BRIAN SHŪDŌ SCHROEDER
Rochester Institute of Technology
KENOTIC THEOLOGY, BUDDHISM, AND TIME
For just as the Buddhist comes to know samsara as Nirvana,
the Christian must come to know the Nothing as the hither
side of God.1
Since its inception, the kenotic philosophical theology of Thomas J. J.
Altizer has been distinguished by its ongoing engagement with
Buddhism, which Altizer regards as “the most philosophical religion
in the world . . . the only one of the world religions that has evolved a
philosophy out of a religious Weltanschauung.”2 In his first book,
Oriental Mysticism and Biblical Eschatology (1961), Altizer writes,
“Buddhism and primitive Christianity may be taken as
representative of the purest—and most radical—forms of mysticism
and eschatology; here the religious reality becomes revealed with
such power that it leads to an abrogation of existence itself.”3 This
close association between Buddhism and Christianity can be found
throughout Altizer’s oeuvre; yet, despite the considerable body of
literature on his work, there has been little written on this crucial
dimension. So figurative in fact is the role that Buddhism exercises
on Altizer’s thinking that his The Descent into Hell (1970) has been
identified as the first Buddhist-Christian theology,4 a work that
concludes with a discussion of the relationship between Buddhist
compassion and Christian love, going so far as to proclaim, “If we
can realize that Christian love is the total reversal of Buddhist
compassion, then we can know the Buddha as the original name and
identity of the New Jerusalem or the apocalyptic Christ”!5 Reflecting
on his body of work, Altizer declares that The Self-Embodiment of God
Thomas J. J. Altizer
Thomas J. J. Altizer, Oriental Mysticism and Biblical Eschatology
(Philadelphia: Westminster, 1961), 125.
3 Ibid., 174.
4 Thomas J. J. Altizer, The Call to Radical Theology, ed. with an introduction
by Lissa McCullough, foreword by David E. Klemm (Albany: State
University of New York Press, 2012), 154; also, Thomas J. J. Altizer, Letter
63 to Friends (June 28, 2012), in This Silence Must Now Speak: Letters of
Thomas J. J. Altizer 1995–2015, ed. with an introduction by Mike Grimshaw
(New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 213.
5 Thomas J. J. Altizer, The Descent into Hell: A Study of the Radical Reversal of
the Christian Consciousness (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1970), 203.
1
2
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(1977)6 was an attempt “to write a theology that would be Eastern
and Western at once, or Buddhist and Christian at once.”7 (Ironically,
this book, which focuses on the topic of silence, is silent about this
attempt; in fact, Buddhism is not engaged explicitly at all.) And in
Genesis and Apocalypse (1990), in a chapter titled with a clearly strong
Buddhist resonance, “Emptiness and Self-Emptiness,” which he
thinks “embodies [his] best work on Buddhism,”8 Altizer asserts that
“while nothing is or could be more distant from Christianity than is
Buddhism . . . it is also the purest and most total way to an absolute
reversal of history,”9 resulting in an absolute emptiness fully distant
from the Christian conception of God. This last statement is telling
and prefigures Altizer’s primary stance toward Buddhism, namely,
as the “purest” eschatological reversal of history, it is therefore the
natural dialectical counterpoint to early or primitive, in other words,
apocalyptic Christianity.
TOWARD A BUDDHIST-CHRISTIAN THEOLOGY
Altizer’s relationship to Buddhist thinking in general is both simple
and complex, and it is not within the scope of this essay to take up
that relation.10 Suffice it to say here, Altizer’s interpretation of
Buddhism, especially in his earlier treatment, focuses primarily on
the Mādhayamika philosophy of the great Indian Dharma ancestor
Nāgārjuna (c. 150–250 CE) and on Mahāyāna Buddhism in general.
Altizer is a dialectical thinker and therefore it is not surprising that
he is drawn toward this most important and influential of Buddhist
dialecticians. Nāgārjuna’s realization of the nondual relation between
samsāra and nirvāna and of the impossibility of positively or
negatively predicating existence to either, as well as his analysis of
emptiness (Sk. śūnyatā; Jp. kū 空),11 profoundly shaped the early
6 Thomas J. J. Altizer, The Self-Embodiment of God (New York: Harper &
Row, 1977); reprint, with an introduction by Jacob Neusner, Brown Classics
in Judaica (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1985).
7 Thomas J. J. Altizer, Living the Death of God: A Theological Memoir,
foreword by Mark C. Taylor (Albany: State University of New York Press,
2006), 31.
8 Altizer, Letter 20 to Lissa McCullough (March 9, 2006), in This Silence Must
Now Speak, 80.
9 Thomas J. J. Altizer, Genesis and Apocalypse: A Theological Voyage toward
Authentic Christianity (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1990), 93.
10 For a more critical appraisal, with which I am largely in agreement, see
Janet Gyatso, “Compassion at the Millennium: A Buddhist Salvo for the
Ethics of the Apocalypse,” in Thinking through the Death of God: A Critical
Companion to Thomas J. J. Altizer, ed. Lissa McCullough and Brian Schroeder
(Albany: State University of New York Press, 2004), 147–67.
11 The following abbreviations will be used to designate the etymological
origin of various important Asian terms: Jp. for Japanese; Sk. for Sanskrit.
For the sake of accuracy and consistency, in most cases macrons have been
placed over Japanese long vowels (for example, Dōgen and not Dogen). For
Japanese names and terms, kanji is also noted. An exception has been made
for persons or institutions who use their Japanese names but do not
customarily employ macrons or wish to employ them. In general, Japanese
names will be written in the Japanese order of family name first, except in
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development of Mahāyāna and ultimately established its distinction
from Theravāda Buddhism. Claiming that “the real foundation of the
Madhyamika is the assumption that conceptual thought can establish
no point of contact with reality,”12 Altizer focuses on what he
considers the most crucial dimension of Nāgārjuna’s philosophy,
namely, its nihilism: “This negative dialectic of the Madhyamika has
the ultimate object of destroying conceptual thought. For
Madhyamika dialectic is nihilistic in that it has the purpose of
demonstrating that all intellectual expressions are ‘void’ of reality.”13
On a basic or simple level, the fundamental point of difference
between Buddhism and Christianity, according to Altizer, is that
whereas Buddhism postulates a primordial nothingness, which
renders history and time as illusory, as “contradictory and unreal,”14
apocalyptic or kenotic Christianity posits an actual nothingness made
possible only by the death of God, which results in a complete
historicity and irreversible forward-moving conception of time.
However, this position immediately becomes more complex, as
Altizer qualifies:
It is not that Buddhism is closed to the possibility of a
forward-moving and irreversible historical time, but rather
that Buddhism transcends and negates every possible
identity of history and time. From this point of view, the
pure simultaneity of Buddhist time is a purely negative
simultaneity because rather than conjoining present, past,
and future it knows a pure or an empty time with no
possible concrete temporal dimension or dimensions.15
While Buddhism and Christianity share the standpoint of affirming a
metaphysical totality that rejects any standard understanding of
transcendence, the Mahāyāna conception of śūnyatā is “negative and
positive at once,”16 and Mādhyamika makes impossible any
conception of either an actual beginning or ending. Because
cases where authors of works in English have used the Western order; in
both cases, the family name will be given in small capital letters (for
example, Masao ABE, NISHITANI Keiji).
12 Altizer, Oriental Mysticism and Biblical Eschatology, 135.
13 Ibid., 137. According to Murti, “The dialectic as Śūnyatā is the removal of
the contradictions which our concepts, with their practical or sentimental
bias, have put on reality. It is the freeing of reality of the artificial and
accidental restrictions, and not the denial of reality. Śūnyatā is the negation
of negations; it is thus a re-affirmation of the infinite and inexpressibly
positive character of the Real” (T. R. V. Murti, The Central Philosophy of
Buddhism: A Study of the Mādhyamika System [London: George Allen &
Unwin, 1955], 160; quoted in Altizer, Oriental Mysticism and Biblical
Eschatology, 138).
14 Altizer, Oriental Mysticism and Biblical Eschatology, 138.
15 Thomas J. J. Altizer, “Buddhist Emptiness and the Crucifixion of God,” in
The Emptying God: A Buddhist-Jewish-Christian Conversation, ed. John B.
Cobb Jr. and Christopher Ives (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1990), 76.
16 Thomas J. J. Altizer, History as Apocalypse (Albany: State University of
New York Press, 1985), 192.
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Nāgārjuna’s notion of emptiness “is not and cannot be an actual
beginning, there is not and cannot be an actual ending, so that
nirvana is not the extinction or the blowing out of consciousness, for
it is not an end of any kind, nor even a cessation of act or actuality,
for here there is no beginning or actuality to come to an end, for
nothing has ever happened, and nothing has ever begun.”17
Buddhism then does not permit any admissible conceptions about
reality; therefore, “existence as a category can only be postulated by
intuition and not by thought.”18 Christianity, on the other hand,
which is grounded in the Logos, makes possible the articulation of
the Real, which is immanent and not transcendent to thought. But
despite this fundamental difference, indeed because of it, Mahāyāna
Buddhism and apocalyptic Christianity form a veritable coincidentia
oppositorum, which is what allows the full realization of nihility to
emerge in recent thinking. Altizer acknowledges that Buddhism is
“more profound” and “thus an ultimate challenge” to Christianity
since from “the perspective of Buddhist philosophy we can realize
the shallowness of Christian theology, which even refuses to think
about its own deepest ground, and that despite its endless discussion
of God.”19 According to Altizer—and on this very point his entire
philosophical theology depends—the deepest ground is the
nothingness of Godhead itself. And this is where Buddhism is
“purer” than Christianity. Why? Because Buddhism is “empty of
every definite and actual image and form, and therefore by necessity
is empty of ‘God.’”20 This why compassion, which Altizer equates
with the love of God, is more present in the Buddhist conception of
śūnyatā and in the absence of anything that might be known in the
West as a subjective will.21
Buddhist scholars will certainly object, and with some justification, to
several of Altizer’s contentions about Buddhism, most notably: (1)
the positing of a unified notion of Buddhism, or at least of ancient
Buddhism, that ignores the same complexities and variegated
expressions that one readily finds in Christianity; (2) the view that
Buddhist philosophy is grounded on a view of a primordial
nothingness, contrary to numerous Buddhist sources that assert a
Altizer, Genesis and Apocalypse, 94.
Altizer, Oriental Mysticism and Biblical Eschatology, 138.
19 Altizer, Letter 63 to friends (June 28, 2012), in This Silence Must Now
Speak, 213.
20 Altizer, “Buddhist Emptiness and the Crucifixion of God,” 77–78.
21 Altizer understands Buddhist compassion as “the total absence of the
will, so that it is not and cannot be an acted, for it cannot be present here
and not there, or now and not then; these are distinctions that are dissolved
and erased in the realization of compassion, a realization that also erases
and dissolves every distinction between the subject and the object of
compassion. So it is that the ‘I’ of compassion is purely a ‘not I,’ and not
simply because selfhood is dissolved in the realization of compassion, but
because every center is erased in that realization, and if now the ‘I’ or the
center is everywhere, that is because it’s circumference is nowhere, for now
every distinction between the “I’ and ‘not I’ and the is a race, and that
erasure is the erasure of every distinction whatsoever” (Altizer, Genesis and
Apocalypse, 98).
17
18
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primordial presence; (3) that there is no fundamental distinction
between Buddhist emptiness and nothingness; (4) that the Buddhist
doctrine of emptiness is confused with nihilism (Sk. ucchedavāda), a
matter that Nāgārjuna himself addresses in the Mulamadhyamakārikā;
and (5) that ancient Buddhism is associated with paganism and
therefore cannot account for historical reality at all.22 These are all
critical issues to be addressed and, as stated earlier, it is not within
the purview of this essay to consider them. The status of Buddhism is
complicated in Altizer’s later writing, however, in which he engages
the so-called Kyoto School of comparative religious philosophy.23
Here one finds decidedly different interpretations and extensions of
Buddhist thinking in addition to an active engagement with both
Western philosophy and theology across the entire history of those
ideas that results not only in altered perspectives on Buddhology but
on Christian theology as well, a view that Altizer certainly shares:
“Perhaps nothing is more important in the Kyoto School than the
balance that it apparently has achieved between its Eastern and its
Western, its ancient and its modern, poles. Who could imagine such a
new Christianity?”24
Altizer wrote several essays on the Kyoto School and on prominent
thinkers associated with it, namely, NISHIDA Kitarō, NISHITANI Keiji,
and ABE Masao 阿部正雄.25 Altizer’s mature thinking develops out of
his conversations with them, some of which, in the case of Abe and
Nishitani, occurred on an interpersonal level. While the
abovementioned Kyoto School philosophers often address similar
See Gyatso, “Compassion at the Millennium,” 149–53.
The appellation “Kyoto School,” which appears to have originated
sometime in the early 1930s, refers to approximately two-dozen
philosophers associated with the Kyoto Imperial University and connected
through their association with the principal thinking of NISHIDA Kitarō 西田
幾多郎, TANABE Hajime 田辺元, and NISHITANI Keiji 西谷啓治. For a history
and critical overview of the Kyoto School, see James W. Heisig, Philosophers
of Nothingness: An Essay on the Kyoto School (Honolulu: University of
Hawai‘i Press, 2001); Bret W. Davis, “The Kyoto School,” in The Stanford
Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Edward N. Zalta (2006),
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/kyoto-school/.
24 Altizer, “Buddhist Emptiness and the Crucifixion of God,” 75.
25 See the following essays by Thomas J. J. Altizer: “Emptiness and God,” in
The Religious Philosophy of Nishitani Keiji: Encounter with Emptiness, ed.
Taitetsu UNNO (Berkeley: Asian Humanities Press, 1989), 70–81; “Abe’s
Buddhist Realization of God” (a response to Abe’s rejoinder), BuddhistChristian Studies 13 (1993): 221–22; “Kenosis and Śūnyatā in the
Contemporary Buddhist-Christian Dialogue,” in Masao Abe: A Zen Life of
Dialogue, ed. Donald W. Mitchell (Boston: Charles E. Tuttle, 1998), 151–60;
“Buddha and God,” in Japanese and Continental Philosophy: Conversations
with the Kyoto School, ed. Bret W. Davis, Brian Schroeder, and Jason M.
Wirth (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011), 179–89; “Buddhism
and Christianity: A Radical Christian Viewpoint,” Japanese Religions 9, no. 1
(March 1976): 1–11. For a critical assessment of Altizer’s relation to the
Kyoto School, see Steve Odin, “Kenōsis as a Foundation for BuddhistChristian Dialogue: The Kenotic Buddhology of Nishida and Nishitani of
the Kyoto School in Relation to the Kenotic Christology of Thomas J. J.
Altizer,” The Eastern Buddhist 20, no. 1 (Spring 1987): 34–61.
22
23
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themes, the remaining remarks of the present essay is confined to
Altizer’s dialogue with Nishitani, with special attention to the
philosophy of Nietzsche. “It should not surprise us that Nietzsche
has so deeply fascinated the Kyoto philosophers,” Altizer writes.
“Nietzsche is the Western thinker who finally and despite himself
became most open to Buddhism, and nowhere more so than in his
vision of eternal recurrence, a vision in which beginning and ending
are one and the same…. an event or a present made possible only by
the death of God.”26 The remainder of this essay will take up the
concepts of nihilism,27 eternal recurrence, will to power, and the
death of God in addressing the points where the thinking of Altizer
and Nishitani converge and diverge in the project of developing a
Buddhist-Christian dialogue.
THE PROBLEM OF NIHILISM
Buddhism is an absolute nihilism, according to Altizer, but one that
is liberating and possible only by a deconstruction that goes beyond
everything that has been named as that. Because there is no concept
of, or analogous to, the Godhead (Gottheit) of God (Gott) or the Being
(Sein) of beings (Seiendes) in Buddhism, “from this perspective, our
Western nihilism could become or perhaps already is a Buddhist
nihilism, a nihilism that is truly a ‘deconstruction’ only insofar as it is
an opening to a deeper ground and only insofar as it finally intends
an Absolute Nothingness.”28 In a personal and later published
correspondence with me, Altizer reiterated his firm position that it is
the historical event of the death of God that makes possible
Nietzsche’s thinking and brings forth a uniquely modern nihilism.
“Only then did the West become open to Buddhism, which it
inevitably understood as pure nihilism, as witness Nietzsche himself,
and even if this is a radical distortion, it nonetheless is inseparable
from our new opening to Buddhism.”29 Altizer’s interpretation of
nihilism in Nietzsche is intertwined with the latter’s later recognition
of the close relationship between nihilism and Buddhism, resulting in
a new or second form of Buddhism: “Although Nietzsche could
finally know his own time as the advent of a ‘second Buddhism,’ it is
so only as a pure nihilism, a nihilism which is the consequence of the
death of God.”30 “But as the late Nietzsche came to know so deeply, a
‘new Buddhism’ is now overwhelming the West. This is a purely
nihilistic Buddhism, one strangely parallel with that pure nihilism
Altizer, “Buddhist Emptiness and the Crucifixion of God,” 76–77.
On the historical development of the concept of nihilism, including a
brief treatment of Nishitani’s views, see David Storey, “Nihilism, Nature,
and the Collapse of the Cosmos,” Cosmos and History: The Journal of Natural
and Social Philosophy 7, no. 2 (2011): 6–25.
28 Altizer, “Kenosis and Śūnyatā in the Contemporary Buddhist-Christian
Dialogue,” 157.
29 Altizer, Letter 16 to Brian Schroeder (January 23, 2006), in This Silence
Must Now Speak, 70.
30 Thomas J. J. Altizer, Godhead and the Nothing (Albany: State University of
New Press, 2003), 6. See also Thomas J. J. Altizer, The Contemporary Jesus
(Albany: State University of New Press, 1997), xv.
26
27
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which The Antichrist unveils as the deepest ground of Christianity,
and now and only a nihilism fully incarnate in the world.”31 Altizer
shares Nietzsche’s passion for subversion and finds this same aspect
in Buddhism: “Buddhism does present itself as being subversive or
negative to the Western and Christian mind, and is precisely as such
that it is most attractive and real to us. So it is that it is a postmodern
nihilism that is most open to Buddhism, a nihilism that pervades our
world…”32 What remains to be determined is how this Buddhist
postmodern nihilism differs from Nietzsche’s nihilism and that of
kenotic apocalyptic theology.
Nietzsche’s proclamation of the death of God is a witness to the
crucifixion, the once-and-for-all apocalyptic death of God, according
to Altizer.33 This “greatest recent event”34 announces the ending of an
old totality and the advent of a new one in which metaphysics comes
to an end, and with it every possible mythical or metaphysical
cosmology. This ending is an irreversible event and brings forth a
new existential and ontological chaos and abyss, indeed, the full
onslaught of nihilism. But is the death of God the sole or deepest way
for grasping the problem of nihilism, or does Buddhism offer its own
way? Altizer addresses this question in relation to Nishitani’s
understanding of Nietzsche:
Is a genuine Buddhist selflessness an emptiness or sunyata
that has only been understood in the West by Nietzsche
himself? As I think you know I once had a deep conflict with
Nishitani over Nietzsche’s nihilism, and whether it is an
absolute or destructive and self-destructive nihilism. I was
simply amazed that despite Nishitani’s love of Nietzsche he
could not accept him as an absolute nihilist in anything
approaching its Buddhist sense, but then I suspect that he
was finally persuaded that there can only be a Buddhist
absolute nihilism.35
What is at stake in this debate is the status of time and temporality,
that is, the notion of eternal recurrence. For Altizer, this must be
construed apocalyptically, and indeed this is crucial to his theology,
since now the archaic notion of eternal return is ended as a return to
the primordial pleroma or Godhead, and ended by way of the total
apocalyptic event of God’s death, which first occurs in the crucifixion
of Christ.36 The crucifixion is the completion of the event of God’s
Altizer, Godhead and the Nothing, 132.
Altizer, History as Apocalypse, 3.
33 For a consideration of Nietzsche’s death of God in relation to apocalypse,
see Brian Schroeder, “Apocalypse, Eschatology, and the Death of God,” in
Nietzsche and Levinas: “After the Death of a Certain God,” ed. Bettina Bergo
and Jill Stauffer (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), 232–48.
34 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. with commentary by Walter
Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1974), §343.
35 Thomas J. J. Altizer, unpublished letter to Brian Schroeder, April 9, 2007.
36 On the distinction between eternal return and eternal recurrence with
respect to the death of God, see Brian Schroeder, “Blood and Stone: A
31
32
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kenōsis that begins with the incarnation of Jesus, but such radical
emptying does not occur solely in Christianity. “Buddhism, too, has
embodied a kenotic pleroma, but a pleroma which is a full and total
pleroma precisely in its emptiness, and in its absolute emptiness, an
emptiness which is not ‘other’ than anything else, for this is an
emptiness which is the emptiness of fullness or totality itself.”37
According to Altizer, contrary to many interpretations that
understand the death of God as simply the assertion that such a
being never existed, divine self-emptying is the deepest meaning of
Nietzsche’s pronouncement.
Nishitani, who took seriously the death of God, writes that “the
meaning of self-emptying may be said to be contained within God
himself.… that is to say, the very fact itself of God’s being God
essentially entails the characteristic of ‘having made himself empty.’
With Christ we speak of a deed that has been accomplished; with
God, of an original nature. What is ekkenōsis for the Son is kenōsis for
the Father. In the east, this would be called anātman, or non-ego.”38
But despite Nishitani’s attempt to connect kenōsis with anātman, what
distinguishes the radical Christian interpretation of kenōsis from
Buddhist conceptions, according to Altizer, is that “self-emptying is
the sheer opposite of pure emptiness, and pure opposite if only
because it is pure act, an act which is itself absolute opposition to pure
emptiness, and an act which enacts the absolute ‘other’ of that
emptiness.”39 And yet, if it is the Buddhism of the Kyoto School that
most purely understands an absolute self-emptying as the
self-emptying of the Godhead, could that self-emptying be
an apocalyptic realization of Godhead itself? Western
thinkers commonly understand Buddhism as a backward
movement to a primordial absolute nothingness, but
Buddhist thinkers insist that this is a fundamental
misunderstanding, for in Buddhism there is no distinction at
all between backward and forward, and hence there cannot
possibly be a genuinely backward movement.40
In other words, because there is no absolute and irreversible genesis
in Buddhism, and all things are empty of form, as the
Mahāprajñāpāramitā Sūtra famously teaches, there is no self, not even a
divine one, to enact the kenotic event. Buddhist emptiness, as Altizer
interprets, is continually kenotic in its eternal returning—a
Response to Altizer and Lingis,” New Nietzsche Studies 4, no. 3/4 (2000–
2001): 29–41.
37 Altizer, Genesis and Apocalypse, 95.
38 Keiji NISHITANI, Religion and Nothingness, trans. Jan Van Bragt (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1982), 59. For more on Nishitani’s views on
the kenōsis of God and the ekkenōsis of Christ, see 26, 58, 288 n4.
39 Altizer, Genesis and Apocalypse, 105; emphasis added.
40 Altizer, “Buddha and God,” 187–88
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movement that paradoxically is not a “pure act” because, Nishitani
argues, it is transhistorical.41
Nietzsche understands the relation between the Christian conception
of God and the will to power as purely dichotomous. Nevertheless,
the will to power is only manifestly actual as a historical consequence
of the death of that God whom in The Antichrist Nietzsche discloses
as “the will to nothingness pronounced holy.”42 While one could
think of the will to power as the renewal of a primordial abyss, this is
only possible as a consequence of the death of God, according to
Altizer, which is the reversal of an original genesis that transforms
that death into an actual nothingness. “And it is just in knowing the
actuality of nothingness that we can know a genesis of nothingness, a
genesis or actual beginning that is wholly alien to a Buddhist
nothingness, and so alien to every nothingness which is and only is a
pure emptiness.”43 This actual nothingness is, for Altizer, only
manifest within a biblical horizon, which understands genesis as an
absolute and final event. But that event is itself reversed in God’s
death, which wipes away the whole horizon of meaning and absolute
truth leaving in its wake a total abyss. It is from the perspective of
this abyss that the confrontation with the crisis of nihilism arises.
Altizer was one of the first in the Western world to recognize that it
was the Kyoto School which first realized that what conjoins the East
and the West philosophically is the issue of nihilism; what separates
the two traditions is how they approach and deal with that issue. A
crucial difference is that between a Buddhist conception of time and
the thought of eternal recurrence, which Nietzsche calls “the most
extreme form of nihilism: the nothing (the ‘meaningless’), eternally.
The European form of Buddhism.”44 Altizer makes a bold assertion in
response to this declaration: “In form, Nietzsche’s vision of eternal
recurrence is identical with the Buddhist vision of the Void.”45
Nishitani develops this distinction. Nietzsche’s conception of eternal
recurrence designates an infinite, irreversible, forward historical
movement, but in Buddhism “time is at once circular and
rectilinear.” The ambiguity of time is preserved, Nishitani claims,
only in the Buddhist conception because, unlike in eternal
41 Nishitani, Religion and Nothingness, 213–16, 225. On the concept of the
transhistorical, see Masao ABE, “Will, Śūnyatā, and History,” in The
Religious Philosophy of Nishitani Keiji, ed. Unno, 280–83; Steven Heine,
“History, Transhistory, and Narrative History: A Postmodern View of
Nishitani’s Philosophy of Zen,” Philosophy East and West 44, no. 2 (1994):
251–78; Brian Shūdō Schroeder, “Dancing Through Nothing: Nietzsche, the
Kyoto School, and Transcendence,” Journal of Nietzsche Studies 37 (2009):
54–55.
42 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Antichrist, in The Portable Nietzsche, ed. and trans.
Walter Kaufmann (New York: Viking, 1954), §18.
43 Thomas J. J. Altizer, The Genesis of God: A Theological Genealogy (Louisville:
Westminster John Knox, 1993), 150.
44 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will Power, ed. Walter Kaufmann, trans. Walter
Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Vintage, 1967), §55.
45 Altizer, The Descent into Hell, 211.
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recurrence, “all its time systems are simultaneous,” thus
necessitating the “infinite openness at the bottom of time,”46 an
openness that can only be grasped as and from the standpoint of
emptiness. The question here concerns how to interpret the
temporality of the eternal recurrence, which is for Nietzsche both the
most “terrible”47 and yet potentially liberating48 of thoughts. Only the
affirmation of meaninglessness eternally opens the self to the
standpoint of emptiness, and thus radically transforms the possibility
of nihilism into the possibility of absolute affirmation.49
Nishitani develops a philosophy that engages both Christian
theology and Buddhology. Each proceeds from the “field of nihility”
(Jp. kyomu no ba 虚無の場)50 to advance the relative nihilism of
existential atheism in order to arrive at a fundamentally nontheistic
religious standpoint—what Nishida calls absolute nothingness (Jp.
zettai mu 絶対無) or what Nishitani prefers to term śūnyatā
(emptiness). Nishitani maintains, though, that the notion of absolute
nothingness, or śūnyatā, has never been truly grasped by the Western
philosophical tradition although he acknowledges the advancements
of both Nietzsche and Heidegger on this question. Their respective
interpretations of the nothingness that attends nihilism, however, are
not absolute but are rather relative, in other words, they are concepts
of nothingness relative to the concept of being. According to
Nishitani, both Nietzsche and Heidegger approach the absolute
nothingness of Zen Buddhism philosophically, but “the nihility of
Nishitani, Religion and Nothingness, 219.
Nietzsche, The Will to Power, §55.
48 See André van der Braak, Nietzsche and Zen: Self-Overcoming Without a Self
(Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2011), 114–15.
49 This is developed in Schroeder, “Dancing Through Nothing.”
50 See Nishitani, Religion and Nothingness, 108ff. Nishitani writes: “The
nihilism we are speaking of takes a firm stance on the awareness of the real
experience of nihility at the foundation of ourselves and of all things. It is a
standpoint in which we ourselves become nihility, a standpoint which, to
revert to earlier remarks, can itself be called the ‘realization’ of nihility . . .
the representation of nothingness is not the issue. What is at issue is rather
the nihility we find opening up before us at the ground of the self-existence
when we take a stand there, a nihility that really stretches out like an abyss
over which the existence of the self is held in suspense. The point here is
simply that nihility is always a nihility for self-existence, that is to say, a
nihility that we contact when we posit ourselves on the side of the
‘existence’ of our self-existence. From this it follows that nihility comes to
be represented as something outside of the existence of the self and all
things, as some ‘thing’ absolutely other than existence, some ‘thing’ called
nothingness. . . . The śūnyatā we speak of points to a fundamentally
different viewpoint. Emptiness in the sense of śūnyatā is emptiness only
when it empties itself even at the standpoint that represents it as some
‘thing’ that is emptiness” (ibid., 96). For an analysis of the “field of
nihility,” see Graham Parkes, “Nishitani Keiji: Practicing Philosophy as a
Matter of Life and Death,” in The Oxford Handbook of Japanese Philosophy, ed.
Bret W. Davis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), esp. 473–79.
According to Parkes, for Nishitani the field of nihility is a place of death
rather than life that turns us toward the “field of emptiness” (Jp. kū no ba 空
の場) when we authentically confront our finitude.
46
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Nietzsche’s nihilism should be called a standpoint of relative absolute
nothingness”51 insofar as he remains tied to a standpoint of will.
Commenting on both Nietzsche and Heraclitus, Nishitani writes:
“They do not contain the other-centeredness by which they become
‘empty’ and make all others their master. . . . They cannot be said to
have arrived at the authentic self-centeredness of absolute emptiness
that holds all dharmas in its grip, that, master wherever it is, makes
wherever it is true. However one looks at it, theirs remains a
standpoint of ‘will,’ not the standpoint of sunyata.”52 Only the
mystical thinking of Meister Eckhart and Jakob Böhme, who were
indirect influences on Nietzsche and Heidegger, approaches the
realization of absolute nothingness, or to use theological language,
the Godhead of God expressed as the groundless (Ungrund) or abyss
(Abgrund).53
THE QUESTION OF ETERNAL RECURRENCE
Altizer and Nishitani concur that Nietzsche’s conception of eternal
recurrence is fundamentally different than the eternal return of
mythical religions. Acknowledging that Christianity broke away
from the cyclical time of eternal return and instantiated a sense of
historicity, Nishitani writes, “in Christianity consciousness of the
once-and-for-all nature and historicity of time was established and
the recurrent nature of time in mythical religions was discarded.
Along with that, an eschatology of recurrence in mythical religion
shifted over to an eschatology within history . . . [however,] this
consciousness [is] problematic as it is intertwined with . . . a
representation of the end of history.”54 Nishitani maintains that
Christianity’s transhistorical understanding of eschatology ultimately
undermines any realization of an actual historicity because it also
imputes to the mythical (transhistorical) end of time a sense of
historicity. Where Nishitani and Altizer break from each other is on
the question of whether Nietzsche’s conception of eternal recurrence,
which avoids such eschatological transhistoricity in its “ecstatic
transcendence,”55 is able to affirm its endlessness and immanent goal
of the Übermensch, as Nishitani writes, “only at the cost of history’s
inability to discharge its full historicity.”
Nishitani, Religion and Nothingness, 66.
See ibid., 67, 265.
53 See Nishitani, Religion and Nothingness, 67. What stands out in Eckhart for
Nishitani is that nothingness is accorded a salvific and not an ontological
function. On Eckhart’s relationship to Zen, see UEDA Shizuteru,
“‘Nothingness’ in Meister Eckhart and Zen Buddhism with Particular
Reference to the Borderlands of Philosophy and Theology,” trans. James W.
Heisig, in The Buddha Eye: An Anthology of the Kyoto School and Its
Contemporaries, rev. ed., ed. Frederick Franck, with foreword by Joan
Stambaugh (Bloomington: World Wisdom, 2004), 157–69; originally
published as The Buddha Eye: An Anthology of the Kyoto School (New York:
Crossroad, 1982).
54 Nishitani, Religion and Nothingness, 209.
55 Ibid., 33, 55, 93, 171, 211–12, 232, 245–46. On this topic, see Schroeder,
“Dancing Through Nothing,” 53–54, 59–61.
51
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Therefore the final question amounts to this: How is it
possible for what we call history to carry its historicity
through to its last and final transhistorical base without
thereby being terminated as history at the hands of the
transhistorical? In other words: How is it possible for history
to become radically historical by virtue of its historicity
being carried through to a transhistorical ground? The
question leads us inevitably, I think, to the relationship
between history and the standpoint of śūnyatā. It remains to
be shown how.56
The issue at hand concerns the status of time and history. Whereas in
apocalyptic or kenotic theology eternity empties itself into the totality
of historical spacetime, in Buddhism eternity and time go “hand-inhand,” says Nishitani, and so is it possible to speak of the
transhistorical without necessarily negating dialectically any and all
conceptions of actual history. Nishitani advances the Mādhyamika
standpoint on the impossibility of positing and therefore of knowing
either an absolute beginning or end:
On the one hand, it must be that dharma is transcendent of
time. On the other hand, time has an aspect susceptible to
constant transition, for it always renews itself and
continually manifests transient ups and downs—that is,
phases of prosperity and decline. By contrast, dharma
expresses that which goes beyond time, or is transhistorical.
But Buddhism tries to conceive of these three aspects as
connected into one, in the form of the Buddha-dharmasangha. They constitute the three pillars of Buddhism. Given
the standpoint of these three doctrines united into one, we
can say that the characteristic feature of the Buddhist
position lies in this: that superhistory and history, eternity
and time, go hand in hand. Therefore, when we take history
into account, we must always conceive of it as involving
within itself such moments as eternity and superhistory.
Conversely, it seems to be necessary to conceive of eternity
and superhistory as involving within itself time and
history.57
In short, Nishitani rejects Altizer’s insistence that to conceive an
actual nothingness as opposed to a primordial nothingness
necessitates thinking an actual historicity that in turn demands
thinking an absolute once-and-for-all genesis and ending, which is
the very hallmark of apocalypticism. “That history has a beginning
and end must be flatly denied from the viewpoint of historical
consciousness,” says Nishitani. “How did things get to this point? In
Nishitani, Religion and Nothingness, 213.
Keiji NISHITANI, On Buddhism, trans. Seisaku YAMAMOTO and Robert E.
Carter, with an introduction by Robert E. Carter, foreword by Jan Van
Bragt (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2006), 48–49.
56
57
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reply, we cannot but point to a view of God that conceived of the
divine as a personal being possessed of a conscious ‘will.’”58 To use
Heideggerian language, Altizer’s insistence on the absolute nihilism
of the death of God is, on Nishitani’s reading here, bound to an ontotheological metaphysics, a position that Altizer would strongly
contest.
The “unbounded meaninglessness” of the nihilism in Nietzsche’s
eternal recurrence, Nishitani writes, is “overcome through a
turnabout wherein the standpoint of the Will to Power is forged out
of this meaninglessness and the world becomes the epiphany of this
Will” and so coming “closest to the Buddhist standpoint of
śūnyatā.”59 But coming close is not the same as actually reaching
there. The eternal recurrence “does not possess the bottomlessness of
the true moment. Hence, it cannot signify the point where something
truly new can take place.”60 Framing the matter in a different way,
the “dropping off of body and mind”61 of which Zen master Dōgen
(on whom Nishitani and others in the Kyoto School have devoted
considerable attention) speaks is impossible in the prophet of the
eternal recurrence Zarathustra’s “moment” of the Augenblick since it
stands against the background of eternal recurrence and not at the
standpoint of śūnyatā. “At any rate,” writes Nishitani, “the return to
the standpoint of will to power takes a person of strong will who can
stand in existence in the world without ‘purpose, unity, or truth,’ a
world of becoming where everything constantly shifts, flows,
parishes or is born—in short, one who can stand up to the absolute
nihility of the ‘the death of God.’”62 In other words, although
Nietzsche can substitute the will to power for the will of God in
Christianity, his conception of time is unable to avoid a regression to
a mythical eternal return because it remains attached to a notion of
will that is bound to the self-centeredness that characterizes all
Nishitani, Religion and Nothingness, 212.
Ibid., 215.
60 Ibid., 215–16.
61 The famous phrase “dropping off (or casting aside) mind and body” (Jp.
shinjin datsuraku 身心脱落) is found in several of Dōgen’s writings: Dōgen,
“Universally Recommended Instructions for Zazen [Fukanzazengi 普勧坐禅
儀],” in Soto School Scriptures for Daily Services and Practice, ed. and trans.
Carl Bielefeldt and T. Griffith Foulk, with Rev. Taigen Leighton and Rev.
Shohaku OKUMURA (Tokyo: Sotoshu Shumucho and the Soto Zen Text
Project, 2001), 81; reprinted in Engaging Dōgen’s Zen: The Philosophy of
Practice as Awakening, ed. Tetsuzen Jason M. With, Brian Shūdō Schroeder,
and Kanpū Bret W. Davis (Somerville, MA: Wisdom Publications, 2016),
195–98; Dōgen, Treasury of the True Dharma Eye: Zen Master Dogen’s Shobo
Genzo, vol. 1, “Actualizing the Fundamental Point” (Genjō kōan 現成公按),
ed. Kazuaki TANAHASHI (Boston: Shambhala, 2010), 30; Dōgen, A Primer of
Sōtō Zen: A Translation of Dōgen’s “Shōbōgenzō Zuimonki,” trans. Reihō
MASUNAGA (Honolulu: East-West Center Press, 1971), 47, 49; Dōgen,
Shōbōgenzō-zuimonki [正法眼藏隨聞記]: Sayings of Eihei Dōgen Zenji recorded
by Koun Ejō, trans. Shohaku OKUMURA (Kyoto: Kyoto Soto-Zen Center,
1987).
62 NISHITANI Keiji, The Self-Overcoming of Nihilism, trans. Graham Parkes with
Setsuko AIHARA (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990), 47.
58
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Western forms of religion. Yet despite Nietzsche’s “turnabout” on
nihilism, Nishitani writes:
Insofar as the Will to Power comes down in my analysis to a
worldview of Eternal Recurrence, it is my view that the
meaning it gives to history as its last and final ground, on
the field of ecstatic transcendence, is only based on a
negative pole. Yet we must not overlook the positive pole in
Nietzsche’s thought. Within the perspective available from
the standpoint of the Will to Power, all meaning in history
that had been transformed into meaninglessness in nihility
was tentatively restored in an affirmative manner in
conjunction with the reaffirmation of all “world
interpretations” as attempts of the Will to Power to posit
values. The standpoint of the Will to Power and the Eternal
Recurrence is a standpoint of the Great Affirmation, which
could only appear after a nihilistic Great Negation.63
On this last point Altizer and Nishitani stand in agreement with
Nietzsche: a yes-saying to life is only possible through a no-saying.
“And whoever must be a creator in good and evil: verily, he must
first be an annihilator and shatter values. Thus does the highest evil
belong to the highest good: but this latter is the creative.—”64 Yet
there is a certain type of nihilism in Nietzsche, according to
Nishitani, that is not completely vanquished inasmuch as time is
confined to the negative pole of historical time. In other words,
Nietzsche strives for the release of time from the nihility of historical
temporality. In this sense, Nishitani maintains, Nietzsche’s thinking
remains confined to the standpoint of a relative absolute nihilism.
The thought of eternal recurrence is inseparable from a thinking of
the origin or beginning, according to Altizer, so much so that one
may rightly question whether Altizer’s theology is in bondage to an
absolute genesis. But from his perspective the issue is, would it be
possible to escape that bondage if one accepts the death of God? It is
vitally important, for Altizer, even more than it is for Nishitani, to
establish a radical distinction between a primordial eternal return
and Nietzsche’s eternal recurrence. A primordial return forecloses an
absolute genesis whereas eternal recurrence forecloses an eternal
genesis, and does so precisely because it is an embodiment of the
death of God, which is the horizon of modernity alone. The death of
God is the apocalyptic event par excellence and as such brings forth
an irreversible nihilism. The calling forth of the will to power is a
nihilistic act since now good and evil are not only inseparable from
each other but also indistinguishable from one another. This is true,
Nishitani, Religion and Nothingness, 212.
Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. with notes by Graham
Parkes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 2.12 “On SelfOvercoming,” 100; also, Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecco Homo, trans. Walter
Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1967), “Why I Am a Destiny,” 327.
63
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in Altizer’s view, for all opposites or contraries, for example, truth
and falsehood, inner and outer, I and not-I, subject and object, etc.
WILL TO POWER AND THE DEATH OF GOD
Altizer follows Nishitani’s interpretation that Nietzsche’s will to
power is what traditional Christianity has understood as the will of
God. Each is not only an absolute will but rather the absolute will;
and even if Christianity understood it as an absolutely transcendent
will and Nietzsche as a wholly immanent will, each is an absolute
origin itself. Moreover, from Altizer’s perspective, both conceptions
designate an absolute power that assaults and breaks every
individual and interior will, or every individual will that is open to
its presence. This is tantamount to the Buddhist realization of nonego
or no-Self (Sk. anātman; Jp. muga 無我), the fundamental standpoint
of śūnyatā, which is to say in other words, of the dependent
origination of all things (Sk. pratītyasamutpāda). This “standpoint” (Jp.
tachiba 立場), which is Nishitani’s preferred term as opposed to
“ground” (Grund), is where Buddhism comes closest in Altizer’s
view to grasping both the genesis and death of God. “Buddhist
thinking begins with the question of origin, the origin of pain and
suffering, which is here the question of the origin of selfhood or the
ego, and if that very thinking necessarily leads to the dissolution of
any possible selfhood, that is the dissolution of any possible origin
and just thereby a dissolution of anything whatsoever that the West
can know as either God or the Godhead.”65 As has been noted by
others, Nietzsche’s construal of the death of God is inseparable from
the death of the subject or self,66 but in the nihilistic unfolding of
Western metaphysics it is the death of God that entails the death of
the subject, whereas in Buddhism the dissolution of the ego-self—the
“great death” (Jp. daishi 大死)67—is what makes possible the
realization of the emptiness of any and all conceptions of the
absolute.
Because Buddhism does not postulate either the beginning or end of
history, according to Altizer, this
can even lead Nishitani to interpret Nietzsche’s Eternal
Recurrence as the realization of a Buddhist Great Death
([Religion and Nothingness] 231). But Nishitani does concede
that Nietzsche’s Eternal Recurrence and Will to Power were
not able fully to realize a Buddhist meaning of the historicity
of historical things, and this because of the very presence of
Altizer, Godhead and the Nothing, 180.
See Mark C. Taylor, Erring: A Postmodern A/Theology (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1983), esp. 34–51.
67 On the Buddhist notion of the great death with respect to the views of
Eihei Dōgen and the Kyoto School philosophers Tanabe and Nishitani, see
Brian Shūdō Schroeder, “Recurrence and the Great Death,” in
Phenomenology and Japanese Philosophy, ed. Shigeru TAGUCHI and Andrea
Altobrando (Cham, Switzerland: Springer, 2020), 245–62.
65
66
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some “thing” called “will.” Nishitani also notes that the Will
to Power in Nietzsche and the Will of God in Christianity are
inseparable, for they are inseparably connected with a
Western and Christian understanding of time, eternity, and
history.68
Correlative with the dissolution of the ego-self is a nonwilling69 (what
Meister Eckhart, an important figure for Nishitani and others in the
Kyoto School, terms Gelassenheit) that overcomes self-willing and
makes possible the existential realization of the interconnectedness of
all beings and dharmas, which is the Buddha-nature of all things.
How is it possible to speak of the advent of the will to power? In
general, Nietzsche opposes biblical apocalyptic language, but from
Altizer’s perspective this masks a critical problem: Not only is
apocalyptic language the only nihilistic language in the ancient
world, but Franz Overbeck, one of Nietzsche’s closest friends and
someone whose thinking had a significant impact, is the scholar who
discovered the original apocalyptic ground of Christianity. Altizer
considers Nietzsche part of the prophetic tradition, and surmises that
perhaps Nietzsche reacts violently against apocalyptic language
because it is so close to his own, indeed, perhaps because it is the
historical source of his own language and the only ancient language
paralleling his own. Since it is only through the irreversible
apocalyptic advent of nihilism in the death of God that the will to
power is manifest as such, and even if the will to power is eternity
itself, it is only historically actual as a consequence of the death of
God, which is not only a historical event, according to Altizer, but
also the ultimate consequence of everything that can be known as
history. Nishitani also makes note of this: “The standpoint of the Will
to Power, which represented a conversion from nihilism, came also
to be essentially bound up with the problem of history….”70 The
tension or problem Altizer locates in Nietzsche, then, is that despite
his refusal of biblical apocalyptic language, Nietzsche’s declaration of
the death of God is meaningless apart from the apocalyptic
dimension of that historical event. Moreover, declares Altizer, “if the
death of God is the ultimate historical event for Nietzsche, it is the
absolute dividing line between our historical past and our historical
future, and therefore is the very axis of historical time itself.”71 In
other words—and here is where Altizer and Buddhism (as he
understands it) part ways—only within the horizon of Christianity is
the historical actuality of the nihility of existence made manifest since
Altizer, “Emptiness and God,” 74.
See Bret W. Davis, Heidegger and the Will: On the Way to Gelassenheit
(Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2007), esp. 14–20, 282–83. On
the will more generally as it relates to Nietzsche and Buddhism, also see
Bret W. Davis, “Zen After Zarathustra: The Problem of the Will in the
Confrontation Between Nietzsche and Buddhism,” Journal of Nietzsche
Studies 28 (2004): 89–138.
70 Nishitani, Religion and Nothingness, 212.
71 Altizer, “Buddhist Emptiness and the Crucifixion of God,” 77.
68
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the apocalyptic death of God is the irreversible historical affirmation
of that nihility.
The advent of the death of God is the occurrence of an absolute
origin, according to Altizer. It is therefore impossible to return to an
earlier horizon and to knowledge of an eternal genesis of God if one
takes seriously the death of God, or at least that death as Nietzsche
via Altizer proclaims it. This is a death that realizes the actuality of an
absolute abyss that is alien not only to the thinking of Spinoza and
Hegel but to Buddhism as well.
Only in Nietzsche and in Mahayana Buddhism can one
discover an actual philosophical understanding of abyss,
and understanding or a thinking which is here a dissolution
or reversal of thinking itself, or of every thinking which is
not a pure and total thinking of abyss. Buddhism knows this
abyss as Sunya, that absolute void or emptiness which is the
dialectically negative form of nirvana or Sunyata, whereas
Nietzsche knows an absolute abyss as the consequence of
the death of God. In both Nietzsche and Buddhism this
abyss is an absolute nothingness, and an absolute
nothingness that is absolutely negative and absolutely
positive simultaneously. But whereas Nietzsche can know
absolute abyss as the Will to Power or as apocalyptic Eternal
Recurrence, Mahayana Buddhism knows it as absolute
emptiness or an absolute quiescence. If these are truly
opposite understandings of absolute abyss, this could
illuminate a uniquely Western or a uniquely modern
transfiguration, a transfiguration inseparable from an
absolute act or an absolute actuality.72
Altizer’s understanding of absolute abyss is an eternally recurring
chaos, but only as the consequence of the irreversible beginning of that
chaos, which is the death of God. In other words, an actual
nothingness that has an irreversible beginning is unmanifest and
unreal apart from the biblical Creator, and thereby is inseparable
from the very genesis of that creator, whose own beginning is
inseparable from the beginning of an actual, that is, historical
nothingness, as opposed to the empty nothingness of Buddhism.
Actual nothingness becomes totality itself with the death of God,
according to Altizer, resulting in a nothingness that Nietzsche knows
as the will to power. As the very reversal of the Christian God, the
will to power is the naming of God, but now as the death of God, and
so is identified with the will of God, since God kenotically wills its
own demise. This will of God is now taken up by the individual
human will, and just as God’s self-emptying overcomes and
annihilates nihilism on the metaphysical plane, so too on the
existential-ontological plane does this occur in the affirmation of time
as eternal recurrence. Here Altizer and Nishitani stand on the same
72
Altizer, Godhead and the Nothing, 143.
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ground. As “the turning point of history,” the teaching of eternal
recurrence “must also be the turning point,” writes Nishitani,
“reached internally by who reflects on himself within history. In
other words, it must be a consummation of nihilism within the self
and at the same time an overcoming of nihilism.”73 The death of God
creates an absolute abyss now manifest that never was before, and is
so only as the consequence of an origin or genesis that has never
before occurred. Such an origin could never occur, on Altizer’s
account, as the consequence of an eternal genesis, which is an eternal
return to Godhead or a Buddhist śūnyatā itself. Such an origin could
occur, however, as the consequence of the irreversible and absolute
genesis of God. And this is an origin necessarily culminating in its
own apocalyptic ending, since there cannot be an actual death of God
apart from an actual beginning of God.
73
Nishitani, The Self-Overcoming of Nihilism, 64.
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