Shandao

The Contemplation Sutra sets out sixteen visualisations, beginning with the setting sun and building through the ground, the trees, the water and the ornaments of the Pure Land to the figure of Amitabha himself. Read straightforwardly, it prescribes a demanding programme of sustained visual concentration, and most earlier commentators read it that way, treating the final passages about simply calling the Buddha's name as a concession to the incapable.

Shandao inverted the emphasis. He argued that the sutra's intended audience is precisely the ordinary, distracted, morally compromised person, that the visualisations describe what the Pure Land is rather than prescribe how to reach it, and that the practice actually enjoined is the vocal recitation of the name. He distinguished the right and settled practice, recitation, from the supporting practices of reading, contemplation, worship and praise, and he grounded the whole on Amitabha's vow rather than on any quality of the practitioner. Merit accumulated by the practitioner is not what carries them; the vow is.

He also read the sutra's nine grades of birth as covering people who had committed the gravest offences, which mattered enormously to those who received it. The Pure Land became not a reward for the accomplished but a refuge for those with nothing to offer, and the practice became something a person could do while working.

Honen encountered the commentary in the twelfth century after decades of study on Mount Hiei and treated it as an instruction addressed to him. His account of the moment turns on a single sentence in which Shandao urges wholehearted and exclusive recitation of the name, whether walking, standing, sitting or lying down. From that Honen drew the conclusion that recitation is not one practice among many but the sole practice for the present age, and founded Jodo shu on it. Shinran, his student, pressed further and located even the faith to recite in Amitabha's working rather than the practitioner's.

Because of this reception, Shandao occupies an unusual position: a Tang Chinese monk who became the charter authority for two Japanese schools whose combined membership makes them the largest form of Buddhism in Japan. His four-fascicle commentary was preserved in Japanese temple libraries while the Chinese transmission thinned.

One image of his is quoted everywhere in that tradition. A traveller is caught between a river of fire and a river of water, pursued from behind, with a narrow white path running between the two. Voices call from the near shore to turn back and from the far shore to come on. The path is the aspiration for birth in the Pure Land, the two rivers are anger and craving, and the point of the parable is that the traveller does not have to be brave, only to go forward because there is nothing else.