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In the Steps of Amida Buddha

by George Gatenby

For forty years I have entertained a dream of writing a book with a title like 'In the Steps of Amitabha'. The reason is that, during that time, the Pure Land Dharma has been the light of my soul. It is a religion of absolute beauty, absolute truth and absolute love and compassion.

Such a book would require a long exploratory journey, starting at the seat of Gautama Buddha's enlightenment at Bodhgaya in Bihar. Then I would visit the Vulture Peak near the ancient city of Rajagriha, and the garden of Anathapindada. All of these sites have been identified in the ancient Pure Land scriptures as places where the seeds of Pure Land Dharma were sown.

But everything really begins incalculable ages before the time of Gautama Buddha, when Amida Buddha formed the Universal Vow, the quintessential expression of the Buddha Dharma, to lead beings of every kind to final liberation by means of his Name, namu-amida-butsu. It is not really until about two thousand years ago that the working of the Vow comes to be recorded in the annals of history because until that time the Dharma was transmitted without writing. In the meantime, it was Gautama Buddha who introduced Amida Buddha to his faithful disciples.

Sometimes the Gautama is portrayed as some kind of clinical reductionist, almost like a modern scientist. There are two problems here. One is that spiritual and mundane truth are two different but complementary fields of understanding. The second is that many modern commentators and teachers of the Buddha Dharma decontextualise the teaching. The reality is that the Buddha cannot be seen outside of his Vedantic context. He was raised as a member of the Shaivite tradition and his teaching contains both assumptions and reactions derived from his spiritual environment. For example, the Buddha's meditation practice was not his invention. He adapted traditional methods.

The evidence is that Gautama was a wonderful, complex, loving and warm personality, with certainty of his understanding, deep inner calm and great love for beings - in the way of a realised Indian guru. Otherwise he would not have been as popular as he was in his day. For example, he looked back, we know, to his enlightened predecessors, buddhas who lived in invisible ages gone by. In his deep meditation (samadhi), he found union with Amida Buddha.

From Gautama Buddha's teaching, the Pure Land way, the Dharma of Infinite Life and Light became manifest in history and was passed on from generation to generation. As for all of Gautama's teaching, the news of the Buddha of Immeasurable Light 'Amitabha' and Immeasurable Life 'Amitayus' was initially conveyed by word of mouth. The lived experience of those followers of this Dharma - monks and nuns, laywomen and laymen - confirmed that this was the present Buddha.¹

Early in the Common Era, it seems that many became concerned that the Buddha Dharma was under threat and that the teachings needed to be recorded for posterity. Among the teachings of the Buddha to be written down at this time was the Sukhavati Vyuha Sutra, later to become known as the Larger Sutra of Immeasurable Life.²

It seems that the bearers of these sutras, who at last recorded them in writing during the first or second century of the Common Era, were monks of the Lokottaravada school. Not long after the famous Pali Canon was composed in distant Sri Lanka, they wrote the sutra down on the orders of another Buddhist school, that Mahishasakas. Both schools were present where the sutra seems to have been recorded: in the kingdom of Gandhara (part of present day Pakistan and Afghanistan).³ The Mahishasakas had already discovered the intractable truth that ordinary people 'cannot uproot desire and anger'.⁴ It was clearly time to put the Larger Sutra into circulation.

In Gandhara, later, lived Vasubandhu Bodhisattva who was a great scholar, philosopher and Buddhist practitioner. He took refuge exclusively in Amida Buddha and wrote A Treatise on the Pure Land. This is the first practical manual and guide to full engagement with the living, present Amida Buddha. Remember that the Buddha Dharma is a practical way of living and is non-dogmatic. Its teachings do not quicken until they are assimilated into one’s life and put into practice. Hence, for Vasubandhu Bodhisattva, Amida Buddha is as alive and real as Gautama Buddha was to his disciples. His land was enduring and true.

Since Afghanistan or Pakistan is where the sutras that we love were first compiled, and because Vasubandhu lived in Purushapura (Peshawar), a great city of Gandhara, my journey would definitely call there. Then I would travel along the Silk Road on the northern side of the Himalayas because that was the way that the Pure Land Dharma travelled into China, and on into Korea and Japan.

The wonderful news of the Buddha Amida was passed from oasis to oasis through the agency of monk and merchant. Countless millions of people lived in Amida’s light. Soon his sutras arrived in China. One by one, great teachers adopted Amida Buddha as their refuge and, through practical knowledge of him, both at first hand and through the teaching of their forerunners and the classical sutras, they began to tell us more and more about him and expound his teaching with greater and greater clarity.

Masters T'an-luan (476-542 CE), Tao-Ch'o (563-645 CE) and Shan-tao (613-681 CE) through study of the sutras and direct knowledge, laid the groundwork for the finest flowering of Amida Buddha's Dharma in Japan.

From China to Japan my path would take me, until I came to Mt Hiei near Kyoto. For here the fine masters, Genshin (942-1017 CE) and Honen (1133-1212 CE) lived. But my path would ultimately take me across the mountains to Inada (Ibaraki) and Sainenji (temple) near the east coast of the main island of Japan. For it is here that Shinran Shonin (1173-1263 CE) finally collated the works of these ambassadors of Amida Buddha into a single comprehensive volume - The True Teaching, Practice, and Realisation of the Pure Land Way - so that all may hear and be liberated by Amida's Dharma. All of the light, all of the knowledge, and all of the virtue of the sutras and the masters, are contained in this splendid book.

On that wooded hillside, where Sainenji has been located for centuries, the light of the Dharma that I love still shines.

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1: The Pratyutpanna Samadhi Sutra, Numata Center for Buddhist Translation and Research, 1998, p. 18.

2: Indian Buddhism, Hajime Nakamura, Buddhist Tradition Series, pp. 201-209.

3: Op cit Nakamura, p. 205.

4: The Cycle of the Formation of the Schismatic Doctrines, Numata Center for Buddhist Translation and Research, 2004, p. 123.