 Yet the real breakthrough to a non-dualistic reaffirmation of self and world only occurs when the relative nothingness of nihility is in turn broken through to a genuine experience of absolute nothingness or true emptiness on the “field of śūnyatā.” Nishitani thus explained the personal encounter with nihilism as an experience of the extreme relative nothingness of “nihility” or “vacuous nothingness” (kyomu), and for him the central task of “overcoming nihilism by way of passing through nihilism” entailed transgressing beneath (i.e., “trans-descending”) the “field of nihility” to the “field of śūnyatā” (see NKC X, 109 and 122ff.; Nishitani 1986, 97 and  108ff.).[15]  As mentioned earlier (subsection 3.2), the “field of śūnyatā” is not a vacuum of relative nothingness that assaults beings from without; it is an open clearing wherein beings are neither nullified nor reified but rather let be in the mutual freedom of their coming to be and passing away. It is also the place in which a genuine interpersonal encounter can take place (Nishitani 2004; Davis 2017).