In this process we lose our grip on things and our knowledge of reality. The
unity of things (being of things) falls apart and what remains is a bottomless
nihility which is reflected in everything around us. A world collapses. It does
not matter at all how gigantic the mountain was or how healthy the man or
how stable the personality: the whole of existence is challenged.
(Nishitani 1982:122)Nothing is clear anymore. Everything becomes uncertain and unknown. The other,
too, with whom we have become friends and whom we trust, disappears out of sight.
We no more know whence our closest friend comes and whither he is going than we
know where we ourselves come from and where we are headed. At this home-ground,
a friend remains originally and essentially a stranger, an ‘unknown’ (Nishitani
1982:100). The experience of nothingness places the person in an impossible,
unbearable position.
Nishitani begins to describe the next phase by recommending the phase of doubt.
Confusion and doubt, resulting from the confrontation with death and nihility, are
experienced as painful and fearful, but in fact the doubt is a sign of growing clarity.
Confusion is placed in the context of insight, insight into life which is not separated
from death.
GROWING INSIGHT
Nishitani emphasizes that in the experience of doubt a light begins to glimmer for
the first time. The certainty of life is challenged. This is excellent because life is not
only life but life and death. The two cannot be seen apart from each other.
This kind of double exposure is the true vision of reality. In the same sense,
the aspect of life and the aspect of death are equally real, and reality is that
which appears now as life and now as death. It is both life and death, and at
the same time it is neither life nor death. It is what we have to call the
non-duality of life and death.
(Nishitani 1982:52)This seeing together of life and death has enormous consequences for the ‘self’ because
it is outside the self itself. With the coming together of life and death Nishitani does
not suppose a mixture wherein life and death mingle with each other, and life is not
life and death is not death. On the contrary, life is life and death is death and (they)
are both present in everything which exists (Nishitani 1982:93).
Nishitani uses a specific expression to indicate this simultaneous vision of life and
death: existence is life-sive-death. The essence of this term is in sive.^8 Life-sive-death
must not be taken to mean that ‘life is sometimes life and sometimes death.’ Sive has
to be regarded as the middle point. Existence is at once life and death—life-sive-death
—and each being is being-sive-not-being. This is the reality of things: the true view
of reality. Seeing things as being and not-being is seeing things as they truly are. For
NISHITANI AND DIALECTICAL BEHAVIOR THERAPY 189