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It’s interesting to check the “other side” and see how the more profound Pure Land practitioners understood this distinction. I think we see it’s not that far from what Bankei is saying, and the distinction ultimately exists only in names and style:
“Most people assume that by drawing a distinction between self-power and Other Power and so maintaining the reality of the self, they can lean upon Other Power and in this way attain birth. This is a misapprehension. The distinction of self-power and Other Power is but the first stage. True Other Power means discarding utterly the standpoints of self and other and simply attaining Buddhahood in one thought-moment. ” (No Abode: The Record of Ippen, p. 138)
Interesting fellow, somewhat akin to Bankei in that he did within the context of Pure-Land Buddhism what Bankei succeeded in doing within Zen: they both broke through conventional patterns and marvelously led people to the Source; although the direct-comparison ends there. Ippen was not as direct as Bankei. He was like a Pied-Piper sort of character, prancing-around through the common square while chanting the Nembetsu, enchanting people to follow him to the Source of their being. One of his writings highlights his round-about way to self-realization:
“Perfect Enlightenment ten kalpas past–pervading the realm of sentient beings;
Birth in one thought-moment—in Amida’s Land
When ten and one are nondual, we realize no-birth;
Where Land and realm are the same, we sit in Amida’s great assembly.”
Bankei does him one better. You see, there was no “Birth” of any sort for Bankei; one did not have to be enamored with Amidism’s enrapturing one to awaken and be “re-born” in the Pure Land where and “when” the non-dual realization is eventually won. For Bankei one didn’t even have to “pass Go and go directly to the Source”; for him there was simply the spontaneous Recollection of the Unborn In the Unborn As the Unborn—there was no-form of any secondary “outside/other-side” intermediary agencies that needed to be “invoked” in order for Awakening to occur. Either one is attuned to the Un-born (It’s all UN-create, with no secondary qualities whatsoever) or one is still enraptured with those outside/otherside agencies that can lead one down the garden path to a false imitation of Self-Actualized Buddhahood. All is perfectly resolved in the Unborn and No-where else.
Thank you for the very thoughtful reply, I would just like to add that there’s a crucial ambiguity in how the Pure Land is understood in the Japanese tradition … Shinran speaks of salvation in the present, and shuns the idea of waiting for death (he claims people who look forward to the Pure Land after death have not attained birth). – This is supreme upaya: that the Pure Land, even though a future thing, is already here for one that “attains birth”. – It’s similar to the ambiguity in Christianity, – sometimes Heaven understood as “after death”, but then as “being within us” and “being already here, but people do not see it”.