 While the first layer in which the self is located is the historical horizon of the everyday life-world, this horizon itself is ultimately found to rest in an absolutely “empty-expanse,” a place of absolute nothingness that both enfolds the everyday world as well as grounds the radical freedom of the individual “self-negating self” (see USS IX, 22–24 and 324ff.). Ueda finds this idea of returning, by way of absolute self-negation, to a primordial wellspring of existence that is “empty and free” (ledig und frei) in Meister Eckhart, and, in an even more rarified form, in Zen Buddhism (see Davis 2008a). It is from the latter that he borrows the term “empty-expanse” (kokū) as a topological expression for śūnyatā.