The Reformer Who Trusted Grace Alone

Shinran is the founder of Jodo Shinshu, the "True Pure Land School," which became the largest Buddhist tradition in Japan, and he arrived there by carrying his teacher Honen's Pure Land Buddhism to its most radical conclusion. Where Honen taught reliance on the recitation of the nembutsu, Namu Amida Butsu, Shinran shifted the emphasis decisively from the human act to the Buddha's power. He taught that even the nembutsu is not a work we perform to earn rebirth, but the expression of faith (shinjin) that is itself a gift of Amida's "other-power" (tariki); the deluded self can do nothing to save itself, and salvation is wholly Amida's doing.

From this followed his most famous and startling formulation, that "even a good person is reborn in the Pure Land, how much more so an evil person", since it is precisely those who know they cannot save themselves who throw themselves entirely on the Buddha's vow. Shinran enacted the break with monasticism this implied: he married openly and ate meat, declaring himself "neither monk nor layman," and founded a tradition of married clergy. His teaching, radical in its abandonment of self-effort, made Buddhist liberation fully available to ordinary lay life.