 To answer in terms of its use, the term “ultimacy”, meaning the state or nature of being ultimate, has Brahman, the Dao, emptiness etc. as instances. To answer semantically, with a meaning, is difficult for at least two reasons. First, though there is abundant precedent in the literature for collecting these subjects as ideas of  ultimacy,[2]  doing so presupposes they have some shared characteristic or family resemblance that makes them count as ultimate. But is there a shared core idea of being ultimate? “Particularists” among others argue no: the diverse range of cultural and historical contexts from which these subjects come, coupled with how hard it is to talk across such contexts, makes them all “separate cultural islands” (Hedges 2014: 206; see also Berthrong 2001: 237–239,  255–256).[3]  The second concern is related, and not far from one Tomoko Masuzawa (2005) among others has raised about religion: even if we found a substantive account of ultimacy visible in multiple traditions, such an account necessarily will be borne from a cultural conceptual context. Thus, far from delivering the notions at work in other traditions, such an account actually risks de-forming them.