Honen and Shinran, Two Readings of the Nembutsu

Shinran's teacher Honen, who founded the independent Pure Land school Jodo Shu a generation before Shinran established what became Jodo Shinshu, had already taught that reciting Amida's name was the one practice suited to a degenerate age in which more demanding disciplines had become impractical, a position that itself broke sharply from the wider Buddhist establishment of his time. Shinran's doctrine that the nembutsu is gratitude rather than cause carries Honen's simplification a further step, and the two schools that trace to teacher and disciple have kept the difference visible ever since: Jodo Shu still generally treats sustained nembutsu recitation as itself contributing toward birth in the Pure Land, close to Honen's own teaching, while Jodo Shinshu's doctrinal center holds that shinjin alone, received once, already accomplishes what the recitation in Jodo Shu is understood to work toward gradually. Historians of the two schools' formation trace part of this divergence to the circumstances of Shinran's own exile, a punishment imposed on Honen's movement by the court in 1207 that scattered Honen's students and sent Shinran to the provinces as a laicized, married teacher outside the capital's monastic institutions, a setting in which the doctrine Shinran built could not assume the kind of sustained ritual discipline available to monastics closer to the center of institutional Buddhism.