Amitabha

Pure Land Buddhism is the most widely practised form of Buddhism in East Asia by a large margin, and it rests entirely on a promise that a buddha is held to have made and to be keeping.

The account is in the Larger Sukhavativyuha Sutra. A monk named Dharmakara, in the presence of a previous buddha, makes a series of vows and declares that he will not accept buddhahood unless they are all fulfilled. The decisive one, generally numbered the eighteenth, undertakes that beings who sincerely call on him, wishing for birth in his land, will be reborn there. He then attains buddhahood as Amitabha, boundless light, also called Amitayus, boundless life. The logic is compact and is the whole of the tradition: he is a buddha, therefore the vows were fulfilled, therefore the promise holds.

Sukhavati, the land of bliss, in the west, is not a heaven in the sense of a final destination. It is a place where the conditions for practice are perfect and where awakening is therefore assured. The claim is not that calling on Amitabha substitutes for the path; it is that it secures a rebirth in which the path cannot fail.

The practice is recitation of the name: nianfo in Chinese, nembutsu in Japanese, namo Amituofo and namu Amida butsu. It requires no literacy, no monastery, no leisure and no ritual expertise, which is why it spread as it did.

Honen in twelfth-century Japan made exclusive nembutsu the sufficient practice. Shinran, his disciple, took the further step that defines Jodo Shinshu: if the practitioner's own effort could contribute to the result, salvation would be a wage rather than a gift, so even the trust that prompts the recitation must itself be the buddha's gift. On that view the recitation is gratitude for something already accomplished rather than a means of accomplishing it. Shinran married and had children, and the Jodo Shinshu priesthood has been non-celibate since.

The historical study of Pure Land Buddhism turns on a small number of hard data and a large number of translation questions, and it is a good illustration of how early Mahayana history actually gets done.

The hardest datum is an inscription. A pedestal from Govindnagar, now in the Government Museum at Mathura, is dated by Gregory Schopen to the twenty-sixth year of the Great King Huveshka, which is 104 of the common era. It records the dedication of an image of the Blessed One, the Buddha Amitabha, and the donor's hope that all living things obtain the unexcelled knowledge of a buddha. This is the earliest known epigraphic mention of him, and it puts him in India in the early second century, considerably earlier than a casual account of Pure Land as an East Asian development would suggest.

The earliest sutra mention is in the Pratyutpanna Samadhi Sutra, translated into Chinese by the Kushan monk Lokaksema, and dated between the first century before the common era and the second after it. Compilation of the Larger Sukhavativyuha has been proposed for Kushan-era Gandhara, but that origin is disputed.

The translator problem. Five Chinese translations of the Larger Sutra survive. The one catalogued as T. 362 is traditionally attributed to Zhi Qian but is now thought likely to be the work of Lokaksema or his lineage; T. 361 is probably Zhi Qian's revision of it. T. 360, made between 359 and 429 by Buddhabhadra and Baoyun, became the standard version in China and is the one East Asian Pure Land actually reads.

This matters because doctrine follows the text a tradition uses. Jan Nattier's work, including her Guide to the Earliest Chinese Buddhist Translations of 2008, has revised a number of these attributions, and early Chinese versions show traces of having been translated from Gandhari rather than Sanskrit.