 Buddhism was in a different situation from Confucianism, however, because it was both a religion and a philosophy in premodern Japan. As a “foreign” religion it was deemed a pollutant to the pure Japanese spirituality of State Shintō and underwent various forms of persecution, even to the extent of mobs desecrating Buddhist cemeteries and altars within private homes. The major Buddhist reaction was institutional, trying to be less visibly an exception to the new order, at times even encouraging monks to marry and have families in service to the national program supporting population growth, for example. There was also a philosophical response, however. With Buddhism’s wide variety of schools of thought and its traditions of experiential verification, theories of consciousness, forms of dialectical logic, alternative forms of knowing, and so forth, some intellectuals felt there could be fertile interaction between premodern Buddhist thought and the newly introduced Western philosophies. As a result, some of the brightest young Buddhist seminarians were enrolled in philosophy programs at the Imperial Universities, creating a synergy between Western and Buddhist philosophy in Japan that continues in many quarters until the present. In addition, intrigued by the manner in which Christian theology was drawing on nineteeth- and twentieth-century European philosophies, pockets of so-called Buddhist-Christian dialogue began to emerge and fully blossomed in the post-censorship era after 1945.