Shizuteru Ueda

Shizuteru Ueda, born in 1926, has been a disciple of Nishitani Keiji for over fifty years and his successor in the Department of Religion at Kyoto University, thereby assuring the continuation of the Kyoto tradition which began with Nishida Kitaro. After receiving doctorates from Kyoto University and the University of Marburg, he contributed numerous studies in the fields of German mysticism and modern German thought, on Zen Buddhism, and on the philosophy of Nishida, to both Japanese and German journals. He was also a regular speaker at the Eranos Conferences in Ascona, Switzerland. His major work on the mysticism of Meister Eckhart, Die Gottesgeburt in der Seele und der Durchbruch zur Gottheit, has been received with particular interest. Dr. Shizuteru Ueda wrote the essay “‘Nothingness’ in Meister Eckhart and Zen Buddhism” that appears in The Buddha Eye: An Anthology of the Kyoto School and Its Contemporaries (World Wisdom, 2004).