Takizawa regarded Nishida's work as "a philosophy of metanoia which bears testimony to the true God in the language of this specific country in this specific age"(5) and tried to persuade Barth to believe that the triune God can reveal himself outside the "wall" of Christendom, indeed at every time and everywhere in so far as the primordial divine-human relationship can not be localized to a particular age and country.(6)
Though Barth flatly denied such a possibility of God's revelation outside the Bible, Takizawa insisted that the historical event of Jesus, his life and death, was a Biblical testimony to the primordial fact (Urfactum) , implicitly going beyond Barth's Christ-centrism where the Jesus event was neither a testimony to nor a sign (Zeichen) of the Fact (Sache) but the primordial fact itself. According to Takizawa, the danger of pharisaims always hovers about us if we are blind to the Fact which has decreed the life and death of Jesus even when we worship him as the Savior, saying that there is no salvation without Jesus Christ. He often cited those lines of the Gospel which recorded that Jesus himself was not pleased to be an object of idol-worship (Matt. 19-17) though he proclaimed his divinity before the high priest (Matt. 26-64). Jesus was not an exception but a chief exemplification of the paradoxical unity of God-human nature.
The difference between Jesus and his followers consists in the modes of awakening to this Fact. While Jesus proclaimed the Kingdom of God as a witness of the Truth (John 18-37) , his disciples worshipped him as the Savior. So the consequent divine-human relations were different between them. This difference reflects that of modes of awakening to the primordial fact. Whereas Jesus awakened to it through a unique and original awareness of his own historical role as Messiah in the New Testament age of Judaism, his disciples awakened to the same Fact through believing in the paradoxical event of Christ's death and resurrection. In recognizing the fundamental identity behind the apparent differences between the founder and the followers of Christianity, we may say that Takizawa discovered an anthropo-theology of Awakening on the basis of the primordial fact.
Takizawa's anthropo-theology was developed through his confrontation with the so-called FAS Zen Buddhism of Shin'ichi Hisamatsu, another disciple of Nishida and one of the most radical Buddhist thinkers in the modern Japan. Hisamatsu insisted that we should not seek for Buddha as an exterior authority, nor as the Other Power, because Buddha is nothing but the "Formless Self" who awakens in our innermost subjectivity. The Formless Self should not be localized to a particular person, but He should be universalized to All mankind as the authentic subject of forming history from the Supra-historical standpoint.(7)
Takizawa's christology had a remarkable similarity with Hisamatsu's conception of the Formless Self. Takizawa admitted that Hisamatsu was radically consistent in rejecting both the Other Power of the Pure Land Buddhism and the unilaterally transcendent God of Christianity as legacies of pre-modern religiocity, and was even sympathetic with Hesamatsu's atheology in so far as it swept away any vestige of idol-worship in Christianity and Buddhism. Takizawa, however, objected that there should be an irreversible order in the primordial divine-human relation, and insisted that a personal experience of enlightenment, however deep it may be, should not claim finality in the primordial sense.
The experience of enlightenment, in so far as it takes place at some time and somewhere, should be considered as an inceptive event on the level of the consequent divine-human relation rather than as the unconditional unity with the Absolute. Every Buddha, i.e. every awakened one, is primordially on the same level as an ordinary human being, and the apparent monistic attitude of an atheistic Buddhist has, according to him, a tendency of self-delusion due to the lack of in-sight to the subtle structure of the divine-human relation.
The life of Buddha, as well as the earthly life of Jesus, was considered by Takizawa as an "exemplary complete reflection" of the primordial fact on the level of the consequent divine-human relation. We can not say that Takizawa's standpoint was pantheistic, because he recognized the irreversible order between God and Man, and denied apotheosis of a finite self in any experience of awakening. We need not transcend the limit of humanity because such a trial would be a misplaced one from the beginning. Takizawa's polemic against Hisamatsu was concerning the subtle distinction between a finite self and the Formless Self. Hisamatsu did not talk much about the "practice after awakening" because his emphasis was on the primordial Enlightenment which transcends the limit of space and time.
So the problem of Hisamatsu Zen, if any, was that the status of a finite self had not been explicated enough in the actual historical situation. It would be far from the truth to say that a finite self becomes the Formless Self through awakening, because the self-identity between before and after an experience of awakening should be strictly distinguished from the paradoxical unity of a finite self with the Formless Self in the primordial Enlightenment. The essential finitude of human existence cannot be ignored even in the case of an awakened one. Neither would it be persuasive to deny the reality of a finite self, pace the theory of non-self in the traditional Buddhism, once we enter the realm of social and ethical practice where it is not the Formless Self but always a finite self that has to take the moral responsibility of its own decision among other finite selves.
Takizawa's emphasis on irreversibility in the divine-human relation caused debates among Zen Buddhists and Christians.8 Though the concept of irreversibility is familiar to Christianity, most Zen Buddhists have felt uneasy about it especially when applied to the structure of primordial Enlightenment. Abe, for example, objected against Takizawa that the ultimate religious relation should be absolutely reversible and said "the standpoint m which an element of irreversibility remains is not a thoroughgoing one " from Zen Buddhism.9 On the other hand, Takizawa's concept of God-with-us seemed unsatisfactory, at least to some Christians in that the aspect of reciprocity between God and man was totally ignored, and the mystery of Christ's passion and death on the Cross cannot be explained away on the standpoint of Awakening to the primordial fact. We need something more than Awakening if we are to grasp not only the words of Jesus but also his life and death in the Gospel.
In the original context of the New Testament, God-with-us means the retrieve of the lost bond between God and man in the history of salvation, and does not signify a non-historical universal relation. Takizawa considered historical aspects of the divine-human relation as consequent on the primordial fact, and stressed the irreversible order between the non-historical and historical relations though they are inseparable. If historical elements are essential to Christianity, then it is insufficient to the understanding of such elements to assert unilaterally the irreversible order between the primordial and consequent relations. The God whom we encounter in the consequent divine-human relation is no less important than God-with-us in the primordial relation, and the concept of irreversibility seems insufficient if it is applied to the eternal and historical aspects of the divine-human relation.
The controversies which Takizawa aroused in his later years showed that we must further his project of anthropo-theology in more satisfactory fashions though we owe to him a great insight into the universal non-historical character of the divine-human relation which has made it possible for Christians to enter into dialogue with Buddhists.
The second section of my paper is concerning the philosophical foundation of anthropo-theology. As both Takizawa and Hisamatsu are Nishida's disciples, the latest stage of Nishida's philosophy, especially "the Logic of Topos and Religious World-View" will first be discussed, and then my own standpoint which is called hayathology (the theory of Becoming) will be propounded as a project of the syn-thesis between ontology (the theory of Being) and sunyatology (the theory of Nothingness) .
