 As mentioned before, the Pure Land Buddhist teachings have taken on a highly distinctive shape in Japan, generating new determinations of the central canonical texts and multiple strands of scholastic and commentarial tradition. It is in relation to these latter developments that we can best speak of a specifically “Japanese Pure Land Buddhist philosophy,” for the creative construals of a practicable Buddhist path to transformed awareness involved, in the forces for their evolution and in the articulation of their implications, deliberation on such matters as the nature of human existence, self and other, language, reality, and truth. Further, the disparate streams of Japanese Pure Land thought stand as distinctive understandings, often employing their own characteristic terminology, of an already highly evolved Buddhist tradition, and a grasp of them often requires a recognition of the tensions between received tradition and reinterpretation that they manifest.