Nishida kitaro (1870-1945)，japan's foremost academic philosopher，ended his career with a long essay entitled "the logic of place and a religious world-view". the article gives a brief resume of his literary career，and then analyzes the structure of this essay. it demonstrates nishida's explicit reliance on classical buddhist metaphysical concepts, centering around the notion of nothingness or voidness (sunyata) as the ultimate locus or "place" of concrete experiential immediacy. the logic of place is therefore a logic of the religious dimension of experience，distinguished phenomenologically from the moral and cognitive spheres. it is shown that this logic of the religious consciousness was nishida's attempted synthesis of pure land and zen religious values, and also certain western philosophical positions such as existentialism.
