- Lived:
- 1870–1945 · Unoke, Kanazawa, Tokyo, Kyoto, Kamakura — Japan
- Tradition:
- Founder of the Kyoto School; Zen Buddhism meeting Western philosophy as an equal
- The Big Idea:
- Before there is an "I" looking at a "world," there is pure experience — one undivided flow — and beneath everything that exists lies not Being but a "place of absolute nothingness" that lets all things appear.
- In their words:
- He said the East had sought "the form of the formless" — and set out to give it a logic.
- If you remember one thing:
- Two generations after Japan was forced open to the West, a provincial schoolteacher who had spent a decade on a Zen cushion built the first fully modern philosophy on nothingness instead of Being — and Western philosophy has been answering it ever since.