Recent research both on the Kyoto School and on the contemporary New Confucians suggests significant similarities between these two modern East Asian philosophies. Still missing is, however, an explanation of the shared philosophical ideas that serve as the foundation for comparative studies. For this reason, I analyze the basic theories of the two distinctly East Asian philosophies of Nishida Kitarō (1870-1945) and Mou Zongsan (1909-95) so as to identify and extract the same type of argument. This is an alternative to the analyses provided by the previous studies of their philosophies, which inevitably regard their theories as an East Asian assimilation of modern European philosophy in the Kantian, Neo-Kantian, or phenomenological tradition, or else as the traditional tenets under the guise of philosophical speculation, without being able to clarify how these theories contribute to philosophy. My analysis shows that both the logic of basho and the theory of perfect teaching formulate the same type of theory, the ontological or opological — onto-topological — turn from the act of consciousness to its basho or its vertical enfolding, which constitutes the bedrock of East Asian philosophy.
近年來,當代新儒學和日本京都學派的許多專家逐漸意識到代表東亞哲學的這兩學派之間有明顯的相似性。可惜的是,真正比較研究所需要的哲學上的共同理論卻未受到充分的闡明。這個比較研究上的困難來自過去東亞哲學研究中經常遇到的兩種陷阱,即視這兩學派一方面為西方哲學如康德、新康德或現象學傳統的追隨者,另一方面為東方的傳統思想如儒家或佛教之複述者。本文非但要避免這兩種解釋方式,更想要闡明東亞哲學對全世界哲學何以做出了具體的貢獻。本文欲指出,代表兩個學派的西田幾多郎(1870-194)之場所論和牟宗三(1909-95)之圓教論其實共有一個哲學模型,即從意識作用的考察到其縱貫的場所之存有論式的轉折,而此共同理論是東亞比較哲學不可或缺的基礎。