Sukhavati (The Pure Land)

Sukhavati, the "Land of Bliss," commonly called the Pure Land, is the paradise of the Buddha Amitabha (Amida) in the west, and it represents one of the most consequential developments in Mahayana Buddhism: the making of liberation accessible through devotion rather than through the rigours of monastic discipline.

According to the Pure Land sutras, the bodhisattva Dharmakara made a series of great vows, above all the eighteenth, promising that when he became the Buddha Amitabha, any being who called on him with sincere faith would be reborn in his Pure Land. And Sukhavati is designed for one purpose: it is a realm so free of suffering, distraction, and the conditions that drive rebirth that any being reborn there can pursue enlightenment under ideal circumstances and attain it without falling back. It is described in luminous, jewelled imagery, lotus lakes, jewel-trees, the constant teaching of the Dharma, but its real significance is soteriological. Because rebirth there is won not by one's own accumulated merit but by reliance on Amitabha's vow-power, the Pure Land path opened Buddhist liberation to laypeople, the illiterate, and the ordinary sinner, and Pure Land Buddhism, through teachers like Honen and Shinran, became the most widely practised form of Buddhism in East Asia.

The Pure Land rests on a promise made by a bodhisattva. In the Larger Sukhavativyuha Sutra, the monk Dharmakara sets out a series of vows describing the buddha field he intends to establish and declares he will not accept buddhahood unless every one is fulfilled. He becomes Amitabha, so by the logic of the text the vows are fulfilled and the field exists. The eighteenth vow, that any being who calls his name in sincere faith will be born there, is the one the entire tradition turns on.

That makes the required practice extremely short. Reciting the name, nianfo in Chinese and nembutsu in Japanese, is available to the illiterate, the dying, the busy and the unmonastic, which is why this became the largest form of Buddhism in East Asia. Shinran pressed the logic furthest, arguing that even the impulse to recite is Amitabha's doing rather than the practitioner's, so that no self-powered effort is involved at all.

The Pure Land is not nirvana and the tradition is clear about that. It is a place where the conditions for practice are perfect and there is no falling back, so awakening follows. The offer is not salvation instead of the path; it is a birth in which the path finally becomes possible.