Shinjin as Amida's Gift in Shinran's Doctrine

Shinjin, usually translated entrusting faith or true entrusting, is the term Shinran uses in the Kyogyoshinsho for the single moment his doctrine treats as the actual cause of birth in the Pure Land, displacing the accumulated practice earlier Buddhist and even earlier Pure Land teaching had treated as the cause. Shinran distinguishes shinjin sharply from ordinary belief or confidence built up through a person's own reflection or effort, since building faith by one's own effort would itself be a form of self-power, the very thing his doctrine of other-power sets aside; shinjin, in his account, is itself a gift transmitted from Amida's own mind to the follower, so the very capacity to entrust oneself is already Amida's working rather than the follower's achievement. Once shinjin arises, Shinran holds that birth in the Pure Land is settled at that moment, not deferred until death, a position summarized in Jodo Shinshu doctrine as the stage of the truly settled, and one that made the ongoing recitation of Amida's name afterward a response to an already accomplished liberation rather than a continuing bid for one. James Dobbins' study of Jodo Shinshu's formation describes this reordering, faith settled in life rather than practice accumulated toward death, as the doctrinal center that most sharply distinguished Shinran's teaching from the Pure Land Buddhism practiced around him.