (p. 4)." Nishitani claims that we live our ordinary lives within an assumed (and unconscious) framework that places us at the center of things, where everything (and everybody) is seen as meaningful for us. He calls this a "self-centered" view of existence, but Nishitani is not using this term in a pejorative sense; rather, he is referring to a basic Buddhist tenet that one of the primary erroneous views that afflict us humans is the notion of an abiding self (according to Buddhism, the reality is that there is no self... this assertion makes many folks shudder). In the modern context that Nishitani is using this idea of self-centeredness, this assumed framework is teleological in nature, that the objects, events, and people in our worlds become projects for us (I want to buy that car, go to that concert, date that person). When a person's world comes apart, due to, for example, becoming gravely ill, losing a loved one, or failing at some business venture, she or he comes up against nihility, the fact that life is uncertain, transient, and ultimately leads to death. At this point, life, in its telic, self-centered mode of existence, has become meaningless. However, once this nihility is embraced, there is a radical transformation in one's outlook. One's question is no longer, "how will religion, people, etc., serve me?" but rather, "what is the real purpose of my life?" This profound reorientation in outlook is, for Nishitani, the beginning of the religious quest.
One more (lengthy) point before going on to my reflection, Nishitani's concept of the "field of consciousness." This concept is used by Nishitani to describe and critique the Cartesian idea of self. Simply put, the field of consciousness is an epistemic structure made up of an independent (alienated) self or ego, a consciousness that is completely separated from both its body and the world (both body and world are material, mechanistic existences, while consciousness, defined primarily as rationality is not only of a different order, but also that which we are). This epistemic framework structures all experience in the form of a subject/object duality, that is, a separate subject (ego) that observes both objects, etc., external to it and states internal to consciousness. For Nishitani, this mode of consciousness never really perceives anything but representations of "external" and "internal" phenomena; the assumption here is that the "self" that observes and reflects on phenomena is a given ("I think, therefore, I am). In order to see things directly as they are, Nishitani asserts that we should break through the field of consciousness by understanding (not conceptually, but with one's entire being) the absolute subjectivity of the subject. This means that one comes to see the subject in itself, without the dualistic representations--seeing the self as an object of the perceiving ego. Paradoxically, once one sees one's subjectivity in its own home ground, to use Nishitani's phrase, one sees the "home ground" of all things. In other words, "perceiving" without the dualistic and representational "field of consciousness" means to see (understand with one's entire being) all phenomena without duality, which is akin to seeing things as they truly are.
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