SOURCE: "Views and Reviews: The Diary of a Zen Layman, The Philosopher Nishida Kitaro," in The Eastern Buddhist, Vol. XIV, No. 2, Autumn, 1981, pp. 121-31.

In the following essay, Masumi discusses elements of Zen practice as evidenced in Nishida's early diaries.

Nishida Kitaro was born in 1870 in a village in the region of Kanazawa on the Japan Sea. He was to become the most important philosopher of modern Japan. Whether one agrees or not with his philosophical principles, the future of Japanese philosophy must take account of Nishida's world of thought as its starting point.

Before he wrote his first work, A Study of Good (1911), he had practiced Zen for decades. Obviously this zazen discipline greatly influenced the formation of both his personality and his thought. He began Zen practice at Kencho-ji and Enkaku-ji in Kamakura when he was twenty-three and a student at Tokyo University. Suzuki Daisetz had...