"The Flower Opens in the Sheer Drop"
by Notto R. Thelle
There was always someone who was taken by surprise when the shabby old man shuffled into the circle of thinkers and philosophers. His long undervest poked out from his sleeve. He carried some slices of bread in a plastic bag and occasionally broke off a piece and ate it. He was a chain-smoker. When he began to speak, he groped carefully for the right words. He was not in a hurry; he gave his thoughts time to take shape. He was not eloquent, and his formulations were not particularly elegant. He posed a series of questions that slowly homed in on the subject, and some people wondered what he was trying to say.
After a while, however, something happened to those who listened to him. They were caught in the magic of wondering as he drew them into his own world and filled the room with his presence. This was no longer a closed room, for the walls vanished and the wind began to blow. He was not giving an academic course in philosophy--he was taking his hearers with him on a philosophical journey into reality. And this was highly demanding, because he expected something of his fellow travelers: they had to take responsibility for their thoughts, and they themselves had to encounter reality. The conversation lasted for several hours, but no one left the group.
The shabby old man was Keiji Nishitani, who died at the age of ninety on November 24, 1990. He was active to the very last as one of Japan's leading philosophers, the most prominent representative of the so-called Kyoto School. I met him in Kyoto in 1972, while I was studying at the Buddhist Otani University, and I had the great privilege in subsequent years of getting to know him in seminars and lectures, formal dialogue encounters, and informal conversations. Few persons have influenced my thinking more profoundly.
Nishitani was a traveler. His basic attitude to life was shaped by Zen Buddhism, and there is no doubt that it was Buddhist concepts that best expressed his ideas; but his travels took him into other worlds too. He studied the Bible, the church fathers, and the great thinkers of the Christian church with a quiet passion, and he taught Western philosophy throughout his long life. His own existential questions were shaped by the existentialist philosophy elaborated by Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Heidegger--questions about meaning and meaninglessness, and the problem of nothingness. He took these questions along on his travels and wove them into his own experience of life. One could call him a Socratic Buddhist, one who sought answers and got other people to see by means of the questions he put to them.
When I asked Nishitani to sign one of his books, toward the end of his life, he wrote a poetic greeting that expressed his attempts to discover meaning:
The flower
opens
in the sheer drop
This was not just poetry: it was dearly bought existential wisdom, a profession of faith on the part of a man who had walked along the rim of the sheer drop, had seen the abyss yawning below him, and had discovered that it was precisely there that life's meaning could be seen. "The flower opens in the sheer drop."
Nishitani's travels began with the despairing experience of meaninglessness. In the few glimpses he has given of his own life, he describes his youth as a period without hope, when he was sucked down into the experience of nothingness and hopelessness. He saw his decision to study philosophy as a religious matter, a question of life and death. "In the little story of my soul, this decision was a kind of conversion," he has written. Right up to our last conversations, he maintained his conviction that a true understanding of life is possible only when one is confronted by the abyss of nothingness.
Nishitani was a man of faith. He held that our search for meaning is not a hopeless groping in the dark; existence is borne up by a power that holds all things together, and this power drives us toward the abyss because it knows that it is there we shall catch sight of a new world.
Although it was Buddhism that formed the basic pattern in Nishitani's thinking, he did not wish to be called a Buddhist. Whenever this happened, he felt somewhat embarrassed, and claimed with a perplexed smile that he was in fact searching for something more fundamental, something that lay beyond or beneath both Buddhism and Christianity. The essential point was our shared humanity. What does it mean to be a human being? This is the riddle to which all religions seek the answer. Since Buddhism and Christianity possess treasures of insight, they can help us understand. But Nishitani did not think that any religion had discovered the definitive answers.
Two or three thousand years amount to only a small fragment of history. Must this not mean that religion has an infinite potential to penetrate more and more deeply into the riddles of life? This was the question Nishitani pondered. We must continue our search with an open mind. We must stop hanging on self-consciously to our own principles. We must struggle with life's problems in a radical openness.
Nishitani was most reluctant to let himself be called a Buddhist, but it was even clearer that he did not wish to be a Christian. If pressed, he could say with a smile that he was en route to faith; it would be unthinkable for him to end up as a Christian. But when he spoke of Christ, his words expressed his love for the great Master whose friend and disciple he was. He had a special preference for biblical motifs, to which he returned again and again. He spoke of God's selfless and unreserved love, about the incarnation as God's "self-emptying," and about Jesus, who won life only by giving his life for others. He spoke with warmth and respect even of the idea of a personal God, and he affirmed that belief in God as a person has given special dimensions to our human conscience and love, raising the personality to new heights.
At the same time, however, he was unsparing in his criticism of Christian thinking and Western philosophy, both of which were held captive in the structures of their ego. The faith in God that the church has inherited has imprisoned it in a universe that will disintegrate in the encounter with science, nihilism, and atheism, he argued. The world does not turn on the axis of a relationship between God and the human person! We must reject belief in God as an absolute deity who rules the world from outside. The attempt to make the human person the center of creation leads to a distorted relationship to reality. What is needed here is nothing less than a revolution.
Nishitani was not a man who raised his voice often, but on this subject he used strong words. He said that Christianity, and most religions, are facing a catastrophic change comparable to what happened millennia ago when the dry land emerged from the sea and many marine animals had to adapt to life on land. Christians must get used to living in a world where there is no longer any God "out there," and where it is no longer possible to understand the human person as the absolute center of activity and thought.
Although he admired Christianity, and not least Christ himself, Nishitani was a severe critic who asserted that there is no future for Christianity in its present form. The solution is not to abandon the faith but to let something new grow out of the old. Perhaps he envisaged a future Christianity that had been transformed by the encounter with Buddhism?
It is somewhat surprising that a philosopher who was so critical of Christianity should have exercised such a strong attraction on Christians. Apart from his exceptional personality and the inherent power of his thinking, the reason for this attractiveness was quite simply his love for Christ. I shall never forget the time I asked what he thought about what Christian mystics call the "flame of love" in our relationship to God. He sat in silent thought for a while and then replied quietly, to the astonishment of the Buddhists who were present: "Surely we all need something of that flame."
His criticism came from outside the church, but it was born of his endeavor to penetrate the riddles of life. As a traveler, Nishitani made countless fellow travelers his friends. He showed them new landscapes and taught them to see, to ask, and to wonder. I never heard him speak of his "disciples," but he had many more than he knew--and a good number of them are Christians.
Now he has laid down his earthly pilgrim's staff, now he is in new landscapes. We still hear the wind blow.
This essay is a translation from the author's 1991 book in Norwegian whose title translates as "Who Can Stop the Wind? Travels in the Borderland between East and West."
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