 For his part, Nishida responded to Tanabe’s early critique by affirming that his idea of the self-awareness of absolute nothingness does indeed entail the profound significance of religious experience. Yet he claims that this is neither mystical in the sense of “religious ecstasy” nor “is it thought in the direction of substance, as is Plotinus’ One.” He denied the charge of emanationism, claiming that in his thought “it is not a matter of the self-determination of being, but rather the self-determination of nothingness” (NKZ VI, 154). For Nishida, only if the absolute is thought in terms of a self-negating nothingness, rather than in terms of a transcendent plenum of the One, is it possible to truly affirm the world of the many. The absolute is found in the very midst of beings, not beyond them. It is “because this is absolute nothingness,” Nishida writes in the parlance of Zen, “that the mountain is mountain, the river is river, and all beings are just as they are” (NKZ V, 182; see Nishida 1958, 137).