 Nishida—who could hardly be accused of underestimating what Japan had to learn from Western philosophy—also spoke at times in very general terms of Eastern nothingness in contrast with Western being. In his essay, “The Types of Culture of the Classical Periods of East and West Seen from a Metaphysical Perspective,” he wrote: “How then are we to distinguish between the types of culture of the West and East from a metaphysical point of view? I think we can do this by dividing them into that [i.e., the culture of the West] which considers the ground of reality to be being, and that [i.e., the culture of the East] which considers this ground to be nothingness.” In Greek philosophy, he goes on to say, “that which has form and determination was regarded as the real”; or even, as in Plato, reality, that which has true being, was understood as the Forms. Judeo-Christian culture, however radically different in various ways it was from Greek culture, and despite negative theology’s indications of a Deus absconditus as a kind of nothingness, nevertheless primarily considered the person of God as “the most perfect being” to be the basis of reality. In radical contrast to both the Greek and Judeo-Christian origins of Western culture, Indian culture, like that of China and Japan, took “the profoundest idea of nothingness as its basis” (NKZ VII, 429–33; see Nishida 1970, 237–40).