Pure Land · Skt: sukhāvatī

Pure Land is the great devotional stream of Mahayana Buddhism in East Asia. The Amida path is expounded in the Larger and Smaller Sutras of the Adornments of the Buddha-field Named Bliss (Sukhāvatīvyūha-sūtra), which the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy traces “back to northwestern India in about the first century CE”. The Larger Sutra tells “how the bodhisattva Dharma-Storehouse (Dharmākara) established and fulfilled vows to become Amida”, glossed as “immeasurable [light and life]”, “the buddha of compassion who leads all beings to enlightenment by enabling them to be born into his buddha-field”. Sutras teaching birth in that buddha-field “were among the earliest Buddhist scriptures transmitted to China”, and the teaching was taken up by Indian thinkers including Nāgārjuna and Vasubandhu.

The practice is the nembutsu, the saying of the buddha’s name. Earlier nembutsu practice “centered on mindfulness exercises conducted in veneration of Sakyamuni Buddha” and later became monastic ritual; the Japanese teacher Hōnen made it the whole path, “establishing the practice of vocal nembutsu as an independent, self-sufficient path of Buddhist praxis” in which “only the simple saying of ‘Namu-amida-butsu’ with complete trust was involved”. The tradition calls reliance on one’s own disciplined effort “self-power”, and turns instead to the nembutsu “as the act that embodies ‘Other Power’, Amida Buddha’s wisdom-compassion functioning in the world”. Shinran’s stream became Shin Buddhism (Jōdo Shinshū). For the buddha at its centre, see Amida Buddha.