[My philosophical starting point]

In this essay, published two years after his masterpiece Religion and Nothingness (1961), to which he alludes in the last lines, Nishitani ponders over his own philosophical odyssey. Rather than offering an autobiographical sketch, the author tries to expound analytically his own philosophical standpoint (articulated around the question of nihilism), which he forged early in his career and from which his practice of philosophy is to be understood. The interest of this essay lies in the fact that it connects his early preoccupations for the question of nihilism to his later reflections, which bear the spiritual legacy of Buddhism.