 The representative Japanese Buddhist figure here is the Pure Land priest Kiyozawa Manshi (1863–1903), a younger associate of Inoue who had also studied Western philosophy at Tokyo Imperial University. Despite his early death, Kiyozawa’s efforts to democratize and modernize the Shin Buddhist temple institution deeply influenced succeeding thinkers of the Higashi Honganji tradition. Like Inoue, he speaks of the finite and infinite (or absolute) as mediated by reason in philosophy and by faith in religion. Kiyozawa is distinctive, though, in his decidedly practical orientation, exploring the encounter with the absolute in religious life. In his late twenties, he undertook an ascetic discipline of daily life and diet that ended after several years when he contracted tuberculosis. In the last five years of his life, he was strongly attracted to the introspective spiritual cultivation of equanimity and indifference to contingencies that he found in the early scriptures of Buddhism and especially in the Stoic philosopher Epictetus.