Two Arrows Zen

Two Arrows Zen Two Arrows Zen, 21 G Street, Salt Lake City, Utah 84103. Please visit our website. https://twoarrowszen.org We are not open for public events during the pandemic.

We are a meditation center in the Zen Buddhist tradition offering daily meditation M-F, classes, retreats, and programs. Two Arrows Zen, Artspace Suite 155, 230 South 500 West, downtown Salt Lake City.

JOHN CAGE: John Cage was born September 5, 1912, in Los Angeles. By the time of his death in 1992, he had become one of ...
09/05/2026

JOHN CAGE: John Cage was born September 5, 1912, in Los Angeles. By the time of his death in 1992, he had become one of the most influential experimental composers of the twentieth century, expanding the possibilities of music through percussion, prepared piano, electronics, chance operations, unconventional notation, performance, writing and, most famously, silence.

For students of Zen, Cage is especially interesting because his relationship with Buddhism was both substantial and unconventional. He encountered Zen through books and through the teachings of Daisetz Teitaro Suzuki, whose lectures he attended in New York. Cage also read Buddhist texts, including teachings associated with Huang-po, and returned repeatedly to the traditional Ten Oxherding Pictures. Another important influence was the Indian philosopher and art historian Ananda K. Coomaraswamy, whose writing helped Cage think about art as something other than personal self-expression.

Cage was careful, however, not to present himself as a conventional Zen practitioner. He acknowledged that he did not practice seated meditation and resisted explanations that reduced his work to Zen alone. What interested him more broadly was the possibility of loosening attachment to personal preference. Questions about who decides which sounds are beautiful, important or musical became central to his work.

Beginning around 1950, Cage increasingly used chance procedures, especially the Chinese I Ching, to make compositional decisions he might otherwise have made according to taste. Chance was not simply randomness for its own sake. It allowed Cage to interrupt his own habits and preferences while still creating the conditions in which a work could unfold. In this sense, composition became partly an exercise in relinquishing control.

That approach became inseparable from Cage’s best-known work, 4′33″. The piece was first performed by pianist David Tudor at the Maverick Concert Hall in Woodstock, New York, on August 29, 1952. Tudor sat at the piano through three timed movements without intentionally sounding the instrument. Yet the performance was not actually silent. Sounds from the room, the audience and the environment remained present. Cage’s interest was increasingly directed not toward silence as an absence of sound, but toward the act of listening itself.

His well-known experience in an anechoic chamber at Harvard reinforced this idea. The room was designed to eliminate external sound, yet Cage reported hearing sounds produced by his own body. The experience contributed to his conclusion that complete silence was effectively impossible. There was always something occurring, even when nothing had been intentionally composed for the listener to hear.

This is one of the places where Cage’s work has a clear resonance with Zen. A quiet zendo is never entirely quiet. There is breathing, traffic, birds, a heating system, physical discomfort, coughing and the movement of thought. The mind may classify these things as distractions, but they are also part of the actual conditions of the moment. Zen practice does not necessarily require those conditions to disappear. It asks the practitioner to examine the tendency to divide experience immediately into what is wanted and unwanted, meaningful and meaningless, pleasant and unpleasant.

Seen in this way, 4′33″ is more than the familiar joke about a composition in which nothing happens. A great deal happens. What changes is the framework through which the listener encounters it. In conventional music, melody, rhythm and harmony organize attention. Cage removes that structure and allows the room itself to become audible. A cough, shifting chair, wind outside the building or the listener’s own impatience can become part of the experience.

This is also where Cage comes closest to an idea familiar in Zen: awareness does not need to be manufactured so much as noticed. A bell in a zendo does not create awareness; it calls attention to what is already present. Zazen does not create the world. It provides a setting in which the practitioner can observe how quickly the mind sorts the world into categories, including music and noise, silence and sound.

Cage was not alone among twentieth-century musicians in finding Buddhist practice or philosophy useful. Herbie Hancock has practiced Nichiren Buddhism since the early 1970s and has spoken about its relationship to openness, improvisation and his approach to music. Tina Turner also practiced Nichiren Buddhism for decades and described chanting as central to the transformation of her life. Laurie Anderson has spoken extensively about meditation and Buddhist practice as part of her artistic and personal life. None of these artists produced something that could simply be classified as “Buddhist music.” The influence appears instead in questions of attention, discipline, identity, control and the relationship between performer and experience.

Cage’s contribution was to make listening itself one of the central subjects of his art. His work repeatedly asked what happens when sounds are no longer required to justify themselves according to conventional ideas of beauty, order or importance. 4′33″ remains his clearest expression of that question. It suggests that what we commonly call silence is not empty at all. The world continues to occur, whether or not we have decided that what is happening deserves our attention.

For Cage, the discovery was not silence. It was everything else.

READING & MORE INFORMATION

John Cage Trust — About John Cage
https://johncage.org/about

John Cage — Autobiographical Statement
https://johncage.org/cage-autobiographical-statement

John Cage — Silence: Lectures and Writings
https://www.weslpress.org/9780819571779/silence/

Kay Larson — Where the Heart Beats: John Cage, Zen Buddhism, and the Inner Life of Artists
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/304454/where-the-heart-beats-by-kay-larson/

Museum of Modern Art — There Will Never Be Silence: Scoring John Cage’s 4′33″
https://www.moma.org/calendar/exhibitions/1386

WATCH / LISTEN

John Cage’s 4′33″ — performance by William Marx
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JTEFKFiXSx4

Music Made of Listening: John Cage and 4′33″ — Gresham College
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ItEntABdofc

More than three hundred poems survive under the name Han Shan, meaning “Cold Mountain.” They have been read for centurie...
09/04/2026

More than three hundred poems survive under the name Han Shan, meaning “Cold Mountain.” They have been read for centuries in China and Japan and, during the twentieth century, became some of the most widely translated Chinese Buddhist poetry in the English-speaking world.

The person behind them is considerably harder to identify.

Han Shan was probably not the poet’s personal name. It refers to the mountain retreat in the Tiantai region of eastern China with which he became associated. His actual name and dates are unknown, and scholars disagree about when the poems were composed and whether they can all have been written by a single person. Robert G. Henricks’s complete scholarly edition specifically treats the dating, authorship and biography of Han Shan as unresolved historical problems. (SUNY Press)

The traditional account describes a ragged hermit living around Cold Mountain and periodically appearing at nearby Guoqing Temple. He is associated with two other legendary figures, Shide and Fenggan, and supposedly left poems written on rocks, trees and walls. Later Buddhist tradition identified Han Shan and Shide with the bodhisattvas Mañjuśrī and Samantabhadra. In Japan the pair became known as Kanzan and Jittoku and became established subjects of Zen literature and painting.

The poems themselves contain Buddhist, Daoist and other strands of Chinese thought. Some describe solitude, poverty, mountains, aging and everyday life; others address Buddhist practice, impermanence, attachment and the workings of the mind. Whatever the biography of their original author or authors, Han Shan eventually became firmly established within the Chan and later Zen literary traditions. Modern scholarship consequently distinguishes between the uncertain historical author and the much more clearly documented literary and religious figure that developed around the poems. (SUNY Press)

The history of Han Shan in English adds another layer.

The earliest English translation currently identified by researchers appeared not in the 1950s, but in 1933. Henry H. Hart included a single Han Shan poem, Chengbei Zhongjia Weng, in The Hundred Names: A Short Introduction to the Study of Chinese Poetry with Illustrative Translations. Hart rendered the poem about an elderly host whose former guests abandon him after his death in colloquial English. Research into Han Shan’s American reception identifies Hart’s version as the earliest English translation so far located. (Zhejiang Province Government)

Four years later, in 1937, Japanese scholar Tetsuzo Okada included six Han Shan poems in his English-language Chinese and Sino-Japanese Poems. Neither Hart nor Okada appears to have produced much immediate interest in Han Shan among general English-language readers. (Zhejiang Province Government)

That changed in 1954, when the British sinologist Arthur Waley published “27 Poems by Han-shan” in Encounter. Waley was already one of the major English translators of Chinese and Japanese literature, and his twenty-seven poems constituted the first substantial presentation of Han Shan available to a broad English-language literary readership. (Terebess)

Then came Gary Snyder.

While studying Chinese at the University of California, Berkeley, Snyder began translating Han Shan in 1955 under the guidance of Chinese literature scholar Chen Shih-hsiang. Snyder selected twenty-four poems from the much larger corpus. They appeared as “Cold Mountain Poems” in the Evergreen Review in 1958 and were later incorporated into Riprap and Cold Mountain Poems. (eNotes)

Snyder’s translations became especially significant because they crossed from Chinese literary translation into the developing literature of the Beat generation. Snyder did not attempt a representative or complete edition: he selected twenty-four poems from more than three hundred. Scholars studying the translations have consequently examined the extent to which Snyder’s selection helped shape a particular American Han Shan—the mountain recluse, Buddhist outsider and poet removed from conventional society. (KCI)

Jack Kerouac gave that Han Shan an even larger audience. Snyder became the model for Japhy Ryder in Kerouac’s 1958 novel The Dharma Bums. In the novel, Ryder is shown translating and discussing Han Shan with Kerouac’s fictional counterpart, Ray Smith. The connection appears before the novel even begins: Kerouac dedicated The Dharma Bums simply “to Han Shan.” (Faded Page)

English translation continued well beyond the Beats.

In 1962, Burton Watson published Cold Mountain: 100 Poems by the T’ang Poet Han-shan. Watson’s hundred-poem selection offered English readers a substantially larger portion of the collection than either Waley or Snyder had translated. It was first published by Grove Press and later reissued by Columbia University Press. (Google Books)

In 1983, Red Pine, the pen name of Bill Porter, published The Collected Songs of Cold Mountain through Copper Canyon Press. It was the first complete translation of Han Shan’s poems into English and presented the Chinese alongside the English translation. Later editions added extensive notes and material concerning Shide and Fenggan. (Copper Canyon Press)

In 1990, scholar Robert G. Henricks published The Poetry of Han-shan: A Complete, Annotated Translation of Cold Mountain. Henricks translated 311 poems and devoted substantial attention to the textual problems surrounding Han Shan: dating, authorship, biography, Buddhist terminology and the internal evidence contained in the poems themselves. (SUNY Press)

Other translators continued to approach the collection differently. J. P. Seaton placed Han Shan alongside Shide and Wang Fan-chih in Cold Mountain Poems, emphasizing the broader tradition of unconventional Chinese poetry. Paul Rouzer produced a complete scholarly translation of the works attributed to Han Shan, Shide and Fenggan, presenting Chinese and English together.

Then, in 2018, Kazuaki Tanahashi and Peter Levitt published The Complete Cold Mountain. Their edition includes the entire traditional corpus and proposes that the collection represents not one Han Shan but three different poets from different historical periods. (Shambhala Pubs)

The history of these translations shows why identifying a single English-language “Han Shan” is difficult. Hart translated one poem. Okada translated six. Snyder chose twenty-four. Waley chose twenty-seven. Watson chose one hundred. Red Pine, Henricks, Rouzer, and Tanahashi and Levitt undertook complete or substantially complete editions. Each worked at a different moment, for different readers, and with different assumptions about the history and authorship of the collection.

There may never be a definitive biography of the person who first wrote poems under the name Cold Mountain.

The history of the poems themselves is much easier to follow: from medieval China into the Chan tradition, from China into Japanese Zen culture, and eventually through generations of translators into twentieth- and twenty-first-century English literature.

Gary Snyder and Jack Kerouac form one important chapter in that history.

They were far from the first.

HAN SHAN IN ENGLISH

Henry H. Hart — The Hundred Names (1933)
The earliest English translation of a Han Shan poem currently identified by researchers.

https://archive.org/search?query=Henry+H+Hart+The+Hundred+Names

Tetsuzo Okada — Chinese and Sino-Japanese Poems (1937)
Includes six Han Shan poems.

https://search.worldcat.org/search?q=%22Chinese+and+Sino-Japanese+Poems%22+Okada

Arthur Waley — “27 Poems by Han-shan” (1954)
Published in the September 1954 issue of Encounter.

https://www.unz.com/PDF/PERIODICAL/Encounter-1954sep/5-11/

Gary Snyder — Cold Mountain Poems
Twenty-four translations originally published in Evergreen Review in 1958.

https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/675190/cold-mountain-poems-by-gary-snyder/

Burton Watson — Cold Mountain: 100 Poems by the T’ang Poet Han-shan (1962)

https://cup.columbia.edu/book/cold-mountain/9780231034500/

Red Pine — The Collected Songs of Cold Mountain (1983)
The first complete English translation.

https://www.coppercanyonpress.org/books/the-collected-songs-of-cold-mountain-by-han-shan-cold-mountain-tr-bill-porter-red-pine/

Robert G. Henricks — The Poetry of Han-shan: A Complete, Annotated Translation of Cold Mountain (1990)

https://sunypress.edu/Books/T/The-Poetry-of-Han-shan

J. P. Seaton — Cold Mountain Poems: Zen Poems of Han Shan, Shih Te, and Wang Fan-chih

https://www.shambhala.com/cold-mountain-poems-9781611806984.html

Paul Rouzer — The Poetry of Hanshan (Cold Mountain), Shide, and Fenggan

https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/9781501501913/html

Kazuaki Tanahashi and Peter Levitt — The Complete Cold Mountain (2018)

https://www.shambhala.com/the-complete-cold-mountain.html

September 2, 2026 marks the 80th birthday of Peter Levitt, the American-born Canadian poet, translator, editor, and Zen ...
09/03/2026

September 2, 2026 marks the 80th birthday of Peter Levitt, the American-born Canadian poet, translator, editor, and Zen teacher whose work has helped shape the way several important Buddhist texts are read in contemporary English.

Levitt was born in New York City on September 2, 1946. He began practicing Zen in San Francisco in 1967, initially encountering the tradition through Zen literature and sitting largely on his own. From 1983 until 2003, he studied with Jakusho Kwong Roshi, a Dharma successor of Shunryu Suzuki Roshi. Levitt was later authorized to teach in the Suzuki Roshi lineage by Zoketsu Norman Fischer and received Preceptor Transmission in the White Plum Asanga from Egyoku Nakao Roshi.

After moving to Salt Spring Island in British Columbia in 2000, Levitt founded the Salt Spring Zen Circle in 2001. The community developed as a lay Zen sangha connected to the Soto tradition and the lineage of Suzuki Roshi.

Levitt’s most significant contribution to Zen may be his role in bringing Eihei Dōgen’s writings into accessible contemporary English. Working with translator and calligrapher Kazuaki Tanahashi, Levitt served as associate editor of Treasury of the True Dharma Eye: Zen Master Dogen’s Shobo Genzo. The project brought together more than thirty Zen teachers, writers, and translators and represented decades of work on one of the central texts of Japanese Soto Zen. Tanahashi has credited Levitt’s repeated review of the complete manuscript with helping establish the translation’s consistency and clarity.

Levitt and Tanahashi then created The Essential Dogen, selecting passages from across Dōgen’s writings to provide a more manageable entry into his thought. Levitt described the book as a kind of “portal” into Dōgen for readers who might find the complete Shōbōgenzō difficult to approach.

His contribution to Western Zen is broader than Dōgen. Levitt edited Thich Nhat Hanh’s The Heart of Understanding and his teacher Jakusho Kwong’s No Beginning, No End. With Tanahashi he translated The Complete Cold Mountain, the poetry attributed to the Chinese hermit Hanshan, as well as Blossom Awakening, the poetry of the Japanese Buddhist poet Saigyō. With Rebecca Nie, he translated Yin Mountain: The Immortal Poetry of Three Daoist Women.

Levitt also played a role in a less widely known change in North American Zen practice. In response to a student asking why traditional Zen lineage documents contained no women, Levitt began researching historical female Buddhist ancestors. Working with the support of Norman Fischer and drawing on the scholarship of others, he helped develop a women’s ancestor lineage paper that was presented alongside the traditional lineage document during a 2007 jukai ceremony at Salt Spring. The work contributed to the broader effort that eventually produced a standardized women-ancestors document within North American Soto Zen.

Poetry has remained the other major strand of Levitt’s life. He has published numerous volumes of poetry and prose and received a Lannan Literary Award for Poetry in 1989. Rather than treating literature and Zen as unrelated careers, much of his work has occupied the territory where translation, poetry, and Buddhist practice meet.

Today Levitt continues to live on Salt Spring Island, British Columbia, with his wife, poet Shirley Graham. In May 2023, he transferred lay entrustment to Judy Daylen and Simon Rompré, providing for the continuation of the Salt Spring Zen Circle beyond its founder. He has nevertheless remained active as a teacher and writer. As recently as 2026, Levitt was teaching with Upaya Zen Center in a program devoted to Hanshan and the relationship between poetry and Zen practice.

More than five decades after beginning zazen and poetry at roughly the same time, Levitt once summarized the continuity between the two simply:

“Still sitting. Still writing. Still laughing.”

Further Reading

Salt Spring Zen Circle — Peter Levitt
https://saltspringzencircle.org/teacher/

San Francisco Zen Center — Eihei Peter Levitt
https://www.sfzc.org/teachers/eihei-peter-levitt

Lay Zen Teachers Association — Peter Levitt
https://www.lzta.org/peter-levitt

San Francisco Zen Center — A Walk with Dogen: An Interview with Kazuaki Tanahashi and Peter Levitt
https://blogs.sfzc.org/blog/2013/06/10/the-essential-dogen-interview/

Upaya Zen Center — Peter Levitt
https://www.upaya.org/person/sensei-peter-levitt/

The flooding in Nepal has caused widespread destruction, damaging roads, bridges, homes, and essential infrastructure an...
08/29/2026

The flooding in Nepal has caused widespread destruction, damaging roads, bridges, homes, and essential infrastructure and leaving communities facing profound loss and uncertainty.

Images from the affected regions convey the extraordinary force of the flooding, but behind those images are individuals and families whose lives have been disrupted — people searching for loved ones, survivors in need of shelter and medical care, and communities working under difficult conditions to provide rescue, relief, and support.

Two Arrows Zen holds the people of Nepal in compassion and offers metta:

May those who are in danger be safe.

May those who are missing be found.

May those who are injured receive care.

May those who are grieving be surrounded by compassion.

May those who have lost homes and livelihoods find shelter and support.

May rescue workers, medical teams, volunteers, neighbors, and all those providing assistance be protected and sustained.

May those who are frightened find refuge.

May all beings affected by this disaster be free from suffering.

May all beings know peace.

For those wishing to offer material assistance, the following organizations and funds are supporting relief efforts in Nepal:

Government of Nepal — Prime Minister’s Disaster Relief Fund
https://pmdrf.nchl.com.np/

Nepal Red Cross Society
https://donation.nrcs.org/donate

UNICEF — Nepal Flood Emergency
https://www.unicef.org/emergencies/nepal-flood

There are moments when words are necessarily limited. What remains possible is attention, compassion, generosity, and practical support.

May the people of Nepal receive the care and assistance they need.

May suffering be relieved.

August 26, 1940, marks the Birthday of Shōdō Harada Roshi. He became one of the prominent contemporary teachers of Rinza...
08/27/2026

August 26, 1940, marks the Birthday of Shōdō Harada Roshi. He became one of the prominent contemporary teachers of Rinzai Zen and is the abbot of Sōgen-ji in Okayama.

Although he was raised in a temple family, Harada did not initially intend to become a monk. While still a student, he encountered Yamada Mumon Roshi, one of the leading Rinzai teachers of the 20th century. Harada later described that meeting as decisive. He went on to study at Hanazono University in Kyoto and then entered monastic training under Mumon at Shōfuku-ji in Kobe.

Harada trained there for approximately twenty years in the traditional Rinzai system, which included zazen, kōan practice, sanzen, work practice, chanting, and intensive sesshin. He later received formal recognition from Mumon and was sent to Sōgen-ji, a historic Rinzai monastery in Okayama whose formal training hall had been inactive for many years.

At Sōgen-ji, Harada reestablished intensive monastic training and gradually opened the monastery to international practitioners. This became one of the distinctive features of his teaching career. Students from Europe, North America, and elsewhere were able to participate in traditional Japanese Rinzai practice without necessarily entering the Japanese temple-priest system.

Harada also began leading sesshin outside Japan. These communities eventually became associated with One Drop Zen, named after the traditional expression “Sōgen’s One Drop of Water.” The phrase refers to the transmission of the Dharma from one person to another and is linked with a story preserved at Sōgen-ji concerning the value of even a single drop of water.

Harada’s teaching remains closely aligned with traditional Rinzai practice. His instruction emphasizes zazen, kōan study, sesshin, breath practice, samādhi, and direct realization. He has also taught methods of abdominal breathing and concentration associated with the Rinzai tradition and with Hakuin Zenji.

His published works in English include Morning Dewdrops of the Mind, The Path to Bodhidharma, Moon by the Window, and Not One Single Thing. His calligraphy and written commentaries frequently draw on traditional Zen sayings, kōans, and classical Buddhist texts.

Harada’s work has contributed to the transmission of Rinzai Zen outside Japan while maintaining a strong connection to traditional monastic forms. Sōgen-ji continues to function as an international training monastery, and students trained under Harada have established practice communities in several countries.

On August 26, 2026, Shōdō Harada Roshi turns 86.

Reading List

One Drop Zen — Shōdō Harada Roshi and lineage
https://onedropzen.net/lineage

One Drop Zen — official site
https://onedropzen.net/

One Drop Zen — teachings and texts
https://www.onedropzen.org/teachings/texts/

Shōdō Harada Roshi, The Path to Bodhidharma
https://search.worldcat.org/title/The-path-to-Bodhidharma-%3A-the-teachings-of-Shodo-Harada-Roshi/oclc/43615614

Shōdō Harada Roshi, Morning Dewdrops of the Mind
https://books.google.com/books/about/Morning_Dewdrops_of_the_Mind.html?id=86uvSe58DD0C

“Sōgen’s One Drop of Water” — One Drop Zen
https://onedropzen.net/uploads/sogensonedropofwater.pdf

Thank You Dolly Parton …..
08/26/2026

Thank You Dolly Parton …..

NIETZSCHE, ZEN, AND THE PROBLEM OF NIHILISMFriedrich Nietzsche died on August 25, 1900, at the age of fifty-five. His st...
08/25/2026

NIETZSCHE, ZEN, AND THE PROBLEM OF NIHILISM

Friedrich Nietzsche died on August 25, 1900, at the age of fifty-five. His statement that “God is dead” has become one of the most widely cited phrases in modern philosophy, but its significance extends beyond a rejection of religious belief. Nietzsche used the phrase to describe a historical and cultural crisis in which traditional European sources of moral authority and metaphysical certainty were losing their persuasive force.

Nietzsche regarded Christianity as one of the principal structures through which European culture had understood morality, purpose, truth, and human destiny. By the nineteenth century, developments in science, historical criticism, and philosophy had weakened confidence in many traditional religious claims. Nietzsche argued that the erosion of these foundations created the possibility of nihilism: a condition in which inherited values lose their authority without being replaced by an equally compelling framework of meaning.

Much of Nietzsche’s later philosophy can be read as an attempt to respond to this problem. Concepts such as self-overcoming, amor fati—the love of one’s fate—and eternal recurrence are connected to his effort to formulate an affirmation of life that does not depend upon a transcendent or otherworldly source of value. Nietzsche’s project therefore concerns not only the critique of religion, but also the problem of how human beings might live after the decline of inherited metaphysical certainties.

This concern has created an important point of comparison between Nietzsche and Buddhist philosophy, particularly in later encounters between European philosophy and Japanese Zen thought.

Nietzsche was not a Zen Buddhist, and his philosophy should not be treated as a form of Buddhism. Nevertheless, both Nietzschean philosophy and Buddhist thought address questions concerning fixed identity, permanence, attachment to conceptual systems, and the foundations upon which human beings construct meaning. Their responses to these questions, however, differ substantially.

A central concept in Mahayana Buddhism is śūnyatā, usually translated as emptiness. Emptiness does not mean that phenomena do not exist. Rather, it refers to the absence of independent, permanent, self-sufficient essence. Phenomena arise through causes and conditions and exist in relation to other phenomena. This principle is closely associated with the Buddhist teaching of dependent origination.

The distinction between emptiness and nihilism is therefore important. Nihilism concerns the loss or negation of meaning, value, or metaphysical foundation. Buddhist emptiness concerns the mode in which phenomena exist: dependently, relationally, and without permanent self-nature.

In simplified terms, nihilism may be associated with the conclusion that nothing possesses ultimate meaning, whereas Buddhist emptiness denies that anything possesses independent existence.

These positions are not equivalent.

This distinction can be particularly relevant for Western students of Buddhism whose intellectual background has been shaped by Christian concepts. Christianity encompasses a wide range of theological traditions, but Western religious thought has often included ideas such as God as creator, an enduring soul, divine purpose, salvation, and eternal existence. Buddhist concepts such as anātman or no-self, emptiness, impermanence, and “nothing to attain” emerge from a substantially different philosophical framework.

As a result, Buddhist teachings can sometimes be interpreted through categories inherited from Christian theology. The doctrine of no-self, for example, can be misunderstood as a claim that persons do not exist. In classical Buddhist thought, however, anātman denies the existence of a permanent, independent, unchanging self. It does not deny the conventional existence of persons.

Similarly, emptiness is not a doctrine of nonexistence. A phenomenon such as a flower exists conventionally, but its existence depends upon soil, water, sunlight, biological processes, time, and numerous other conditions. The flower is therefore described as empty of independent existence rather than nonexistent.

The same analysis is applied to human beings. Persons arise through biological, psychological, social, cultural, and environmental conditions. Buddhist analysis therefore treats the self as conditioned and relational rather than as an independent and permanent entity.

The relationship between Nietzschean nihilism and Buddhist emptiness became especially important in twentieth-century Japanese philosophy through the work of Keiji Nish*tani (1900–1990).

Nish*tani was a major representative of the Kyoto School, a group of Japanese philosophers who brought Buddhist thought, particularly Zen, into sustained conversation with European philosophy. Nietzsche was one of the central Western thinkers in Nish*tani’s work, particularly because of Nietzsche’s analysis of nihilism.

Nish*tani argued that nihilism could not simply be overcome by returning to earlier religious or metaphysical certainties. Instead, he treated nihilism as a historical and existential condition that had to be examined fully. In Religion and Nothingness, he described a movement through the standpoints of being, nihility, and emptiness.

For Nish*tani, nihility emerges when previously accepted foundations of identity and meaning lose their authority. At this level, things can appear to lack any ultimate ground or significance. Nish*tani regarded Nietzsche as one of the Western philosophers who confronted this condition most directly.

Nish*tani nevertheless distinguished nihilism from the Buddhist standpoint of emptiness. The standpoint of emptiness does not replace lost foundations with another metaphysical substance. Instead, it challenges the assumption that phenomena require an independent, permanent foundation in order to exist.

From this perspective, emptiness is not an underlying “nothing” beneath the world. It describes the relational and conditioned character of reality itself.

Nish*tani’s philosophical work was also shaped by his engagement with Christianity, especially Christian mysticism and the writings of Meister Eckhart. The Kyoto School consequently became an important site of dialogue among Zen Buddhism, European philosophy, and Christian theology. This dialogue did not depend upon treating the traditions as identical, but rather upon examining how each addressed questions of selfhood, nothingness, transcendence, suffering, and ultimate reality.

The distinction between nihilism and emptiness also helps clarify several expressions commonly encountered in Zen literature:

No self.
Nothing to attain.
Emptiness.
Mu.

Taken outside their doctrinal and practical contexts, such expressions can appear to advocate a philosophy of negation. Within Zen and Mahayana Buddhism, however, they function within a broader critique of attachment to fixed concepts and independent selfhood.

Buddhist philosophers also warned against treating emptiness itself as an absolute doctrine. Nāgārjuna’s Madhyamaka philosophy rejects both the assertion of permanent independent existence and the opposite claim of complete nonexistence. Emptiness therefore functions as part of a “middle way” that avoids both substantialism and nihilism.

Zen practice applies these philosophical concerns experientially. Rather than asking practitioners simply to accept propositions about emptiness or no-self, Zen traditions generally emphasize direct investigation of experience, impermanence, attachment, and the construction of identity.

Nietzsche and Zen therefore intersect around a shared problem without arriving at the same conclusion. Nietzsche examined the consequences of the collapse of inherited metaphysical and moral foundations and sought forms of life-affirmation beyond them. Zen Buddhism examines attachment to permanent identity and independent existence and interprets emptiness through dependent origination and non-self.

The relationship between the two became particularly important through Nish*tani and the Kyoto School, where European nihilism and Mahayana emptiness were placed into sustained philosophical dialogue.

Their similarity lies less in shared doctrine than in the seriousness with which both traditions examine what remains when familiar assumptions about self, permanence, and meaning are called into question.

READING LIST

Friedrich Nietzsche — Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/nietzsche/

Keiji Nish*tani — Religion and Nothingness
https://www.ucpress.edu/books/religion-and-nothingness/paper

Keiji Nish*tani — The Self-Overcoming of Nihilism
https://sunypress.edu/Books/T/The-Self-Overcoming-of-Nihilism

The Kyoto School — Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/kyoto-school/

Nāgārjuna — Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/nagarjuna/

Chan Buddhism — Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/buddhism-chan/

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84103

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