Shinran Quotes on God

Shinran (1173–1263) — the Japanese Buddhist monk whose teaching gave rise to the Jōdo Shinshū (True Pure Land) tradition that became the largest school of Japanese Buddhism — gave Pure Land Mahayana its most influential philosophical statement of salvation through the absolute power of Other-Power (tariki). The central commitment of the Kyōgyōshinshō and the more accessible late writings is that the human capacities of the present degenerate age (mappō) are wholly inadequate to the practice of the contemplative and ethical disciplines the older Buddhist traditions had relied upon — and that genuine liberation comes only through the trusting acceptance of the Original Vow of Amida Buddha to bring all sentient beings to the Pure Land, with the recitation of the Name (nembutsu) understood as the spontaneous expression of that received faith rather than the meritorious work of the practitioner. The framework, drawing on Shinran’s earlier teacher Hōnen and the broader Pure Land tradition, shaped the subsequent Japanese Buddhist landscape and supplied the principal classical analogue in the Buddhist tradition of grace-based Christian theologies.