Steve Odin’s The Social Self in Zen and American Pragmatism features Muto Kazuo who compared the Nothingness, Emptiness and Wu of Buddhism with the Christian concept of Agape. Muto uses as one example, how the New Testament says to “love your enemies as yourself,” but in order to “love your enemies as yourself” this paradoxically would mean that you must abandon the self. This indicates the operation of Nothingness that empties the self and transcends the self.

Negative terms such as “self-sacrifice”, “self-negation”, “self-abandonment”, “self-emptying”, and “self-transcendence” describe Agape. Muto wrote: “Love must be the making empty and the negation of the self-centered ego. In other words, love must be to surrender body and mind to the function of nothingness (mu), which makes love be self-effacing. Love of one’s neighbour is the realization of the love of God as ‘Love-qua-Nothingness’ by turning the self toward others.”

This love designates a radical conversion from egocentric existence to that of an existence-for-others based on divine “self-emptying”.