  Nishida’s term for self-awareness is jikaku, which can also be translated as self-awakening, a Buddhist reading he undoubtedly intends. Nishida allows for the Buddhist view that there is actually no self to awaken by referring to the self-awakening of absolute nothingness; its awakening is the awakening of the “true self.” Absolute nothingness in action, as it were, entails a negation (of a substantial, self-same self) and an affirmation (of the true self). In the manner of self-negation, I am one with you while not being the same as you. Not only between us does a “continuity of absolute discontinuities” obtain, but also within each of us, insofar as our identity is in continual formation. In the end, then, Nishida denies the substantiality of the self, and he re-visions both  the radical alterity of other persons and the transcendence of an absolute other, in the guise of God for example, as we shall see.