SOURCE: "The Range of Nishida's Early Religious Thought: Zen no kenkyu," in Philosophy East and West, Vol. XIX, No. 4, October, 1969, pp. 409-21.

In the following essay, Dilworth examines Nishida's contributions to modern religious philosophy in Japan, which eventually led to the founding of the Kyoto School.

The intellectual career of Nishida Kitaro, generally regarded as Japan's foremost modern philosopher, 1 grew out of his early Zen experience and his philosophical interest in the question of religious experience. The efforts of many Japanese thinkers who, indebted to Nishida, have contributed to the movement of "philosophy of religion" in modern Japan are illustrative of this central orientation in his own thought. This movement has its roots in the wider spiritual, particularly Buddhist, heritage of Japanese tradition, and even in modern times can be thought to antedate Nishida.² Nevertheless, probably the first philosophically original assimilation of Eastern and Western religious ideas in...