Early Nishida Kitarō's Philosophy of Religion and Its Background

From the Study of the Newly Discovered Lecture Notes on Religion

Abstract

This paper clarifies early Nishida Kitarō's philosophy of religion, referring to his Lecture Notes on Religion, a text that was recently discovered and published as a separate volume of his complete works.

In Nishida's view, individual things arise by self-division and development from the original unity of “pure experience.” Nishida looks for “God” in the ultimate unity of pure experience. From this standpoint, Nishida evaluates diverse discourses about religion and finally shows sympathy for mysticism. In the Lecture Notes on Religion, we can clearly see this attitude of Nishida through his examination of Western studies on religion and history of thought.

This text also enables us to reveal the background of another thesis Nishida posited about religion. In his first published work, An Inquiry into the Good, Nishida claimed “pantheism.” Referring to the Lecture Notes on Religion, we can now understand that Nishida was trying to defend Buddhism, which was regarded as pantheistic by some Western researchers.

Hence, as a “Western philosopher” in Japan, Nishida read Western literatures extensively and sought to criticize them from within to establish an original philosophy of religion that appreciates Buddhism.