PACIFIC WORLD - The Institute of Buddhist Studies

Book Reviews 293Heisig’s focus on three principal figures of the Kyoto School scales thetopic down to manageable proportions. Absolute nothingness, the coreconcept shared by the three, provides a unifying thread. It is absolutenothingness, rather than a higher being, that functions as the ground for allthings, “at once embracing and penetrating the inherent contradictionsand relative nothingness at the limits of being” (p. 129). Heisig’s attentionto this foundational concept is particularly appreciated given the obscuritiesof thought and expression characteristic of his three subjects; it systematizesthe book into a guide through what for many readers would otherwiseremain a forbidding maze. Heisig offers a wealth of pointers to furthersources of information on the Kyoto School, and steers the reader awayfrom the poor Western translations. The material is organized around thelogic of ideas. Heisig follows ideas “without paying too much attention totheir dating or the development of their interlocking” (p. 49), and wherehelpful, “overlays earlier ideas with later ones” (p. 112). For Nishida andTanabe, his strategy is to “avoid dividing their career into stages,” and“instead to concentrate on recurrent themes” (p. 190). For Nishitani, it is to“focus on specific motifs. . . with a minimum attention to their dating orlocating them in the development of his ideas” (p. 190). These disclaimersnotwithstanding, Heisig does trace the rough lines of the evolution ofthought in each of the three philosophers as well as the influences betweenthem, and carefully distinguishes the particular contributions of each to theideas they share; he also supplies basic chronologies.The central segment of the book contains three sections, one on each ofthe thinkers. It is preceded by a single “Orientation,” where Heisig describesthe emergence of the Kyoto School in parallel with the developmentof Western philosophy in modern Japan. He describes the core assumptionsof the School as inward-directedness (interest in the transformationof consciousness and preference for the direct experience unencumberedby critical logic or religious doctrine), the unity of awareness and reality,the latter taken “simply as it is,” and an uncritical attitude toward Japan. Asketch of the history of the studies on the Kyoto School in the West isincluded.The three sections forming the central part of the book are divided intochapters that are short (2–4 pages) and manageable, with the seamlesstransitions between them helping eliminate potential choppiness. The lastsection is followed by “Notes,” a seventy-page appendix serving as acommentary to the main text and a valuable resource of background data.It is to this section that Heisig relegates more detailed observations aboutthe parallels between his three thinkers and Western philosophy. A disadvantageof this approach is the inconvenience of having to match multiplequotations dispersed throughout a particular chapter with their creditsstrung at the end of the corresponding section of “Notes.” On the otherhand, the reader may find it handy to have comments and notes in an