with a pupil of Eduard von Hartmann; sojourning at Berlin and Heidelberg,
he studied with Harnack, Windelband, and Troeltsch. So far we have an
eclectic mixture of Western vitalism, historicist theology, and Neo-Kantianism.
Like Nishida, Hatano began as a historian of Western philosophy, suspended
among its various positions before going on to develop his independent stance.
More important, it was not just the content of European philosophy that was
coming through but the creative energy of the European networks. The Kyoto
school was not merely linked with figures such as Windelband, but transformed
those links in just the way that contemporary networks in European philoso-
phy were transforming.The Stimulus of Exporting Ideas to the West: The Kyoto School
The distinctiveness of Japanese philosophy in the newly autonomous university
structure also involves a key indigenous element. After generations of Confu-
cian dominance, Buddhism suddenly made a comeback. This can have had
nothing to do with events in the surrounding society; the Kyoto school fol-
lowed close on the time when Buddhism was being attacked, sometimes vio-
lently, and the school system (which at its elementary levels had been heavily
staffed with Buddhist priests) was being secularized. The key is rather in the
intellectual network. We see here an instance of a phenomenon which we find
in the history of Islamic and Byzantine philosophy as well: the exporting of
ideas to a receptive foreign audience stimulates further production of just those
ideas. In this case, the receptive foreign audience consisted of the European
scholars exploring the history of Asian religions. In the network surrounding
Nishida and the Kyoto school were links to just those European scholars who
were most interested in what the Japanese had to offer in the realm of
Buddhism. Nishida’s teacher Nanjo Bunyu was a monk who had been sent by
the Pure Land sect to Oxford to study Sanskrit with Max Müller; returning in
1885, Nanjo began teaching Indian philosophy at Tokyo. In turn, Nanjo’s pupil
D. T. Suzuki came to Chicago for the World’s Parliament of religions in 1893,
organized by Paul Carus. Suzuki stayed as Carus’ assistant during 1897–1908,
meeting William James (just then in his phase of exploring religious experi-
ence), and translating Sanskrit and Japanese Buddhist texts. Suzuki eventually
became famous by promoting Zen in the West through his books of 1927–1938
(Kitagawa, 1987: 320–323).
The revitalization of philosophical Buddhism and more specifically of Zen
took place as these networks crystallized in the autonomous Japanese univer-
sity. This is hardly what one would have expected from the flow of ideas or
the continuation of past intellectual trajectories. Zen had not had an important
thinker since Hakuin in the early 1700s. Confucianism after eight generations374 • (^) Intellectual Communities: Asian Paths