It is not simply an empty nothing but rather an absolute emptiness, emptied even of these representations of emptiness. Each thing is restored anew to its own virtus - that individual capacity that each thing possesses as a display of its own possibility of existence. And he has especially in mind the philosophers of the West who have made the identification of substance and being. This same point has been made by the historians of the Thomistic renaissance when they contrasted the being of Aristotle as substance with the being of St. Thomas as esse, or existence. Further, Nishitani gives a role to nihility in showing the weakness of the equation of being with substance, while these same historians show how the doctrine of creation from nothing played a role in Thomas' metaphysical formulation of existence.
Reason is the outer one and sensation the inner.
When a radius from the center crosses the two circles, these two points of intersection represent the objective forms under which the thing appears to sensation and reason, while the center of the circle represents the thing as it is in itself. Our normal way of viewing things is to look at the center from the circumference and see the One at the center as a result of mere non-differentiation. But this is not how Nishitani would have us view it. Each thing in its own selfness shows the mode of being of the center of all things. Thus, while Nishitani's diagram has many similarities with the metaphysical circle discussed in Part I , at the end it veers away from it by avoiding the notion of an absolute center.