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Genshin Founds a Society of Monks for Mutual Deathbed Practice

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Genshin Founds a Society of Monks for Mutual Deathbed Practice

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Genshin founded the Nijugo Zanmai-e, the Society of Twenty Five for Samadhi, in 986 on Mount Hiei, a documented monastic institution distinct from the written text of the Ojoyoshu his first article covers. The society bound its members to practice nembutsu together and to attend one another at the moment of death, reciting Amida's name at a dying member's bedside so that his final thought would be fixed on the Pure Land, a documented communal practice distinct from a text read alone by scholars and later reformers.

That mutual deathbed vow set Genshin's own teaching apart from an abstract doctrine handed down in writing: the society trained its members to apply the Ojoyoshu's own claims about the moment of death under real conditions, among monks who had committed to be physically present for each other's dying, a documented institutional application distinct from the systematized guide itself. Membership in the Nijugo Zanmai-e placed Genshin inside an organized community of practice on Mount Hiei rather than positioning him only as an author working from his own study.

That the same monk who gathered Tendai doctrine, Chinese commentary and inherited practice into the single systematic guide later reformers built on also founded a society whose twenty five members bound themselves to attend each other's actual deaths, marks Genshin's Nijugo Zanmai-e as a documented case where Pure Land teaching he had organized on the page was organized a second time, as a living community keeping a mutual vow.

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Source The Princeton Dictionary of BuddhismRobert E. Buswell Jr. and Donald S. Lopez Jr.
Sources
The Princeton Dictionary of Buddhism
Robert E. Buswell Jr. and Donald S. Lopez Jr., Princeton University Press, 2014View the Source
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