Tariki and Jiriki (Other-Power and Self-Power)

Honen, a Tendai-trained monk, broke from the establishment of his day in 1175 to teach that in the present degenerate age, mappo, ordinary people could not realistically complete the demanding meditative and monastic disciplines that had defined the path for centuries, and that the recitation of Amida Buddha's name, the nembutsu, Namu Amida Butsu, was itself sufficient, because it called on Amida's own vow rather than the practitioner's accumulated merit. Honen's Pure Land school, Jodo Shu, still held the nembutsu as a practice to be repeated with devotion and discipline.

Shinran, Honen's disciple, pushed the logic further after his own teacher's exile. In his major work, the Kyogyoshinsho, Shinran taught that a single sincere moment of entrusting oneself to Amida's vow, shinjin, was the actual point at which salvation was settled, and that repeating the nembutsu afterward was gratitude rather than a further contribution toward one's own liberation. Where Honen still left room for the nembutsu itself to be read as a discipline the practitioner performs, Shinran read it as Amida's working expressing itself through the practitioner, closing the gap almost entirely between a person's own effort and the power that saves them. Shinran's teaching became, after his death, the foundation of Jodo Shinshu, the True Pure Land school, now the largest Buddhist denomination in Japan.

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.