Shinran, and the Power of the Other

Jodo Shinshu, the "True Pure Land school," was founded on the teaching of Shinran (1173-1263), a disciple of Honen who carried Pure Land Buddhism to its most radical conclusion. Its governing idea is tariki, "other-power": in this degenerate age, Shinran taught, no one can win liberation by their own effort (jiriki); salvation comes entirely through the compassionate Primal Vow of the Buddha Amida, who has vowed to bring all who entrust themselves to him to rebirth in his Pure Land.

What is asked of the believer is not accumulated merit but shinjin, the entrusting faith that is itself Amida's gift, expressed in the grateful saying of the nembutsu, "Namu Amida Butsu." Shinran drew the practical consequences unflinchingly: he married and ate meat, rejecting the monk-lay divide, and held that even the deliberately wicked, precisely as those most helpless to save themselves, are the very objects of Amida's vow, a teaching crystallised in the famous saying that "even a good person attains rebirth, how much more the evil person."