 In his mature writings Nishitani explicitly employs the Mahāyāna term śūnyatā (even though he never disavows the term Nishida coined, “absolute nothingness”) in his attempt to think a way beyond both the exacerbated attachment to being and the reactive nihilism that together plague the modern world (see Ueda 2011a). Nishitani writes as follows: On the one hand, śūnyatā or emptiness can be termed “an absolute negativity, inasmuch as it is a standpoint that has negated and thereby transcended nihility, which was itself the transcendence-through-negation of all being.” In this sense, “emptiness can well be described as ‘outside’ of and absolutely ‘other’ than the standpoint shackled to being, provided we avoid the misconception that emptiness is some ‘thing’ distinct from being and subsisting ‘outside’ it.” On the other hand, then, emptiness is truly emptiness “only when it empties itself even of the standpoint that represents it as some ‘thing’ that is emptiness. … [True emptiness] is to be realized as something united to and self-identical with being” (NKC X, 109–10; Nishitani 1982, 97). Following in the wake of Nishida’s topological thinking of absolute nothingness (see subsection 3.3 below), Nishitani also thinks of śūnyatā as a “place” or “field” wherein beings can appear as they truly are in their proper basis or “home-ground” (moto).