The Tannisho on Self-Power and Other-Power

The Tannisho, a short record of Shinran's sayings compiled by a disciple traditionally identified as Yuien after the teacher's death, states the other-power doctrine in a form blunter than Shinran's own formal treatise. Its most quoted passage says that even a good person attains birth in the Pure Land, so how much more does an evil person, a statement the text immediately warns against misreading: ordinary people assume the reverse, that a good person's own accumulated merit should qualify them and an evil person's failures should disqualify them, and the Tannisho's point is that this entire way of counting merit belongs to self-power thinking, which Shinran's doctrine sets aside altogether. Under other-power, a person who cannot generate the self-power a rigorous practitioner might claim is, if anything, in a more honest position to entrust themselves fully to Amida's vow, since they hold nothing back as their own contribution. The compiler frames the whole short work as a corrective against teachings already circulating in his own generation that he judged to have drifted from what he had personally heard Shinran say, part of why the Tannisho, though not Shinran's own composition, is treated in Jodo Shinshu scholarship as one of the most direct surviving statements of how the founder's inner circle understood other-power in practice rather than only in formal doctrine.