Other-power (tariki): liberation comes from Amida's vow and not from one's own effort

Shinran (1173 to 1263), a disciple of the Pure Land teacher Honen who went on to found what became the Jodo Shinshu school, built his major work, a collection on teaching, practice, faith and realization known as the Kyogyoshinsho, around a single reorientation: liberation is accomplished entirely by Amida Buddha's own vow, not by any capacity, however refined, in the person seeking it. Shinran calls this other-power, tariki, and sets it explicitly against self-power, jiriki, the broad Buddhist assumption that a practitioner advances toward liberation through their own accumulated discipline, merit and insight. In his reading of the Pure Land sutras, Amida's eighteenth vow already promises birth in the Pure Land to anyone who entrusts themselves to it, so the entire structure of graduated practice found elsewhere in Buddhism, including in the Pure Land tradition he inherited from Honen, is for Shinran already accomplished on Amida's side before the practitioner does anything at all. The doctrine is not a claim that no effort exists in Jodo Shinshu life, but that the effort a follower makes, chiefly reciting Amida's name, does not itself cause birth in the Pure Land the way merit is usually thought to cause a good rebirth; the cause, in Shinran's own account, is entirely Amida's vow, received rather than earned.

The Tannisho, a short record of Shinran's sayings compiled by a disciple traditionally identified as Yuien after the teacher's death, states the other-power doctrine in a form blunter than Shinran's own formal treatise. Its most quoted passage says that even a good person attains birth in the Pure Land, so how much more does an evil person, a statement the text immediately warns against misreading: ordinary people assume the reverse, that a good person's own accumulated merit should qualify them and an evil person's failures should disqualify them, and the Tannisho's point is that this entire way of counting merit belongs to self-power thinking, which Shinran's doctrine sets aside altogether. Under other-power, a person who cannot generate the self-power a rigorous practitioner might claim is, if anything, in a more honest position to entrust themselves fully to Amida's vow, since they hold nothing back as their own contribution. The compiler frames the whole short work as a corrective against teachings already circulating in his own generation that he judged to have drifted from what he had personally heard Shinran say, part of why the Tannisho, though not Shinran's own composition, is treated in Jodo Shinshu scholarship as one of the most direct surviving statements of how the founder's inner circle understood other-power in practice rather than only in formal doctrine.