 It is Tanabe’s declaration of partial independence from Nishida’s thought in an essay written in 1930, “Requesting Instruction from Professor Nishida” (THZ IV, 305–328), that many see as the origin of the Kyoto School as more than a group of disciples of “Nishidan Philosophy.” In this essay Tanabe sharply criticizes Nishida’s middle-period philosophy of the “place of absolute nothingness,” claiming that it falls into kind of Plotinian “emanationism” that ultimately rests on a religious or mystical intuition. For Tanabe, this posed two serious problems for a genuine philosophy of absolute nothingness.