 Barth insightfully discusses specific doctrinal analogues in a long note in Church Dogmatics, and these parallels have indeed tended to form the foundations for the understanding of Japanese Pure Land Buddhism in much of Western scholarly literature. Unfortunately, to the extent that Pure Land Buddhism has seemed to resemble Protestant Christianity, it has also been assumed to be divorced from “genuine” or “original” Mahayana Buddhist thought and practices and devoid of any intellectual interest. Any comparative considerations of Japanese Pure Land Buddhist thought, therefore, require caution, even in the face of seemingly evident resemblance.