 Watsuji’s interest in religion was as a social phenomenon, that is, in religion as an aspect of the cultural environment. And yet in the Watsuji scholarship there remains disagreement about how religion — Buddhism in particular — is to be read in his work (Sevilla 2016, 608–609). William LaFleur remarks, for example, that Watsuji “embraces a religious solution…philosophically and methodologically” (LaFleur 1978, 238). While David Dilworth contends that “Watsuji’s position was not essentially a Buddhistic or religious one”(Dilworth 1974, 17). While there is disagreement on LaFleur’s claim that “it was in the Buddhist notion of emptiness that Watsuji found the principle that gives his system…coherence” (LaFleur 1978, 239), it cannot be denied that when Watsuji writes of emptiness as that final place or context in which all distinctions disappear, or empty, and yet from which they emerge, that this notion is at least partly rooted in his study of Buddhist philosophy and culture, and the concept of emptiness in particular. Watsuji “embraces a religious solution…philosophically and methodologically” (LaFleur 1978, 238).The Buddhist notion of pratîtya-samutpâda, or ‘dependent co-origination’ (or ‘relationality,’ ‘conditioned co-production,’ ‘dependent co-arising,’ ‘co-dependent origination’) implies that everything is ‘empty’ that is to say, “that everything is deprived of its substantiality, nothing exists independently, everything is related to everything else, nothing ranks as a first cause, and even the self is but a delusory construction” (Abe 1985, 153). The delusion of independent individuality can be overcome by recognizing our radical relational interconnectedness. At the same time, even this negation must be emptied or negated, hence our radical relational interconnectedness is possible only because true individuals have created a network in the betweenness between them. The result is a selfless awareness of that totality beyond all limited, social totalities, namely the emptiness or nothingness at the bottom of all things, whether individual or group. LaFleur summarises Watsuji’s position: “the social side of human existence ‘empties’ the individuated side of any possible priority or autonomy and the individuated side does something exactly the same and exactly proportionate to and for the social side. There can be no doubt, I think, that for Watsuji, emptiness is the key to it all” (LaFleur 1978, 250). Watsuji’s emptiness is more a recognition of underlying relatedness, and manifests as a place, a basho, that is the dynamic and creative origination of all relationships and all networks of interactions. However, it is important to keep in mind that even when Watsuji uses religious language (as in “it is a religious ecstasy of the great emptiness” (LaFleur 1978, 249), that ecstasy is not a mystical-like insight into one’s union with God or the Absolute or a recognition of floating in ‘other-power,’ but a relational union of those persons involved in some communal forms, eventually culminating in the state. It is an ethical, or political, or communal ecstasy and not a religious identification with a transcendent Other – and as much as we hear the influence of Buddhism, we also hear, for example, echoed of the Hegelian concept of sublation (Sevilla 2016, 626). Watsuji gives no evidence of deep religiosity but expresses a profound and sometimes ecstatic ethical humanism, one which is, nonetheless, significantly Buddhist in conception. 