 Another criterion that could be used to define the School is an essentially ambivalent attitude toward Western modernity (or toward modernization as Westernization). A critical stance toward a unilateral globalization of Western modernity, a stance which at the same time accepts in part its unavoidability and in some respects even affirms its necessity, gave rise to the idea of “overcoming modernity”—an overcoming that would take place not by retreating from Western modernity, but by going through and beyond it. This going through and beyond, moreover, would not simply be a matter of going further down the road of linear progress; it would entail a hermeneutical as well as ultimately a (me)ontological and existential re-gress, a radical “step back.” For the Kyoto School, a critical and creative retrieval of the traditions of the East, those of East Asian Mahāyāna Buddhism in particular, is thought to enable the radical religious and philosophical “trans-descendence” necessary to move through and beyond the limits and problems of Western modernity.