All people, indeed all things whatsoever, meet on the common field of nothingness which is the universe. On this common field, each moment of time is ever-present in all things. Always. This means that all things, including you and I, are constantly in a state of becoming - constantly transcendent of the moment. Such continual newness yields ever-present, novel freedom and possibility, as well as burdens and necessities.
For Keiji Nishitani of the Tokyo school of philosophy, such seemingly radical assertions are really simple ramifications wrought from an investigation of our experience in the world. Standing in opposition to the western scientific edifice (which he describes as a vast superstructure spanning a yawning nothing), Nishitani's marriage of western philosophy and Buddhist thought encourages a reflection upon our own interactions within the world. Our own newness without ceasing; our embodiment of the vast web of relations, entails an emptiness (not proscriptively negative) at the core of our being. Such an emptiness allows for the freedom of the moment; enables us to interact with and grow alongside the universe of radical becoming.
Nishitani's work does much to invert our sense of self and the world - perhaps long overdue. The ramifications of a radical becoming on a field of emptiness have been touched upon in canonical Buddhist works and given a certain audience in the West by Whitehead. By fully investing ourselves into the world (an acceptance of the home-ground of the emptiness of all things demands such) we can begin to understand our own formation in moment, and live the embodiedness of things-as-self, and vice versa.
