The Pure Land Buddhist Notion of Faith

Abstract

I seek not only to clarify Pure Land faith, but also to go beyond the mutual exclusivistic tendency in our encounter with other traditions in order to seek a way for the creative transformation and peaceful coexistence of Christianity and Pure Land Buddhism that will be mutually fructifying. Four major shifts in particular should perhaps be noted here in order to highlight the specific transition embodied in Pure Land Buddhism. All four contributed to the culmination of the Pure Land tradition in the Shin Buddhism expounded by Shinran inJapan. First is the appearance of Gautama Buddha in the sarmsaric, birth-and-death transmigrating world of segregation and defilement in India. His teaching liberated oppressed people from the bondage of caste society. There is the strong implication in his sermons that all sentient beings, including even animals and trees, are equal before the truth of Dharma, and that all will become enlightened beings. The second shift takes place with the emergence of the Mahayana movement. It was a revolution in its motivation to seek religious truth in the midst of the secular world; it is not apart from the profane that the sacred is revealed and attained. With this claim, the Mahayana movement gave rise to the image of secular bodhisattvas, who sought religious truth precisely within the realm of profanity and who thus were solely concerned with the salvation of the laity. The third shift is the prodigious translation of Sanskrit and Pali scriptures into Chinese. It effected an unprecedented transformation of Mahayana Buddhism, in particular its practice as a path toward enlightenment and its method of interpretation. The fourth shift, which is the most radical, found itself in the transition from self-power to Other Power, by which one could attain enlightenment. This was