 In Zen we find the Mahāyāna Buddhist notion of emptiness and the Daoist notion of nothingness fully intertwined and developed into a practice of living both completely unattached and completely engaged in the world of “true emptiness, marvelous being.” In the famous wu or mu kōan that opens the Gateless Barrier, Wumen (Mumon) urges those who wish to reach enlightenment, that is, those who wish to pass through the “barrier of the gate of nothingness,” to concentrate their entire life force on this wu (mu), taking care to understand it neither as “nihilistic nothingness” nor “in terms of being and non-being” (Nishimura 1994, 22; see Cleary 1999, 71). This was the kōan that Nishida finally passed after nearly a decade of intense practice of Zen (see Yusa 2002, 45ff.). And as Nishida confided many years later to Nishitani, it was from early on his “impossible desire” to somehow bring Zen and philosophy together (NKZ XIX, 224–25; see Davis 2004b, 256ff.).