This article builds on the growing literature on the Kyoto School of Philosophy and its influences on the field of Education. First, I argue that the influence of the Kyoto School of Philosophy is historically significant in Japan, and that the connection between this philosophical school and the philosophy of education is by no means superficial. Second, I suggest that this school contributes a unique view of ‘negative education’ founded in the philosophical idea of ‘nothingness’. I examine how this negative education is manifest both in religious cultivation and in more general views of education, and I develop these ideas through the models of self‐negation proposed by Nishitani Keiji and Hisamatsu Shin'ichi. Third, taking up the Herbartian idea of ‘pedagogical tact’, I analyse the characteristics of the I‐Thou relationship, in the vector of nothingness, implicit in the above‐mentioned view of education. I examine two approaches to this relationship—one of ‘sharing in nothingness’ as found in Nishitani and Hisamatsu, and one that goes beyond the idea of ‘sharing’ and accommodates alterity, as found in Nishida Kitarô and Nishihira Tadashi. By threshing out these three points, I hope to highlight the continued pedagogical relevance of the philosophical ideas of the Kyoto School.

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Watsuji Tetsurô (1889–1960) is famous for having constructed a systematic socio‐political ethics on the basis of the idea of emptiness. This essay examines his 1938 essay “The Concept of ‘Dharma’ and the Dialectics of Emptiness in Buddhist Philosophy” and the posthumously published The History of Buddhist Ethical Thought (based on lectures given in the 1920s), in order to clarify the Buddhist roots of his ethics. It aims to answer two main questions which are fundamentally linked: “Which way does Watsuji's legacy turn: toward totalitarianism or toward a balanced theory of selflessness?” and “Is Watsuji's systematic ethics Buddhist?” In order to answer these questions, this essay discusses Watsuji's view of dharma, dependent arising, and morality in Hīnayāna Buddhism. It then proceeds to Watsuji's fine‐tuning of the concept of emptiness in Mādhyamika and Yogācāra Buddhism. Finally, this essay shows how Watsuji's modernist Buddhist theory connects to his own systematic ethical theory. These two theories share a focus on non‐duality, negation, and emptiness. But they differ in their accounts of the relations between the individual and the community, between the “is” and the “ought,” and between hermeneutics and transcendence. These findings give us hints as to Watsuji's origins, pitfalls, and possibilities.

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