of dominance had been disowned by the reform of the school system, but it
was not Buddhism but Shinto that was on the rise in the Meiji public sphere.
The Kyoto school threw out the materialist positivism of the early wave of
reformers; drawing selectively on Christian, Idealist, and Neo-Kantian imports,
it transformed them creatively into a new position. Nishida Kitaro was the star
who emerged from the intersection of these networks. As a pupil of Nanjo
Bunyu, he was a grandpupil of Max Müller; he was trained under Inoue
Tetsujiro, whose search for a national intellectual identity Nishida contined;
and he was a friend of Hatano, and a close friend of D. T. Suzuki since their
secondary school days.^51
As in all creativity, Nishida transformed the ingredients transmitted through
these networks, sometimes by direct opposition. In 1911 he created an “ori-
ental logic” as an explicit basis for oriental culture, to parallel the Western
cultural foundation provided by Greek logic. Nishida’s “logic of field” or “logic
of place” combined German Neo-Kantian logic with the Mahayana nothing-
ness of Nagarjuna. Nishida found his creative slot by working out the simi-
larities and contrasts of Zen metaphysics with the logics of Aristotle, Leibniz,
Kant, and Hegel; Nishida’s later works distinguish his “place of nothingness”
from the noumena of Leibniz and Kant. Against the popularity of neo-Kan-
tianism at Kyoto and Tokyo universities, Nishida rejected the distinctions of
value and being, meaning and fact; unity is derived from the self-consciousness
exemplified in Zen meditation, as the internal union of meaning and reflection,
the self-generation of concrete experience.^52 Nishida was the first in the world
to produce a high-level confrontation of sophisticated ideas from Asian and
Greek-European traditions. By contrast, his European counterparts—Deussen,
Müller, Carus—acted only as translators and importers, not creative synthe-
sizers of these lineages.
Nishida’s pupils and followers found their creative space by following
similar network combinations. A number of them sought out the leading
German philosophers—both the Neo-Kantians and their network successors,
the phenomenologists. Tanabe Hajime studied at Berlin, and at Freiburg with
Husserl; his work proceeded from a philosophy of mathematics along the lines
of Neo-Kantianism to a synthesis of Hegel, Husserl, and Heidegger into a
religious philosophy combining Buddhism with the Christian doctrine of love.
Tanabe bridged Nishida’s “oriental logic” to both nationalist particularism
and universalism, propounding a “logic of species” (i.e., the nation) mediat-
ing between individual and mankind. Watsuji Tetsuro, a friend of Tanabe,
brought into play the primary contribution within Japanese intellectual history,
in 1926 reviving philosophical interest in Dogen after centuries of neglect. Like
others of the Kyoto school, Watsuji focused on the relations among Nietzsche,
Kierkegaard, and Buddhism. In retrospect we may be inclined to take this as
Innovation through Conservatism: Japan • 375