A Monk Who Retreated to Escape a Fight He Did Not Start

Genshin did not retreat to Yokawa because he wanted quiet for its own sake. By the early 980s, factional conflict inside the Tendai school on Mount Hiei had grown severe enough, driven in part by his own teacher Ryogen's policies favoring one faction over another, that Genshin chose to withdraw to the more remote Yokawa area of the mountain rather than remain at the center of a fight he had not started. It was there, away from that conflict, that he completed the Ojoyoshu in 985, a three fascicle treatise laying out Pure Land Buddhist theory and practice more systematically than any Japanese text had attempted before it.

The book Genshin produced in that retreat did not read as a departure from his own Tendai training so much as an extension of it. He remained a Tendai monk for the whole of his life, and the practices the Ojoyoshu recommends, above all the recitation of Amida Buddha's name known as nembutsu, sit within a devotional current Tendai had already been cultivating on Mount Hiei for generations rather than importing something foreign to it. What made the book unusual was less its content than its ambition: a comprehensive, orderly account of how to die well by Pure Land standards, complete with ten specific practices a devotee should perform at the point of death to invoke Amida's welcoming descent.