While some say that we should practise good works, bring our stock of merits to maturity, and be born in the Pure Land, others say that we need only repeat the name of Amida in order to be born in the Pure Land, by the merit produced from such repetition.  These doctrines concerning repetitions, however, are all considered but “temporary expedients.”  So also is the rigid classification, so prominent in “the old sects,” of all beings or pupils into three grades.  As in Islam or Calvinism, all believers stand on a level.  To Shin-ran the Radical, the practices even of J[=o]-d[=o] seemed complicated and difficult, and all that appeared necessary to him was faith in the desire of Amida to bless and save.  To Shinran,[9] faith was the sole saving act.

To rely upon the power of the Original Prayer of Amitabha Buddha with the whole heart and give up all idea of ji-riki or self-power, is called the truth.  This truth is the doctrine of this sect of Shin.[10] In a word, not synergism, not faith and works, but faith only is the teaching of Shin Shu.

Shinran, the founder of this sect in Japan, was born A.D. 1173 and died in the year 1262.  He was very naturally one who had been first educated in the J[=o]-d[=o] sect, then the ruling one at the imperial court in Ki[=o]to.  Shall we call him a Japanese Luther, because of his insistence on salvation by faith only?  He is popularly believed to have been descended from one of the Shint[=o] gods, being on his father’s side the twenty-first in the line of generation.  On his mother’s side he was of the lineage of the Minamoto or Genji, a clan sprung from Mikados and famous during centuries for its victorious warriors.  H[=o]-nen was his teacher, and like his teacher, Shinran studied at the great monastery near Ki[=o]to, learning first the doctrine of the Tendai, and then, at the age of twenty-nine, receiving from H[=o]-nen the tenets of the J[=o]-d[=o] sect.  Shortly after, at thirty years of age, he began to promulgate his doctrines.  Then he took a step as new to Buddhism, as was Luther’s union with Katharine von Bora, to the ecclesiasticism of his time.  He married a lady of the imperial court, named Tamayori, who was the daughter of the Kuambaku or premier.

Shinran thus taught by example, if not formally and by written precept, that marriage was honorable, and that celibacy was an invention of the priests not warranted by primitive Buddhism.  Penance, fasting, prescribed diet, pilgrimages, isolation from society whether as hermits or in the cloister, and generally amulets and charms, are all tabooed by this sect.  Monasteries imposing life-vows are unknown within its pale.  Family life takes the place of monkish seclusion.  Devout prayer, purity, earnestness of life and trust in Buddha himself as the only worker of perfect righteousness, are insisted upon.  Morality is taught to be more important than orthodoxy.