THIS PAPER is an analysis of the philosophy of Kitar6 Nishida (Nishida Kitar6 E~M9 1 ~ aS 1870-1945), who is now generally acknowledged as a representative metaphysician of modern Japanese. He taught twenty years at Kyoto University, and even after his retirement in 1928 continued writing as Japan's leading thinker. His career covers the entire span of the development of Japanese academic philosophy. Nishida was quite sensitive to changes of the intellectual climate. He was always flexible enough to give serious consideration to new problems and new theories. The result is that his thought shows a number of stages or perspectives. We can distinguish four such stages of development. On the other hand, however, Nishida never lost sight of his central problem, namely, the confrontation of Oriental Buddhistic ideas with Western philosophy. In this respect, the direction of his thought was already fixed when as a young teacher in the Junior College at Kanazawa he practiced Zen-meditation under several excellent priests. This central concern with Buddhism can be detected at every stage of his thought. The four stages mentioned can be discovered in his successive works: (I) "Study of the Good," 1911. (II) "Intuition and Reflection in Selfconsciousness," 1917. (III) "The System of the Self-conscious Universal," 1930. (IV) "Philosophical Essays" I-VII, 1935-1945.'