 Tanabe’s method of thinking, as we have seen, was intensely dialectical, a method he developed through his prolonged study of Hegel. Nishitani, on the other hand, began his study of Western thought by focusing on Bergson, Schelling, Nietzsche and the German mystics. Between 1937 and 1939 Nishitani studied with Heidegger, who was at the time beginning to grapple with the question of nihilism, and whose phenomenology had developed into a thinking of the “clearing of being” or what he would later characterize as a “topology of being” (Heidegger 1975, Vol. 15, 335). Influenced no doubt in part by his contact with Heidegger (and perhaps in turn influencing Heidegger, who frequently invited him to his house to learn about Zen), Nishitani developed, in his own highly original manner, existential and phenomenological aspects of Nishida’s topology of absolute nothingness.