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Shinran's Doctrine of Other-Power in the Kyogyoshinsho

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Shinran's Doctrine of Other-Power in the Kyogyoshinsho

Shinran (1173 to 1263), a disciple of the Pure Land teacher Honen who went on to found what became the Jodo Shinshu school, built his major work, a collection on teaching, practice, faith and realization known as the Kyogyoshinsho, around a single reorientation: liberation is accomplished entirely by Amida Buddha's own vow, not by any capacity, however refined, in the person seeking it. Shinran calls this other-power, tariki, and sets it explicitly against self-power, jiriki, the broad Buddhist assumption that a practitioner advances toward liberation through their own accumulated discipline, merit and insight. In his reading of the Pure Land sutras, Amida's eighteenth vow already promises birth in the Pure Land to anyone who entrusts themselves to it, so the entire structure of graduated practice found elsewhere in Buddhism, including in the Pure Land tradition he inherited from Honen, is for Shinran already accomplished on Amida's side before the practitioner does anything at all. The doctrine is not a claim that no effort exists in Jodo Shinshu life, but that the effort a follower makes, chiefly reciting Amida's name, does not itself cause birth in the Pure Land the way merit is usually thought to cause a good rebirth; the cause, in Shinran's own account, is entirely Amida's vow, received rather than earned.

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Kyogyoshinsho
ShinranShinran's Kyogyoshinsho, setting out other-power against self-power as the doctrine's foundation
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