Outside Japanese Pure Land Buddhism, jiriki describes the operating assumption of most Buddhist practice: the Noble Eightfold Path, the paramitas of the bodhisattva path, and the meditative disciplines of Zen and Vajrayana all present awakening as something a practitioner reaches through sustained effort, however much they also rely on a teacher, a community and, in Vajrayana, the empowerment of a guru. Zen teachers in particular have sometimes framed satori, sudden insight, as arising only when self-power exhausts itself against a koan or in prolonged zazen, a description that resembles tariki in its emphasis on grace arriving rather than being achieved, while remaining doctrinally a jiriki tradition because the exhaustion itself is the practitioner's own sustained work.
Jodo Shinshu teachers have used the self-power and other-power distinction polemically against both mainstream Buddhist monasticism and against Jodo Shu, arguing that any residual sense of the nembutsu as one's own meritorious act reintroduces self-power through the back door and compromises the completeness of Amida's vow. Other Pure Land traditions, in China, Korea and elsewhere in Japan, have generally held a middle position, treating recitation of the Buddha's name as both an expression of other-power and a discipline worth sustained practice, without accepting Shinran's sharper either-or.