 Ōhashi stresses, however, that neither the Buddhist tradition nor the Kyoto School should be thought of as having a patent on the radical “thinking of nothingness.” In fact, he argues, “this thought slowly came to the fore within Western philosophy itself,” a process that indeed set the stage for Kyoto School contributions to contemporary philosophy (Ōhashi 2004, 12–13). Nishitani had already explored a number of resonant notions of nothingness, not only in the Neoplatonic and Christian mystical traditions, but also in 19th and 20th century Western philosophers such as Nietzsche and Heidegger (see NKC VIII; Nishitani 1990). And yet, here again Nishitani finds residues of an ontological bias, where a kind of “relative nothingness” is posited as either a simple negation of or as a veil for being. Nishitani ultimately concludes that Nietzsche succeeded only in expressing a “standpoint of relative absolute nothingness”; and even in Heidegger, he critically suggests, “traces of the representation of nothingness as some ‘thing’ that is nothingness still remain” (NKC X, 75 and 108; Nishitani 1982, 66 and  96).[6]