Abstract

This essay deals with the problem of religious transformation in Tanabe Hajime. In his Philosophy as Metanoetics, Tanabe examines this transformation through the relationship between vows of the Buddhas as described in the writings of the Pure Land Buddhist thinker Shinran. For Tanabe, each vow expresses a moment of the religious transformation. Furthermore,he argues against all possibility of immediacy in human existence and sets out to demonstrate that the meaning of existence is mediated by the transformation of self-power into Other-power, wherein the drive to affirm the self is transformed into a radical return to the world in which the self becomes a medium for the salvation of others. This is where Tanabe locates the deepest power of nothingness: in negating every effort of the self to ground itself and to make human being an upāya, a skillful means to a greater end. This is possible, in turn, because being itself, in all its manifestations, is upāya.