 What is evident in the above instructions is that the Zen practitioner must tackle this “no[thing]” by mobilizing the whole of his or her person in order to delve into the ground of his or her personhood, where the “whole” in question involves both the mind and the body, both the consciousness and the unconscious. This is, no doubt, an existential challenge to Zen practitioners, and so they make an all-out effort, staking life and death, because it guarantees them an embodiment of truth and freedom. In this context, Zen metaphorically speaks of reaching the whole as “kicking through the bottom of a bucket” to designate the ground of a person, which Zen understands to be bottomless. That is, it understands this ground to have “no” bottom, i.e., it is a bottomless ground. To avoid the danger of interpreting this ground nihilistically or relativisitically, the modern Japanese thinker, Nishida Kitarō (1870–1945) adds that it is absolutely nothing, where “absolutely” means cutting off all pairs of polar opposites. (See the entry on  Nishida Kitarō.)