Hello everyone. I'm Stephen West. This is Philosophies This. So I always get emails after an episode's released.

But after last episode, there was a notable increase in two specific kinds of emails I get.

One was an increase in the number of people saying the episode led them to a pretty deep shift in the ways they're thinking about things.

That Kiji Nishitani is opening them up to a whole new interesting way of exploring what it is to exist.

The other was an increase and the number of people saying they don't quite get it, that

while they appreciate it and are sticking with it, that it's such a different way of thinking,

that it's difficult to wrap my mind around what's truly being said here.

I just felt the need to acknowledge this before we talk about Nishatani's views on religion today.

I mean, I know it must sound like a broken record lately.

Be sure to listen to every episode from 211 up until this one if you want to understand what's being talked about.

But look, it's not like I'm trying to annoy you or to be overly complicated.

It's just a gift I have, really.

No, but there's episodes of this podcast

where we're doing something different. Some episodes are trying to cover things a little more

broadly across the thinker's entire work. It casts a wide net. That's what some of the episodes

we do do. But those are always going to be episodes that can never hit you as hard as when we talk

about more the context of where our thinkers coming from, their influences,

the deeper conversations that they were embedded in. I mean, just for example, you know, it's been

said by some Buddhists before that, look, you can explain all of Buddhism to someone in just

three sentences. You can say emptiness is form, form is emptiness. The two are not separate.

And you can imagine someone hearing it and saying,

oh yeah, I guess I get it then. I mean, I understand those sentences in the English language,

...