 This article will proceed as follows. In the following section, I will consider the preliminary issues of how to define the Kyoto School and who to include as its members. The name “Kyoto School” has been used in the past, in some cases rather loosely, to refer to a variety of sets of thinkers. It is therefore necessary to begin by discussing the question: Just who belongs to exactly what? The third and central section of this article will treat what is generally considered to be the central philosophical concept and contribution of the Kyoto School, namely, its ideas of “absolute nothingness.” After discussing the ostensible contrast between “Western being” and “Eastern nothingness,” and after looking at some of the Eastern sources of the idea of absolute nothingness, I will discuss the topological, dialectical, phenomenological, and existential philosophies of absolute nothingness developed by Nishida Kitarō, Tanabe Hajime, Nishitani Keiji, and the central figure of the third generation of the Kyoto School, Ueda Shizuteru (b. 1926). The fourth section will address the political controversy surrounding the wartime writings and activities of the Kyoto School. The first wave of attention paid to the Kyoto School in the West in the 1980s largely ignored the political debate that had long surrounded the School in Japan. While this lacuna in Western scholarship was amended in the 1990s, notably with the publication of Rude Awakenings: Zen, the Kyoto School and the Question of Nationalism (Heisig &amp; Maraldo 1994), the political ventures and misadventures of the Kyoto School remain a highly contentious subject (see Maraldo 2006 and Goto-Jones 2008). In the final section of this article I will return to the question of the cross-cultural legacy of the Kyoto School as a group of thinkers that stood between—or perhaps moved beyond—East and West.