Ueda Shizuteru

Key ideas

Being in a twofold world

The self lives first in the historical world of everyday life, a horizon shaped by language. That horizon in turn rests in an “empty-expanse” (kokū), a place of absolute nothingness that enfolds the everyday world and grounds the individual’s radical freedom.

A self that is not a self

The ego has to be negated completely before the true self can come to be. Dying to itself, it stands as a “non-ego”, at once in the world and beyond it, which is how Ueda understood Nishitani’s “self that is not a self”.

At the limits of language

What lies beyond language is not a mystical realm to dwell in, but is met at the limits of language, where it both tears through and mends our horizons of meaning. Remaining open to that silence frees us to speak and act with more freedom and responsibility.

Eckhart and Zen

Ueda found the return, through self-negation, to a wellspring of existence that is “empty and free” in Meister Eckhart, and in a still purer form in Zen, from which he took the word kokū for emptiness.