Pure Land

Pure Land. The term ‘Pure Land’ is a Chinese invention, but it refers to a concept long known in Buddhism under other names such as Buddha-land or Buddha-field (Skt., Buddha-kṣetra). The idea arose in India with the development of Mahāyāna Buddhism, among whose innovations was the teaching that beings do not simply go into extinction upon the attainment of Buddhahood, but remain in the world to help others. Since they continue to exist, they must exist in a place, and since they are completely purified, their dwelling must also be completely pure. In some scriptures, such as the Vimalakīrti-nirdeśa Sūtra, this did not imply the existence of a separate realm distinct from that in which unenlightened beings dwelt, but was this very world of suffering. Its purity derived from the fact that the Buddhas saw its true nature, which was pure, whereas other beings saw it through the lens of their delusion, which rendered it impure. However, another strain of thought did assign different realms to different Buddhas, and in time several of the more prominent Buddhas received Pure Lands with names and definite locations: to the west, the Buddha Amitābha dwelt in the land of Sukhāvatī, while to the east, the Buddha Akṣobhya presided over Abhirati. Within the esoteric tradition (see Esoteric Buddhism), these lands and their directions became part of maps of the cosmos known as maṇḍalas. Despite the specificity of their locations and features, however, these lands were seen as outside of saṃsāra, and were thus not to be confused with the ‘heavens’, the realms of the popular gods (deva) derived from Hindu mythology.

In India, the composition of the classic ‘Pure Land Scriptures’ (such as the Longer and Shorter Sukhāvatī-vyūha Sūtras) helped to popularize the idea that the Buddhas who dwelt in these Pure Lands could bring unenlightened beings into them for teaching without compromising the purity of the environs. In China, the rise of the Pure Land school popularized this idea, and spurred many centuries of theoretical accounts of the nature of the Pure Lands, and the genesis of typologies that sought to classify the various types of Pure Lands. For example, the thinker Ching-ying Hui-yüan (523–92) identified three different types of Pure Land, depending upon the beings that dwell in them or attain their vision: (1) the phenomenal Pure Land where unenlightened beings go which, while purified by the Buddha's presence, still presents itself to their minds according to their desires; (2) the Pure Land with characteristics, which accommodates those who achieved enlightenment (bodhi) following the Hīnayāna path and Mahāyāna followers in the early stages of practice; and (3) the true Pure Land, achieved by accomplished Bodhisattvas on the Mahāyāna path. This latter type had further subdivisions into lands of Bodhisattvas and lands of Buddhas, with the latter further categorized into two aspects: the land as it appears to the Buddha residing in it, and the way he manifests it to other beings.

The T'ien-t'ai school of China established a four fold typology of both pure and impure lands. (1) ‘Lands where the holy ones and ordinary beings dwell together’ indicated impure lands where Buddhas appear in order to teach. (2) ‘Lands of skilful means with remainder’ pointed to lands inhabited by Hīnayāna adepts who had taken the path of skilful means in which teachings were adapted to their capacities rather than expressed directly. They had escaped saṃsāra, and so this realm is outside the ordinary realms of rebirth and represents a true liberation, but the inhabitants still have more to learn. (3) ‘Lands of true recompense without obstruction’ are attained by those Mahāyāna Bodhisattvas who have achieved a direct vision of the truth. (4) Finally, the ‘Land of eternally quiescent light’ is the destination of perfected Buddhas and is free of all defining characteristics and dualisms, and so manifests only quiescence and peace, with nothing to fix the mind upon.

Within the Pure Land movement in China, another issue was whether the particular manner in which Sukhāvatī, the Pure Land of the Buddha Amitābha, manifests is due to the karma of the Buddha or of the unenlightened beings whom he draws into his land after their death. In part, the answer to this question depended upon correlating the Pure Land with one of the three bodies (trikāya) of a Buddha. Early Pure Land masters regarded Sukhāvatī as corresponding to a Buddha's Emanation Body (nirmāṇa-kāya), which meant that the Buddha emanated it as a teaching device for the worldlings who entered it; its appearance did not reflect the enlightened vision of its Buddha. Breaking with this view, the master Tao-ch'o (562–645) held that it was a ‘reward-land’ corresponding to the Buddha's Enjoyment Body (saṃbhoga-kāya), which implied that the appearance of the land did indeed correspond to the Buddha's own level of realization, and was not adapted to the inferior capacities of worldlings. Logically, the third body, the Truth Body (dharma-kāya), would have corresponded to something like the land of eternally quiescent light referred to above, but Tao-ch'o denied that such a thing existed: being a complete vision of the final nature of all reality, it could not be separated from impure phenomena or localized in any way, and so such a land could not be identified anywhere. The above is a sampling of some of the reflections of Chinese masters on the nature of Pure Lands in general, and Sukhāvatī in particular. There were other issues upon which various writers disagreed, such as whether or not Pure Lands exist within the ‘Triple World’, and how to think of Pure Lands using the dyadic notions of ‘principle’ (Chin., li) and ‘phenomena’ (Chin., shih) that became popular later. All of these issues yielded a richly textured body of literature explaining the nature of Pure Lands.