  But the reader of Nishida can find resonances with certain Asian philosophical ideas even when Nishida did not make use of them. Even where there is no evidence of direct influence, the affinity of some key notions and arguments with classical Indian Buddhist ideas is striking. It is possible, for example, to read Nishida’s development of the three topoi or places of being, relative nothingness, and absolute nothingness, as a deepening of awareness that resembles the progression of awareness, described in many Buddhist schemes, where one first sees through the realm of desire, then through the realm of forms, and finally awakens to the formless realm beyond discrimination (Stevens 2009, 71). Also suggestive of the convictions underlying Nishida’s philosophy are arguments of the Mādhyamaka school of Nāgārjuna pressing for the relationality of all existents, and exhortations to appreciate the “groundlessless of things” in the Vimalakīrti-nirdeśa Sūtra (Priest 2009, 472). We might also recognize distant affinities—and related significant differences—between Nishida’s notion of reality (the world) itself becoming self-aware and pre-Buddhist Indian Vedanta, or its later development, non-dual Advaita Vedanta.  Where some Vedantic texts equate reality with Brahman and assert that “awareness is Brahman” (prajñānaṁbrahma, Aitareya Upanishad 3.3), “I am Brahman” (ahaṁbrahmāsmi, Brihadaranyaka Upanishad 1.4.10), or “You are That” (tat tvam asi, Chandogya Upanishad 6.8.7), meaning your true self is identical with ultimate reality, Nishida places a caesura—his “inverse correlation”—in the equation of relative human self and the Absolute.  Yet when Nishida urges us to “see the self from the standpoint of the world,” he suggests a kind of phenomenological bracketing or epoché of the “I”—of the Ichdoxa—that resonates with the intentions of these Vedantic expressions.  That implied suggestion and its challenge to both Vedantic thought and Husserlian phenomenology, however, remain to be explored in the growing literature on Nishida’s philosophy.      