 Of course, one might respond: even if Nishida methodologically takes his questions from Western philosophy, his responses to these questions reflect his East Asian roots at least as much as his Western studies. To the Western ontological question of being, his answer is a meontology of absolute nothingness. And even if his systematic philosophical articulations of the idea of absolute nothingness owe more to Western than Eastern texts, he nevertheless understands himself to have autonomously (i.e., in the process of engaging in a nonsectarian philosophical search for truth) given expression to the formless origin that is harbored in the traditions of the East. In retrospect Nishida wrote: “It is not that I conceived of my way of thinking in dependence on Mahāyāna Buddhism; and yet it has come into accord with it” (NKZ XIV, 408). Nishitani could have said something similar of his career path through the study of Western philosophy and mysticism and “back” to the standpoint of Zen. Other Kyoto School thinkers took even less of an Occidental excursion before making what Hölderlin called a “homecoming though the foreign.” And some, like Hisamatsu and Takeuchi, began their scholarly pursuits with a self-understanding as a Zen or Shin Buddhist thinker.