 Christianity challenged Japanese Buddhists by teaching a personal religiosity and a stringent individual moral responsibility. Kiyozawa offers a prominent example of the attempt to engage those issues. Regarding the narrative of the origin of Amida Buddha and the Pure Land, which Gordon and other Christian missionaries regarded as obvious fictions created late in the Buddhist tradition, Soga may have found resources for resolution in the very Christian sources behind the criticisms. The Japanese Mahayana tradition had already developed it own concepts of the compassionate emergence out of emptiness or formless reality as well as the nonduality of the karmically conditioned and unconditioned. Those ideas provided an openness to and point of entry into certain areas of Christian and Western philosophical thought. During the twentieth century, philosophers such as Nishida Kitarō, Tanabe Hajime, Nishitani Keiji, Takeuchi Yoshinori, and Abe Masao have drawn on both the Christian and Japanese Buddhist traditions, particularly Pure Land and Zen, in engaging modern philosophical issues.