 During the four decades from the opening of Japan to about the time of the World’s Parliament of Religions in Chicago in 1893, Buddhist institutions were forced into a largely defensive posture in the face of programs for radical social change and the influx of Christian missionizing. Buddhist reform movements were beginning to arise, but on the whole it was a period for regrouping, apologetics, and new organizational rather than intellectual development. The observations and criticisms by Christian missionaries regarding Japanese Buddhism during this period reveal the challenges to which Buddhists sought to respond. An example is a lecture delivered by M. L. Gordon (1844–1900), a Congregational missionary and teacher, to the “General Conference of the Protestant Missionaries of Japan” in Osaka in 1883. To more than one hundred missionaries, Gordon, a scholar of Japanese Buddhism and author of tracts in both Japanese and English, discussed “the religious influence of Buddhism as an obstacle to the reception of the Gospel in Japan” (Gordon 1883). He notes that in the modernizing Japan of his time, “there are many among the educated classes who not only have no sympathy with Buddhism but violently hate it.” Still, he believed Buddhism remained the primary impediment to missionizing. Moreover, he identified Pure Land Buddhism, specifically the Shin Buddhism (Jōdo Shinshū) in the tradition of Shinran’s thought, as “the most popular and flourishing” of Buddhist schools. Gordon’s critique of Japanese Buddhism, and of Shin Buddhism in particular, highlights issues that Buddhist thinkers have continued to grapple with in the modern era up to today: reasoned understanding in the face of modern knowledge, existential engagement, and social action.