A tradition of intense import and equally intense originality: Buddhist and Confucian frameworks arrive from China and Korea, are naturalized over a millennium, and then — in the twentieth century — meet German philosophy head-on in the Kyoto School, producing one of the first non-Western philosophies built in direct argument with the West.
Shōbōgenzō, An Inquiry into the Good, Ethics (Watsuji)
Origins & Development
Buddhism arrives via Korea in the sixth century; Kūkai (774–835) founds Shingon esoteric Buddhism with a philosophy of language — mantra as the Buddha-body's speech.
Kamakura-period renewal produces Dōgen (1200–1253), whose Shōbōgenzō treats zazen and time itself philosophically — "practice is enlightenment" — and Shinran's Pure Land thought.
Edo-period (1603–1868) Japan turns Confucian: Zhu Xi orthodoxy and Wang Yangming's school dominate, with the kokugaku reaction recovering Shintō nativism — see Shintō.
The Meiji restoration (1868) imports Western philosophy wholesale; Nishi Amane coins the modern Japanese philosophical vocabulary.
In 1911 Nishida publishes An Inquiry into the Good, founding the Kyoto School — see his logic of place.
Central Ideas
Pure experience: Nishida starts from experience prior to the subject/object split — an Eastern entry into the problems of consciousness.
Absolute nothingness: the Kyoto School's signature concept — a ground more fundamental than being, worked out against Heidegger; see Nishitani on nihility.
The body and climate: Watsuji's ethics of betweenness — human existence as spatial relationality (fūdo, milieu) as much as time.
Impermanence and embodiment: from mujō to Zen aesthetics, the tradition thinks flux as form, not defect.
Logic of soku: Tanabe's "action-intuition" and the predicative form "A is at once not-A" — formalizing nondualism; see metanoetics.
Schools & Key Figures
Buddhist founders: Kūkai's esotericism, Dōgen's Sōtō Zen (Dōgen's Zen), Shinran's Pure Land other-power.
Kyoto School:Nishida, Tanabe Hajime, Nishitani Keiji — and its contested politics in the 1930s–40s.
Confucian and nativist Edo thought: Hayashi Razan's Zhu Xi school, the kokugaku of Motoori, and their modern heirs.
Postwar and contemporary: Yuasa Yasuo's philosophy of the body, then a broad turn to analytic philosophy and applied ethics in today's Japanese academy.
Influence & Reception
Kyoto School works were translated into European languages by mid-century, shaping the Western reception of "Eastern thought" — and of Heidegger's critics.
Dōgen is now a canonical figure in philosophy of religion and environmental ethics worldwide.
The tradition is a standing exhibit in global philosophy: a modern non-Western school built in two directions at once.