Sukhavati, the "Land of Bliss," commonly called the Pure Land, is the paradise of the Buddha Amitabha (Amida) in the west, and it represents one of the most consequential developments in Mahayana Buddhism: the making of liberation accessible through devotion rather than through the rigours of monastic discipline.
According to the Pure Land sutras, the bodhisattva Dharmakara made a series of great vows, above all the eighteenth, promising that when he became the Buddha Amitabha, any being who called on him with sincere faith would be reborn in his Pure Land. And Sukhavati is designed for one purpose: it is a realm so free of suffering, distraction, and the conditions that drive rebirth that any being reborn there can pursue enlightenment under ideal circumstances and attain it without falling back. It is described in luminous, jewelled imagery, lotus lakes, jewel-trees, the constant teaching of the Dharma, but its real significance is soteriological. Because rebirth there is won not by one's own accumulated merit but by reliance on Amitabha's vow-power, the Pure Land path opened Buddhist liberation to laypeople, the illiterate, and the ordinary sinner, and Pure Land Buddhism, through teachers like Honen and Shinran, became the most widely practised form of Buddhism in East Asia.