Pure Land is the devotional current of Mahayana, and its central move is a reversal the rest of Buddhism does not make.
The ordinary Buddhist path is self-power: the practitioner does the work. Pure Land teaches other power. The buddha Amitabha, in the account the Pure Land sutras give, vowed while still a bodhisattva that any being who called on him in sincere trust would be received into the land he was establishing, a realm in which the obstacles to practice are absent and awakening is therefore assured. The practice that follows is the recitation of his name, nianfo in Chinese, nembutsu in Japanese, and on the most radical readings that is the whole of it.
The reasoning behind the reversal is a doctrine of the age. The tradition holds that the present period, mappo in Japanese, is one of decline in which the capacity for the older disciplines has gone, and that a teaching adequate to such an age must be one an ordinary person can actually perform. That claim is why Pure Land became, and remains, the most widely practised form of Buddhism in East Asia. It requires no monastery, no literacy, no leisure and no meditative aptitude.
Shinran, in thirteenth-century Japan, pressed the logic furthest. If salvation rests wholly on Amitabha, then the recitation cannot be a work that earns anything, and even the faith that produces it must be given rather than achieved. He married, ate meat, and described himself as neither monk nor layman. His tradition has a married clergy to this day.