[Machine Translation] In Japanese, "on its own" and "from itself" are both expressed as "from oneself". They mean "to be" and "to do," "thing" and "self," "nature" and "freedom," but they are not clearly separated, and there is an "awai" between them that crosses, conquers, and conflicts. What are the basic ideas of the Japanese people, and what kind of thought and culture have they fostered? This book, while going back and forth widely and deeply into various fields of thought, religion, literature, and the performing arts, reexamines the Japanese people's correlative perception of nature and self, the relationship between transcendence and ethics, and their view of impermanence and life and death from the very roots up. This is a major work by the author, an ethicist and historian of Japanese thought.