Reading Nishitani. I cannot remember ever before reading someone who aroused in me a sense of awe at his insight and at the startling freshness of his way of seeing things. Perhaps I should not be surprised having been brought up on the Greco-Roman tradition and this is the first time I have tried to come to grips with an Eastern philosophy. What I have read on Hinduism and Buddhism did not prepare me although they make it easier for me to understand Nishitani’s background and where he is coming from.
He spends some time discussing the concept of creation out of nothing; an idea long familiar to us Westerners but always seen, at least by me, as referring, and applying, more to God’s power than to what he created. Nishitani emphasises that if the cosmos is created out of nothing then nothing is at the heart of being. It is just a simple shift of the gaze away from God and onto what he created, but the implications are enormous. Suddenly, reality, formerly so solid and substantial, is seen to be hollow, froth, a chimera without substance drifting in a void.
I have never before considered the meaning of nothing. When I began to realise that the volume of solid matter in us was minuscule compared to the volume of empty space, I thought that at least the matter was real and it was solid. Then when I discovered that protons and neutrons were composed of quarks and that quarks were bundles of energy rather than solid stuff, and that these bundles were constantly popping into and out of existence, that was only cause for wonder. At least the quantum vacuum, from which everything seems to emerge, was another dimension seething with energy, and that, at least, was something. The cosmos had a foundation, something substantial, even if it was in another dimension. However, the idea that at the root of our being there is nothing, that sends shivers down the spine. Pascal looked up into the vastness of the starry sky and said, ‘Ces espaces infinie m’effrai.’ I feel a similar emotion, a terrifying sense of vertigo. I feel that I am in a dream, that this is all that reality is, a dream, and that there is nothing to wake up to. Time, like a relentless gale, blows the ragged shreds of our existence away from us. We try to hang on to them but in seizing one we let go of another. The wind is too fast and too strong and our life is blown away in tatters.