 Gordon’s attack on Pure Land Buddhism begins with the assertion that it “is not the Buddhism which Gotama taught” and, going even further, that “the Buddhism taught by the Shin sect of Japan is in some respects exactly opposed to the teaching of Shakya” (Gordon 1882, p. 108). Utilizing contemporaneous European scholarship in Sanskrit and Pali, Gordon lists contradictions between “Buddhism as Gotama taught it” and “the so-called Mahayana” teachings, which “are perversions rather than denials of the truth, and hence are all the more dangerous.” The problem Gordon encounters is partly a rift with Western rationality—what he calls the ability “for the Buddhist mind to look a logical contradiction squarely in the face without recognizing it.” Even more important to him, however, are how the perceived deviations in the Pure Land tradition that have transformed “original Buddhism” into a religion in the mode of Christianity.