The Two Aspects of “Birth in the Pure Land”

The term “birth in the Pure Land” (ojo) is written with two kanji characters, “to go” (o) and “be born” (jo), and generally has the meaning of “going to Amida Buddha’s Pure Land of Ultimate Joy and being born there.” This is the sense in which the Venerable Master often used this term .

The Venerable Master used the term ojo many times in the above way. A typical example is in Jodo Sankyo Ojo Monrui:

Birth in the Pure Land as described in the Larger Sutra ... is being in the “rightly established group” in this life which guarantees birth in the True Recompensed Land (Pure Land). We attain the unparalleled Enlightenment because that is the true purpose of Amida Buddha’s “merit transference” (eko) in causing our birth there. This is the basic teaching of the Larger Sutra. That is why it is referred to as “birth in the Pure Land based (vowed) in the Larger Sutra,” and also as, “impossible-to-conceive-of birth in the Pure Land.”

The Venerable Master Shinran referred to “birth in the Pure Land based on ‘Buddha-centered power’” (tariki ojo) based on the 18th Vow of the Larger Sutra as, “impossible-to-conceive-of birth in the Pure Land” (nanjigi ojo) and also as, “birth in the Pure Land (vowed) in the Larger Sutra” (daikyo ojo). He wrote that those who dwell in the “rightly established state,” will be born in the “True Land of Recompense” (shinjitsu hodo) and attain the unsurpassed enlightenment without fail when their life in this world ends.

Further, in the Chapter on Transformed Land of the Kyogyoshinsho, the Venerable Master wrote:

... I have left the provisional “true gate” and turned to the “sea of the best selected vow”; having abandoned aspiration for the “difficult-to-conceive-of birth” in the Pure Land (naji ojo, the 20th Vow), I now desire the “impossible-to-conceive-of-birth” in the Pure Land (nanjigi ojo, the 18th Vow). What deep significance there is in the “vow of accomplishing the ultimate salvation”!

Here the Venerable Master expressed his desire to be among the “rightly-established group” of those assured of birth in the True Land of Recompense and attaining the unsurpassed Enlightenment in the “impossible-to-conceive-of Pure Land.

I seem to keep repeating myself, but the “birth in the Pure Land” used here and almost everywhere else, is the birth in the Pure Land of “going to Amida Buddha’s Pure Land and being born there.”;

But the Venerable Master’s understanding of the text in the Larger Sutra known as “passage on completion of the Primal Vow” (hongan jojumon) is unique. The passage as it appears in the sutra is:

All sentient beings who hear his Name, rejoice in faith, remember him even once and sincerely transfer the merit of virtuous practices to that land, aspiring to be born there, will immediately be born there and dwell in the “stage of nonretrogression.”