In this essay I would like to accomplish two ends: first, to clarify the nature of the Middle Way of sunyata or emptiness in the Kyoto School of modern Japanese philosophy; and second, to illustrate the Middle Way through the famous Ten Oxherding Pictures. The Kyoto school, through its initiatives in East-West comparative thought and Buddhist-Christian interfaith dialogue, has become famous for its prescription of emptiness or absolute nothingness as antidote for the problem of "nihilism" which they see in contemporary Western thought and civilization. According to the Kyoto School philosophers, the problem of nihilism as defined especially by Nietzsche can be resolved only by coverting from relative nothingness to absolute nothingness. Hence, it has now become commonplace to describe the central task of philosophy of religion as defined by the Kyoto School as that of "overcoming nihilism." Yet in terms of its Buddhist philosophical orientation, the problem of the Kyoto School is actually to realize the Middle Way of sunyata, emptiness. More specifically, the sunyata trandition propounded by Nagarjuna and ultimately tracing back to the Buddha himself is to be understood as a via media between the twp major philosophical extremes of "nihilism" on the one side and "eternalism" on the other. In this context I would like to clarify the manner whereby the Kyoto School establishes a Middle Way of sunyata between these eternalistic and nihilistic positions by means of a threefold dialectical "emptying" process which moves from Being to relative Nothingness to absolute Nothingness. Moreover, it will be shown how the Kyiti School has appropriated the dynamics of Zen , Kegon and Tendai Buddhist dialectics into this threefold emptying process. And finally, I will endeavor to relate the Middle Way philosophy of sunyata as formulated by Kyoto School to the famous Ten Oxherding Pictures illustrating the progressive stages of Zen enlightenment. It is hoped that in this manner a new and deeper philosophical interpretation can be given to the Zen Oxherding series while at the same time using these pictorial representations to visualize the dialectical emptying process at the heart of the Kyoto School strategy for overcoming nihilism and realizing the Middle Way.
