Keiji Nishitani

In the religiosity of Zen Buddhism, demythologization of the mythical and existentialization of the scientific belong to one and the same process.

— Keiji Nishitani

Previous ideals and values undermine themselves and collapse into nothing precisely as a result of the effort to make them consummate and exhaustive.

— Keiji Nishitani

Through the sincerity cultivated by Christian morality the values and ideals established by that morality itself are revealed as fictions.

— Keiji Nishitani

Ironically, it was not in his nihilistic view of Buddhism but in such ideas as amor fati and the Dionysian as the overcoming of nihilism that Nietzsche came closest to Buddhism, and especially to Mahāyāna.

— Keiji Nishitani

From the perspective of Buddhism, Sartre’s notion of Existence, according to which one must create oneself continually in order to maintain oneself within nothing, remains a standpoint of attachment to the self – indeed, the most profound form of this attachment – and as such is caught in the self-contradiction this implies.

— Keiji Nishitani

A crisis is taking place in the contemporary world in a variety of forms, cutting across the realms of culture, ethics, politics, and so forth. At the ground of these problems is the fact that the essence of being human has turned into a question mark for humanity itself.

— Keiji Nishitani

People give names to persons and things, and then suppose that if they know the names, they know that which the names refer to.

— Keiji Nishitani