  Systematic use of Asian philosophies is also apparent in Nishida’s methods. Where his arguments seek higher forms of inclusion rather than rejection of opposing views, he harks back to Chinese Buddhist schemes of explanation that absorb and contextualize rival doctrines rather than exclude them. Nishida’s manner of contextualizing, in his theory of place or topos, draws from Chinese cosmological methods in which “to explain and infer is to locate within the pattern” (Graham 1989, 320; cited in Dalissier 2009b, 226). Yogacara Buddhist theories of consciousness as the primary reality and explanatory principle most likely influenced Nishida’s tendency in his early works to explain all reality in terms of consciousness. Later, his way of unifying opposites and defining things in terms of self-negation adapts a Buddhist prajñapāramitā logic of negation, in which individuated terms entail their negation and are understood as co-relational rather than exclusive.