Shintai and the Empty Cross

This paper investigates the significance of the empty cross in Tadao Ando's Church of the Light (1989) in association with shintai, the Japanese notion of the body. Following the Japanese cultural tradition, in particular the theory of perception and body in the philosophy of nothingness by Kitaro Nishida (1870-1945), the foremost thinker in modern East Asian intellectual history and the father of the Kyoto Philosophical School, shintai is understood as an active, pre-reflective, sensational capacity to embrace and feel the world as the content of the very self. Simultaneously, when its sensational capacity to embrace the world is limited, shintai transcends the horizon of sensation, articulates posturally its reaching out to the world, and enters into the realm of creative act to accommodate the sensational surplus. By referring to this distinctive Japanese notion of the body, the paper illuminates the significance of the empty cross in the Church of the Light, which integrates the natural phenomenal light—it is a slit—and the iconic permanence of the standing body into one indivisible reality. The paper illuminates how the notion of shintai is effective in understanding the simultaneous presence of the phenomenal and the iconic in the cross. It finally shows how one's perception of the cross under the mode of shintai renews the efficacy of the cross's vertical posture as symbolizing the victory and glory of Jesus, not his suffering, as claimed by Daisetz T. Suzuki, a renowned Zen Buddhist, whose references were the Baroque crucifixion and the peaceful horizontal posture of Buddha on his deathbed

Aesthetics · Art · Buddhism · Enlightenment · Epistemology · Glory · Literature · Nothing · Perception · Political science · Politics · Realm · Sociology · Theology · Victory · Chinese history and philosophy · Digital Media and Philosophy · Japanese History and Culture · Law · Philosophy

• On the problem of embodied sense-making

  Open Access•Nadezhda Sergeevna Filonenko, Mariya Sergeevna Tretyakova et al.•Культура и искусство•2026

  Add to list