The standpoint at the Kitarō Nishida’s philosophy has an extremely strong religious color, especially in relation to Buddhism. That is truly Eastern form of thought, i.e. ‘holistic monism,’which is of a different nature than the Western form, especially with regards to the dualism characteristic of the Latin Western tradition. This monism describes a transcendentally single principle which, while preserving to the end its transcendence, develops itself by arising within itself, is a logic which transforms all things from within, and is a whole from which all origination of development is derived. In other words, we can say that this principle is a logic of ‘substance(tǐ)and function(yòng). It should also be noted, however, that the ‘transcendent unity’of this holistic monism, while we can say that it is transcendent, is not something externally transcendent. In this sense it can be contrasted to that which is featured by the Latin tradition of Western thought in its assumption of an external, personal, singular, divinity which stands outside of that which it transcends. The Eastern transcendent unity of which I speak is, to the utmost, an ‘internal transcendence.’ However, Nishida’s philosophy has inexhaustible depths to offer. We can see this depth in his notion of “oppositional correspondence(gyaku-taiō)”emphasized in his later years. What Nishida tried to teach via his logic of oppositional correspondence is that “the self is itself insofar as it transcends itself.” To put this in other words, we can say that the self which turns its back to God is, just as it is, enveloped within God’s love, or that the self full of desires which cannot cleanse itself of its sin, is, just as it is, receiving the salvation of divine mercy. The paradoxical situation which Nishida describes is that while the individual self is separate in relation to the absolute self, that individual self remains, at the same time and just as it is, unified with the absolute self in deep reality. In short, Nishida’s logic is none other than a “logic of immanence and transcendence.” While transcendence remains utterly within the absolute Other, it is precisely there that the relative existent being is something utterly finite. While there is an absolute division between these two, in the depths they are unified. The finite relative self, in the depths of itself, finds ‘transcendence,’and it is here that such a kind of perspective opens towards the absolute other. This problem of the ‘transcendental other’ at the root of the relation between self and self constitutes the centre of Nishida’s thought.
