---
title: "The Pure Land Patriarchs I: Tanluan and Daochuo — Other-Power as Lexical Invention and the Ordinary Being as Soteriological Subject"
author: "釋慧鏡 (Shi Huijing)"
series: "Six Practice Gates, Volume 1 — Mindful of the Buddha: From Early Buddhist Recollection to the Flower Ornament Vision"
series_short: "NIAN"
volume: 1
paper_id: "NIAN-P20"
paper_number: 20
part: "Part VI · Two Streams"
part_number: 6
date: "2026-04-21"
version: "1.0"
license: "CC BY-NC-SA 4.0"
---

# The Pure Land Patriarchs I

**Tanluan and Daochuo**

**Other-Power as Lexical Invention and the Ordinary Being as Soteriological Subject — Part VI's Foundation Paper**

*中文主題：淨土祖師之一：曇鸞與道綽*

---

**Author:** 釋慧鏡 (Shi Huijing)
**Date:** April 2026
**License:** CC BY-NC-SA 4.0
**Version:** 1.0
**Series:** NIAN — Mindful of the Buddha

---

## Abstract
When Anglophone readers encounter 'other-power' (*tariki* 他力) in Pure Land scholarship, they typically meet it through the Jōdo Shinshū reception mediated by Shinran (1173–1263) and made available to Western audiences by Suzuki Daisetsu. Yet the Chinese term 「他力」 predates Shinran by some seven centuries, and its first systematic use is a Tang-era philological invention attributable to one master. This paper advances two interlocking theses about Tanluan (曇鸞, 476–542) and Daochuo (562–645). First, as an opening philological move: Tanluan did not inherit the 自力／他力 binary from Nāgārjuna's *Daśabhūmika-vibhāṣā* (T1521). Nāgārjuna's chapter nine, the *Easy Practice* chapter (易行品), contains no such binary, classifies easy-practice as a cowardly concession (*níng-ruò qiè-liè* 儜弱怯劣), and lists no 「他力」 vocabulary. Tanluan at T40.826b05 adds a fifth obstacle to difficult-practice — '唯是自力、無他力持' — absent from his source, and silently drops Nāgārjuna's pejorative valence; the binary is Tanluan's creation, attributed retroactively. Second, and more foundationally: the deeper innovation is not the vocabulary but the anthropological redefinition of *who is saved*. The three Pure Land sūtras (T0360 Larger Sukhāvatīvyūha, T0365 Contemplation, T0366 Smaller) and Vasubandhu's Treatise (T1524) together anchor a new soteriological subject — the *fánfū* 凡夫, the ordinary unliberated being unable to undertake conventional cultivation. Tanluan's 劣夫跨驢 (cripple-rider-on-donkey) metaphor and Daochuo's 置草引牛 — the latter preserved as Tanluan's own self-description in *Anle Ji* 卷下 第四大門 — crystallize this subject. Daochuo then re-anchors the 凡夫 to an empirical 末法 time frame grounded not in eschatological speculation but in the fifty-year-proximate communal trauma of the 574 北周武帝 persecution. §IV stages Robert Sharf (primary, anti-Shin-projection) and Charles Jones (secondary, anti-school-essentialism) as structurally integrated interlocutors rather than dismissed foils. P20 opens Part VI's Two Streams arc; P21 will take up Chan's counter-move to the vocabulary invented here.

**Keywords:** other-power, *tariki*, 他力, self-power, *zi-li*, 自力, Tanluan, 曇鸞, Daochuo, 道綽, Nāgārjuna, *Daśabhūmika-vibhāṣā*, T1521, *Easy Practice* chapter, 易行品, *níng-ruò qiè-liè*, 儜弱怯劣, philological invention, lexical invention, fifth obstacle, 唯是自力無他力持, *Wangsheng lun zhu*, 往生論註, T1819, *Anle Ji*, 安樂集, T1958, Vasubandhu, 世親, *Wangsheng lun*, 往生論, T1524, Sukhāvatīvyūha, *Wuliangshou jing*, 無量壽經, T0360, *Guan Wuliangshou jing*, 觀無量壽經, T0365, *Amituo jing*, 阿彌陀經, T0366, eighteenth vow, 第十八願, lowest-of-low-grade, 下品下生, five gravities ten evils, 五逆十惡, ten recollections, 十念, *fánfū*, 凡夫, ordinary being, soteriological subject, anthropological pivot, *lyè-fū kuà-lǚ*, 劣夫跨驢, cripple-rider-on-donkey, *zhì-cǎo yǐn-niú*, 置草引牛, tethering-ox-to-grass, *mòfǎ*, 末法, mofa, end-of-dharma, 574 北周武帝 persecution, *Da ji Yue zang jing*, 大集月藏經, five five-hundred-years, 五個五百年, five turbidities, 五濁, Sacred Path gate, 聖道門, Pure Land gate, 淨土門, time-and-teaching correspondence, 時教相應, five recollection gates, 五念門, original-vow power, *pūrva-praṇidhāna-bala*, 本願力, *adhipati-pratyaya*, 增上緣, contributory condition, returning-aspect dedication, 還相迴向, two-aspect dedication, Robert Sharf, anti-Shin-projection, anti-anachronism, Charles Jones, anti-school-essentialism, textual inheritance, institutional critique, Jan Nattier, *Once Upon a Future Time*, *mofa* layered periodization, Luis Gómez, *Land of Bliss*, Galen Amstutz, *Interpreting Amida*, James Dobbins, *Jōdo Shinshū*, Part VI Two Streams, P21 Chan counter-move, P22 Shandao institutionalization, P23 Tiantai four samādhis, P24 late-Ming synthesis

---

## I. Introduction

Anglophone readers approaching Pure Land Buddhism for the first time typically arrive through a specific door: the Japanese Pure Land traditions, and above all the Jōdo Shinshū (True Pure Land) teaching of Shinran (1173–1263), as interpreted to Western audiences by Suzuki Daisetsu (1870–1966) in a sequence of mid-twentieth-century works. Suzuki framed Shinran's radical doctrine of sole reliance on Amida's other-power (*tariki* 他力) as the Japanese counterpart of Protestant sola fide — an analogy that was rhetorically effective for its Anglophone audience and remains structurally present in popular introductions to Pure Land today. Galen Amstutz's *Interpreting Amida* (1997) traced how this framing, carried by generations of sympathetic but theologically inflected scholarship, came to dominate the entire Western reception of Pure Land thought, including the pre-Shinran Chinese sources that Shinran himself read.

This Shin-inflected reception produces a subtle but consequential anachronism when it reaches back into the sixth- and seventh-century Chinese masters who are the ancestors of Shinran's tradition — Tanluan (曇鸞, 476–542), Daochuo (道綹, 562–645), and Shandao (善導, 613–681). The anachronism takes the form of a quiet presupposition: that these three Tang-era monastics already held the doctrinal position that Shinran would later articulate — a sole-reliance soteriology in which any contribution from the practitioner's own effort is theologically suspect. Robert Sharf, across two decades of publications on Chinese Buddhist historiography, has argued forcefully that this reading-back is methodologically untenable: the Chinese texts have their own doctrinal integrity, embedded in ritual, meditative, and monastic contexts that a retrospective Shin reading quietly erases. Charles Jones, in *Chinese Pure Land Buddhism* (2019), has added a complementary critique: there was no organizational Pure Land "school" in Tang China in the sectarian sense the Japanese category implies; the line Tanluan → Daochuo → Shandao was assembled as a dharma-lineage by later Japanese historiography and read back into Chinese sources.

This paper accepts both critiques as structurally correct and then presses one step further. Sharf and Jones ask Anglophone scholarship to *stop projecting* Shin categories onto Tang sources; this paper asks the next question — *if we do stop projecting, what do we actually find there?* A word-by-word reading of the earliest Chinese texts that use 「他力」 as a systematic term yields a result that neither the Shin tradition nor its Western critics have fully foregrounded. The Chinese term 「他力」 does not enter Buddhist doctrinal vocabulary by inheritance; it is introduced, as a technical binary paired against 自力, by a single sixth-century figure — Tanluan — writing in one specific text: his commentary (*Wangsheng lun zhu* 往生論註, T1819) on Vasubandhu's short treatise on rebirth in Sukhāvatī (T1524). The binary Tanluan introduces is not present in his ostensible source, Nāgārjuna's *Easy Practice* chapter (T1521 十住毗婆沙論, chapter nine); it is Tanluan's own creation, inserted and retroactively attributed to Nāgārjuna. The paper's title calls Tanluan and Daochuo "Pure Land Patriarchs" with full awareness of the scare-quotes Jones has taught us to hear; its opening philological claim is that the one technical term most iconically associated with Pure Land Buddhism in the West, "other-power," begins with a specific documentable act of lexical invention performed by Tanluan around 540 CE.

This philological finding, however, is the opening move, not the foundation. Lexical invention alone does not establish a new soteriology; words do not build traditions without a subject-matter substantial enough to bear their weight. The deeper argument of this paper — the argument that occupies §III.2 and for which the philological finding is preparatory — is that Tanluan and Daochuo's joint innovation lies less in the vocabulary of 「他力」 than in an anthropological redefinition of the subject whom Buddhist soteriology addresses. The three Pure Land sūtras (T0360, T0365, T0366) and Vasubandhu's Treatise (T1524) already supply textual anchors for a new kind of soteriological subject — the *fánfū* 凡夫, the ordinary unliberated being who cannot complete the conventional cultivation path of 戒定慧. Tanluan, in his *Wangsheng lun zhu*, systematizes this subject with the iconic *liè-fū kuà-lǚ* 劣夫跨驢 (cripple-unable-to-mount-donkey) metaphor. Daochuo then preserves a Tanluan self-description — 「恆須繫心槽歷、置草引牛」 (keeping the mind tethered in the stall like grass-bait drawing an ox) — as evidence of Tanluan's own living sense of himself as such a 凡夫 subject. The 「他力」 vocabulary, in its Tang context, is the *grammar* for naming a relation; but what makes the grammar pastorally and doctrinally load-bearing is the subject it is used to name. Part VI's five papers together will argue, across different schools' responses, that the fixing of this subject is what makes the debate over *method* in Chinese Buddhism possible at all.

The paper proceeds as follows. §II lays the textual ground across four primary sources arranged in the order Vasubandhu (T1524) – Nāgārjuna (T1521) – Tanluan (T1819) – Daochuo (T1958), moving from Indian substrate to Chinese redaction and registering at each step what is and is not present in the source Tanluan and Daochuo inherit. §III carries the twin thesis: §3.1 documents Tanluan's lexical invention of 「他力」 by close comparison of the relevant passages in T1521 and T1819; §3.2 develops the deeper claim about the 凡夫 subject and its three-sūtra-one-treatise anchoring; §3.3 treats Daochuo's inheritance of both the vocabulary and the subject, with his re-anchoring of the 凡夫 to the empirical *mofǎ* 末法 time frame framed by the 574 北周武帝 persecution that Daochuo himself had survived as a young novice. §IV engages Sharf and Jones as primary interlocutors; both scholars' critiques are structurally integrated into the argument rather than refuted. §V delivers middle-way corrections against three typical Western misreadings — other-power as passive receptivity, *mofǎ* as eschatological pessimism, and the 凡夫 move as humility-theatre. §VI concludes and hands off to P21, which takes up Chan's counter-move to the vocabulary and subject this paper documents. For the place of P20 in Part V's verb-axis architecture: Part V's closing paper P19 established the *Mañjuśrī-prajñā* one-practice samādhi as a methodological lodestone toward which six Chinese masters take differently-weighted stances; P20 opens Part VI by showing that underneath the differences of method sits a shared subject-fixing — the 凡夫 — without which the methodological divergences would have no common ground to disagree over.

## II. Textual Grounds

This section lays the textual ground of the argument. Four primary sources are treated in the order Vasubandhu (T1524) – Nāgārjuna (T1521) – Tanluan (T1819) – Daochuo (T1958). The ordering is not chronological in the narrow sense (Nāgārjuna precedes Vasubandhu by roughly a century) but argumentative: it follows the order in which each text enters Tanluan's working field. Tanluan's own exegetical target is Vasubandhu's short treatise; his organizing framework for the whole *Wangsheng lun zhu* is borrowed from Nāgārjuna; the resulting commentary is then inherited and elaborated by Daochuo's *Anle Ji*. What this section aims to display, section by section, is precisely *what is and is not present* at each textual stage — a philological genealogy of ideas rather than a biography of masters. The argument of §III will rest on the joints and gaps this section makes visible.

### 2.1 Vasubandhu's Treatise on Rebirth in Sukhāvatī

Vasubandhu's *Wuliangshou jing upadeśa* (無量壽經優婆提舍願生偁), known in shorter form as the *Wangsheng lun* (往生論, T1524), survives in a single short fascicle comprising twenty-four verses and their prose commentary, translated into Chinese by Bodhiruci (Bodhiruci) in 529 CE. The treatise is Vasubandhu's *upadeśa* — an exegetical elaboration — on the *Larger Sukhāvatīvyūha-sūtra* (T0360). Its doctrinal skeleton unfolds in three layers.

At the methodological layer stand the *five recollection gates* (五念門, *pañca-smṛti-dvāra*): bodily prostration (禮拜門), verbal praise (讃叹門), aspiration as one-pointed recollection (作願門), discerning contemplation (觀察門), and dedication (迴向門). Vasubandhu defines the fifth as 「不捨一切苦惱眾生、心常作願迴向為首、成就大悲心故」 — the dedication is not a private post-merit transaction but a mahayāna orientation built into every act of recollection from the outset.[^5] §III.1 of the treatise asserts that 「修五念門成就者、畢竟得生安樂國土」 — a practitioner who completes the five gates *without fail* attains rebirth. At the ontological layer, the treatise organizes its contemplation of Sukhāvatī under the schema *seventeen adornments of the buddha-land* (不可思議力、自在力...), *eight adornments of the Buddha*, and *four adornments of the bodhisattvas* (17-8-4) — not a devotional inventory but an ontological taxonomy meant to display what kind of reality the practitioner's recollection rests on. At the soteriological layer, embedded within the eight buddha-adornments, appears the single phrase that Tanluan will lift out and make architectural to his own exegesis: 「觀佛本願力、遇無空過者、能令速滿足、功德大寶海」 ("contemplating the Buddha's fundamental vow-power, those who encounter it do not pass in vain; it causes them swiftly to fulfill the great treasure-ocean of merit"). This is the lexical seed of 本願力 in Chinese Pure Land thought, already textually present in Vasubandhu.[^4]

What is conspicuously *not* present in Vasubandhu is the binary 自力／他力. The treatise uses 本願力, 佛力, 如來力; it does not oppose these to any category of 自力. The practitioner's five-gate practice is not framed as insufficient and in need of supplementation by an external power; it is framed as an ongoing contemplative-devotional orientation whose fruition is underwritten by the vow-structure of the buddha-land. The philosophical step from "the Buddha's vow-power makes practice effective" (T1524) to "the Buddha's power stands as *other-power* over against *self-power*" (T1819) requires a lexical innovation that Vasubandhu does not make.

### 2.2 Nāgārjuna's *Easy Practice* Chapter

Nāgārjuna's *Daśabhūmika-vibhāṣā* (十住毗婆沙論, T1521) is an extensive commentary on the *Ten Stages* (*Daśabhūmika*) section of the *Avataṃsaka*, translated into Chinese by Kumārajīva in the early fifth century. Chapter nine, the *Easy Practice* chapter (易行品), supplies the passage that will become the ground of Tanluan's opening move in T1819. The chapter opens with a dialogue: a bodhisattva asks the Buddha whether, given the difficulty of the path to irreversibility (*avaivartika*, 阿惟越致), there is any easier route. The Buddha's initial response is dismissive. He calls the question itself cowardly:

> 「如汝所說、是儔弱怯劣、無有大心、非是丈夫志幹之言也。」 ("As you have put it — this is a *weak-and-cowardly* speech, without great aspiration; these are not the words of steady manliness.")[^2]

Pushed by the interlocutor, the Buddha eventually supplies what becomes the iconic metaphor of Chinese Pure Land thought: 「佛法有無量門、如世間道、有難有易。陸道步行則苦、水道乘船則樂。菩薩道亦如是：或有勤行精進、或有以信方便易行疾至阿惟越致者。」 Two paths, one cowardly and one proper; one by steady effort, one by faith. What follows names the easy-practice content as 「憶念五方諸佛、稱其名號」 — keeping in mind the buddhas of the five directions, invoking their names. Nāgārjuna then lists dozens of buddha-names, including Amitābha alongside many others, as objects of this invocation.[^3]

Three philological observations are decisive for what follows. First, the chapter nowhere contains the terms 自力 or 他力. The binary does not exist in the source. Second, the chapter's evaluative valence is not symmetrical: difficult practice is steady-manly (*丈夫志幹*), easy practice is cowardly (儔弱怯劣) — at best a concession for those lacking nerve, at worst a waypoint to return from. Third, the easy practice itself is plural, not directed singly at Amitābha; it addresses the buddhas of all directions. None of these three features survives in Tanluan's handling of the same material.

### 2.3 Tanluan's *Wangsheng lun zhu*

Tanluan's *Wuliangshou jing upadeśa yuansheng ji zhu* (無量壽經優婆提舍願生偁註, T1819), known in shorter form as the *Wangsheng lun zhu* (往生論註), is a two-fascicle commentary on Vasubandhu's T1524 composed sometime before Tanluan's death in 542 CE at the imperially commissioned Xuanzhong temple (玄中寺) in Bingzhou. The *Wangsheng lun zhu* is the single most important text for the argument of this paper. Although Vasubandhu's treatise is its exegetical target, the commentary's opening section does not begin with Vasubandhu at all. Before introducing a single Vasubandhu verse, Tanluan opens by quoting Nāgārjuna — and it is in this borrowed opening frame, not in Vasubandhu's own treatise, that the binary 自力／他力 is announced for the first time as a technical doctrinal pairing in the Chinese tradition.

Tanluan lists what he presents as the five difficulties of difficult practice (難行道) in the age of five turbidities (五濁): (i) externalist imitation of bodhisattva practice (外道相善), (ii) self-benefit of the śrāvaka path (聲聞自利), (iii) ruthless wrongdoers destroying others' virtue (無顧惡人破他胜德), (iv) the human-heavenly upside-down fruit (顛倒善果), and — as the fifth — 「唯是自力無他力持」 ("only self-power, no other-power sustaining"). The passage is located at T40.826b05. Tanluan attributes the whole five-item list to Nāgārjuna as though summarizing the *Easy Practice* chapter. Yet as §2.2 has shown, the fifth item simply does not exist in T1521. Nāgārjuna speaks of difficulty and ease; he does not speak of self-power and other-power. The fifth item is Tanluan's.[^1]

Just as consequential is what Tanluan *removes*. The *Easy Practice* chapter's opening rebuke — the Buddha's dismissal of the easy path as *weak-cowardly speech* — is not quoted, not summarized, not reinscribed under any softened diction. It simply disappears from Tanluan's presentation. The easy practice arrives in T1819 with none of the pejorative valence its source explicitly attached to it. An editorial gesture that would be trivial in a modern citation (a silent elision marked by ellipsis) carries, in the pre-modern Chinese commentary genre, substantial doctrinal weight: by the time the material emerges on the other side of Tanluan's handling, easy practice has become unambiguously the recommended path, reoriented around a new positive vocabulary (他力持, 佛願力, 善知識).

Tanluan then supplies the vivid metaphor that fixes the reversal in the reader's memory. The difficult path's practitioner, Tanluan writes, is like a cripple attempting to mount a donkey, who by exertion of his own strength scarcely manages to rise onto its back (*liè-fū kuà-lǚ* 劣夫跨驢). The easy path's practitioner is like that same cripple riding, as a passenger, the great ship of the buddha's vow-power across the wide waters. The image performs two functions at once: it internalizes Nāgārjuna's 陸道／水道 (land-path, water-path) simile and it inserts a specifically anthropological element that was never in the original — the practitioner is not merely choosing between two modes of travel, but is *named* as a cripple. The innovation is not only in the vocabulary *he carries in* (他力); it is equally in the subject *he reshapes* (凡夫 as the one for whom the vocabulary is needed).[^6] §3.2 will take up this subject-side of the argument at length.

### 2.4 Daochuo's *Anle Ji*

Daochuo's *Anle Ji* (安樂集, T1958) is a two-fascicle anthology-commentary that reads, in both its structure and its citation practice, as an explicit continuation of Tanluan's project. Its composition is datable to some point between Daochuo's move to Xuanzhong temple (the same temple where Tanluan had once resided) around 609 CE and his death in 645 CE. The text is not organized as a verse-by-verse commentary on any single scripture; it is a *set* (*ji* 集) of twelve large gates (十二大門) arguing for the soteriological fittingness of the Pure Land path in the present age. Three of its moves are decisive for the present argument.

First, Daochuo introduces the *shengdao / jingtu* bifurcation: the eight-four-thousand teachings of the Buddha can be organized into two large gates, the Sacred Path gate (聖道門) and the Pure Land gate (淘土門). At T47.13c Daochuo writes: 「謝節產謚、由久又今、未能證入‥故我所候、線編淘土一門、唯可入路」. The key word in Daochuo's framing is 時教相應 ("time-and-teaching correspondence"): the Sacred Path teaching is not *false*; it is *unsuited to the present time-frame*. The Pure Land gate is elevated not by doctrinal polemic against Sacred Path cultivation but by a historical argument about time.[^7]

Second, Daochuo grounds this time-argument in the *Yue-zang fen* (月藏分) of the *Mahasaṃnipāta-sūtra* (T0397), from which he derives the periodization of *five five-hundred-year periods* after the Buddha's *parinirvāṇa*. The first is the period of liberation-firmness, the second of meditation-firmness, the third of hearing-firmness, the fourth of merit-firmness — and the fifth, the period "of many contentions and quarrels, with the true teachings flickering like a lamp" (鬪諸戶獋、白法隱滯). Daochuo places his own age in this fifth period.[^8]

Third, Daochuo inherits Tanluan's discussion of the ten recollections (十念) and develops it with his own *three-discriminants* analysis, distinguishing the 十念 by depth-of-heart (在心), strength-of-condition (在緣), and decisiveness-of-resolve (在決定).[^10] The textual bridge from Tanluan to Daochuo is demonstrable at three concrete loci that will be documented in §3.3: first, a direct lineage name-list in fasc. 2 第四大門 naming 曇鸞 as predecessor; second, a quotation of Tanluan's own self-description (「恆須繫心槽歷、置草引牛」) that preserves Tanluan's living sense of himself as a 凡夫 practitioner; third, a fragment of Tanluan's *Zan Amituo fo ji* (讚阿彌陀佛偈) paraphrased in *Anle Ji* fasc. 2 第八大門. The three bridges together establish a *textual* inheritance that does not require any organizational or institutional connection between Tanluan's milieu and Daochuo's — precisely the kind of continuity Jones's critique permits.

A methodological caveat closes this section. What has been displayed is a textual genealogy, not a master-lineage. No claim is made here that Tanluan and Daochuo belonged to a school, held priestly authority within a religious institution, or saw themselves as founding a new tradition. What the textual evidence supports is more modest and more specific: a demonstrable inheritance of vocabulary, framing, and a soteriological subject across three pre-modern Chinese Buddhist texts. The philological continuity is substantial; the institutional continuity is not claimed. The next section builds on the joints made visible here.

## III. Core Argument

The twin thesis unfolds in three steps. §3.1 documents Tanluan's philological invention of 「他力」 as a technical binary and his retroactive attribution of it to Nāgārjuna, built on the passage comparison laid down in §§2.2 and 2.3. This is the *load-bearing* argument of the paper and receives the fullest textual scrutiny. §3.2 turns to the deeper move — the anthropological pivot to the 凡夫 subject. This subject is not invented by Tanluan from nothing; it is textually available across the three Pure Land sūtras and in Vasubandhu's treatise. Tanluan's contribution is to read these scattered textual anchors as naming a *single coherent subject* and to make that subject the figure at the center of Pure Land soteriology. Daochuo then preserves the subject and completes the move by time-binding it, showing the historical mechanism of this inheritance and grounding Daochuo's *mofǎ* argument in empirical, not eschatological, time. Throughout, the argument remains a philological-doctrinal one; biographical, sectarian, and apologetic matters are bracketed.

### 3.1 Other-Power as Tanluan's Lexical Invention

The argument of this subsection is philological. The thesis is that the binary 自力／他力, which Tanluan's *Wangsheng lun zhu* presents as if summarizing Nāgārjuna's *Easy Practice* chapter, is not present in Nāgārjuna's text but is Tanluan's own technical innovation, introduced by insertion, licensed by editorial elision, and stabilized by a new governing metaphor. The claim is therefore not that Tanluan misunderstood Nāgārjuna; it is that Tanluan's handling of Nāgārjuna's material is an act of creative philology — one that produced, as its output, a doctrinal category that Nāgārjuna's text does not contain but that subsequent Chinese Pure Land thought took to be as canonical as its putative source.

The finding rests on three textual operations performed by Tanluan at the opening of T1819, each of which can be independently verified against the sources that precede him.

**First operation: insertion of a fifth item not present in the source.** Tanluan's opening passage frames difficult practice as afflicted by 「五難」 — five difficulties. The first four, as catalogued in §2.3, are specifications of obstacles to cultivation consonant with general Mahayāna framing: externalist imitation of bodhisattva forms, the self-benefit orientation of the śrāvaka path, ruthless wrongdoers who destroy the virtue of others, and the human-heavenly upside-down fruit. Each has plausible analogues in various Mādhyamika and Yogācāra sources. The fifth — 「唯是自力無他力持」 — has none. The word 他力 does not occur in *Easy Practice*; the word 自力 does not occur there either; the paired binary they would form together could not have existed in Nāgārjuna's text as a technical category, because neither of its members does. An equivalent move in modern academic writing would be akin to summarizing a source with a quotation that the source never contains. Tanluan does not mark the insertion; the fifth item is presented, typographically and grammatically, as continuous with the first four. A reader who encounters T1819 without access to T1521 would have no indication that the fifth item has a different textual provenance than the first four. The insertion is seamless, and the seamlessness is part of its philological work.

**Second operation: silent elision of the source's evaluative frame.** Nāgārjuna's *Easy Practice* chapter, as documented in §2.2, frames the *easy* path as a concession to cowardice. The Buddha's opening rebuke — 「是儔弱怯劣、無有大心、非是丈夫志幹之言也」 — is neither subtle nor easily missed in its source; it appears at the very outset of the chapter and sets the frame for everything that follows. In Tanluan's handling, this rebuke vanishes completely. Tanluan does not paraphrase it, does not gloss it, does not acknowledge it with the sort of brief defensive gesture ("though the scripture at first cautions against this path…") that later traditions would often supply. He simply omits it. The omission is what allows the insertion described above to carry the load it carries: once the pejorative frame has been silently removed, the new *other-power* category can occupy the pragmatic slot that the old *weak-cowardly* frame had filled, and the reader who trusts Tanluan's summary — as readers historically did — comes away thinking that Nāgārjuna endorsed what Nāgārjuna in fact qualified. This is not deception: Tanluan's operation is visible to anyone with access to both texts, and the medieval Chinese exegetical culture placed weight on a commentator's duty to deliver the *meaning* of a source as he understood it rather than its literal verbal surface. But as a philological fact, the gap between what Nāgārjuna said and what Tanluan's readers received, via Tanluan, about what Nāgārjuna said, is substantial, and the gap is a condition for the technical vocabulary Tanluan introduces.

**Third operation: installation of a new governing metaphor that stabilizes the inserted category.** Having inserted a new technical binary and removed the source's evaluative frame, Tanluan closes his opening section with the *liè-fū kuà-lǚ* 劣夫跨驢 (cripple-unable-to-mount-donkey) figure, which by its content enforces the new binary's usefulness. The cripple metaphor works on two levels at once. On the surface it is a restatement of Nāgārjuna's 陸道／水道 figure of walking versus sailing. But Tanluan's cripple is not any walker; he is a walker specifically unable to rise onto the donkey by his own strength. The metaphor quietly anthropologizes what in Nāgārjuna had been a choice between travel modes. The figure ties the *other-power* vocabulary not to a preference about difficulty but to a claim about the practitioner's intrinsic incapacity. Once the metaphor is in place, the insertion in operation one becomes doctrinally intuitive: of course a cripple needs *other-power sustaining* — the alternative is to remain standing in place. The metaphor retrofits the lexical innovation with psychological plausibility. Nāgārjuna's walker could in principle be steady-manly; Tanluan's cripple cannot.

Together, the three operations — insertion, elision, metaphor — produce a technical vocabulary that is fully operational for its subsequent Chinese readers and is attributed, as a rhetorical matter, to Nāgārjuna. This is the philological content of the claim that "Tanluan invented other-power." The invention is not fabrication *ex nihilo*; Tanluan is reading Nāgārjuna with care and drawing out a distinction that Nāgārjuna's material *allows* even if it does not contain. Nor is it unique to Tanluan: creative philology of this sort was ordinary in the Chinese Buddhist commentarial tradition, and Tanluan was well within his generic license. The point is the *identification* of the operation, not its condemnation. Once the operation is identified, both Sharf's anti-projection critique and Jones's anti-essentialism gain new philological traction: Shin Buddhist *tariki* theology has as its Chinese root not an inherited Indian teaching but a sixth-century Chinese invention, and the "Pure Land school" that putatively transmitted this teaching is named as a school only because the lexical invention made such a transmission narratable in sectarian terms.

### 3.2 The Ordinary Being as Soteriological Subject

Lexical invention alone would not have reshaped Chinese Buddhism; a new technical vocabulary requires a subject-matter for which it answers a genuine pastoral need. The deeper argument of this paper is that Tanluan and Daochuo's joint innovation lies less in their invention of 「他力」 than in their redrawing of *who Buddhist soteriology addresses*. This redrawing is not invented by Tanluan from nothing. Its textual anchors are already present, scattered across the three Pure Land sūtras and Vasubandhu's *Wangsheng lun*. Tanluan's original contribution is to read these scattered anchors as naming a *single coherent soteriological subject* — the *fánfū* 凡夫, the ordinary, unliberated being who cannot complete the conventional cultivation path of 戒定慧 (precepts, concentration, wisdom) — and to make that subject the figure at the architectural center of his own exegesis. Daochuo in the *Anle Ji* preserves this subject and time-binds it, completing the move.

The argument proceeds in three steps. First, the four textual anchors for the 凡夫 subject are displayed. Second, Tanluan and Daochuo's two iconic metaphors — 劣夫跨驢 and 置草引牛 — are read not as isolated rhetorical flourishes but as the crystallizing gestures that fix the subject in the reader's imagination. Third, the consequence is drawn out: the five-paper arc of Part VI is made possible — becomes narratable as a single cross-school conversation — precisely because the *subject* of Chinese Buddhist soteriology has, by Daochuo's time, been fixed. Chan, Tiantai, Pure Land proper, and late-imperial confluence traditions can debate over *method* because they share, via Tanluan and Daochuo, a common anthropological starting point.

The four anchors for the 凡夫 subject are textually diverse and pre-dated Tanluan; what Tanluan contributes is their *reading together*. The *Larger Sukhāvatīvyūha-sūtra* (T0360) opens the vow-repertoire of Dharmākara in its eighteenth vow with the phrase 「十方眾生」 ("the beings of the ten directions"). The vow does not address advanced bodhisattvas or stream-enterers; it addresses the beings of the ten directions — a maximally unrestricted soteriological designation. The addressed being is not qualified as virtuous, learned, or cultivated; she is qualified only by the fact of her orientation toward Amitābha's land. The eighteenth vow thus establishes that the recipient-population of this particular vow-structure is specifically the ordinary practitioner, not the advanced contemplative.[^11]

The *Contemplation Sūtra* (T0365, 觀無量壽經) carries the anchor further with its *nine grades* structure (九品), whose lowest grade — 下品下生, the lowest-of-low-grade — explicitly includes beings who have committed the five gravities and ten evils (五逆十惡). The text promises that even such a being, upon hearing a good friend's instruction in name-invocation at the moment of death, is received by Amitābha and born in Sukhāvatī. Two aspects of this are structurally important. The textual recipient is not merely *unvirtuous* but is a moral extremum — the being farthest from any conventional qualification for rebirth in a buddha-land. And the recipient-condition is minimal: ten recollections (十念) at the terminal moment, under guided instruction. The *Contemplation Sūtra* does not establish the 凡夫 as a marginal case; it establishes the extremum as the exemplary case.[^12]

The *Smaller Sukhāvatīvyūha* (T0366, 阿彌陀經) supplies the third anchor by prescribing 「執持名號」 (holding-the-name) as the central practice for the beings of 五濁惡世 (the age of the five turbidities) — a ritual simplicity that presupposes practitioners unable to sustain more elaborate contemplative disciplines. Vasubandhu's *Wangsheng lun* (T1524) supplies the fourth: its *five recollection gates* are methodologically structured so that a practitioner at any level can in principle engage them. The treatise does not demand renunciation, high concentration, or advanced doctrinal understanding as a precondition for the five gates; it offers a graded, bodily-verbal-mental architecture that is accessible to the ordinary practitioner. Taken together, the four anchors name the same population under four different aspects: the being addressed by the vows, the being extended by the nine grades, the being prescribed ritual simplicity, and the being granted a five-fold contemplative scaffold.[^13]

Tanluan and Daochuo each crystallize this composite subject with a single metaphor. Tanluan's *liè-fū kuà-lǚ* 劣夫跨驢 has already been read in §3.1 for its function in stabilizing the 他力 binary; read now for its anthropological content, it does something different. The image names the practitioner not by her moral condition (virtuous or unvirtuous) and not by her cultivation level (beginner or advanced), but by her *structural incapacity* — she cannot rise onto the donkey by her own strength. This is a categorically different kind of self-description. The *险* (rankings) of conventional Buddhist practice turn on degrees of achievement within a shared continuum; Tanluan's cripple is not low on the continuum but stands outside the continuum's entry-point. The metaphor, in other words, does not place the 凡夫 at the bottom of a ladder; it names a subject for whom the ladder itself does not start. Whether the ladder is renunciation (出家), concentration (禁定), or conceptual analysis (觀行), the cripple cannot mount the first rung by his own exertion. This is what the 他力 category is now available to address.

Daochuo's *zhì-cǎo yǐn-niú* 置草引牛 (tethering grass-bait to draw the ox) complements the cripple figure in a crucial way. *Anle Ji* 卷下 第四大門 preserves what Daochuo presents as Tanluan's own self-description: 「吾既凡夫智慧深短、未入地位、念力須均。如似置草引牛、恆須繫心槽歷」 ("I am indeed a 凡夫, shallow in wisdom, not yet entered into the stages of ground; my recollective strength requires balancing. Like tethering grass-bait to draw an ox, I must keep the mind tied in the stall"). Two moves are performed in this self-description. Tanluan explicitly *names himself* as a 凡夫 — not in false modesty but as a technical soteriological self-positioning: the distance from himself to the stages of ground is registered. And the practice he prescribes for himself is specifically adapted to this self-positioning: the grass-bait metaphor is domestic, material, and iterative — one keeps the mind tethered to its object the way a herder keeps an ox to its stall. The 凡夫 subject is not a rhetorical posture; it is the practitioner's own ongoing self-understanding that shapes what practice can look like.

The consequence of the subject-fixing for the rest of Part VI is architectural. Once the *practitioner of Chinese Buddhism* has been named as 凡夫 — whether the namer is Tanluan, Daochuo, or one of their inheritors — the debates that follow among Chan, Tiantai, Pure Land proper, and late-imperial confluence traditions are no longer disputes about *whom soteriology addresses* but about *what method is fit for the subject so addressed*. P21's Chan counter-move (Daoxin's *Ru dao anxin yao fangbian famen*, Huineng's 平常心, Zongmi's four types of *nianfo*) is a method-debate: how the 凡夫 can turn the invocation of the name inward into the recognition of mind. P22's Shandao institutionalizes a method: nine-grade liturgy paired with systematic name-invocation, built on the exact vow-structure and nine-grade anthropology that §§2 and 3.2 have documented. P23's Tiantai four *samādhis* give the 凡夫 a structured contemplative itinerary in the *constant-walking* (常行三昧) and *constant-sitting* (常坐三昧) modes. P24's Yongming, Yunqi, and Ouyi assemble a Ming-dynasty confluence in which Chan, Pure Land, and doctrinal schools each contribute method-elements for the same 凡夫 subject. None of these downstream debates would be coherent if the subject itself had not been fixed. The 凡夫 is the shared floor beneath the methodological divergences — the common ground that makes the divergences specifiable as divergences *about* something. Jones's insight that there is no organizational Pure Land "school" in China takes on an additional valence here: the Pure Land "tradition" persists trans-sectarianly because the anthropological move Tanluan and Daochuo performed was absorbed across the whole Chinese Buddhist landscape, and that cross-sectarian absorption — not a denominational institution — is what Jones's thesis correctly refuses to name as a school. P21 will argue that Chan's most radical moves presuppose exactly this common ground; the Chan critique is of method, not of subject.

### 3.3 Daochuo's Inheritance and Mofa Time

Daochuo's *Anle Ji* inherits the full philological and anthropological architecture laid down in Tanluan's *Wangsheng lun zhu* and adds one structural move of its own: he binds the 凡夫 subject to an empirical time-frame. This move is often read — particularly in Anglophone surveys influenced by the Shin reception — as a cosmological or eschatological claim about the decline of the Dharma. That reading misses Daochuo's actual argumentative structure. The *shengdao* / *jingtu* bifurcation Daochuo introduces at T47.13c is not a restatement of Tanluan's *nanxing* / *yixing* (difficult / easy) contrast under new names; it is a *time-teaching correspondence* (時教相應) argument, and its force depends on a historical premise. The Sacred Path gate, Daochuo argues, is not *mistaken*; it is *unsuited to the present age*. The judgement about unsuitability rests on a diagnosis of what present-age practitioners can and cannot sustain, and that diagnosis is made on observable grounds — grounds that Daochuo, having survived the 574 北周武帝 persecution as a young novice, had more reason than most to take as empirical rather than speculative.

The inheritance from Tanluan is demonstrable at three concrete textual loci, which together form what this paper calls the *triple textual bridge* between the two figures. The first locus is the lineage name-list at *Anle Ji* 卷下 第四大門, where Daochuo lists six Chinese masters who have "completed the Great Vehicle's path through rebirth in the Pure Land" and names 曇鸞 among them. The second locus is the very passage read above in §3.2: Daochuo preserves Tanluan's 「置草引牛」 self-description as direct evidence of Tanluan's pastoral self-understanding. The third locus is a paraphrased fragment of Tanluan's *Zan Amituo fo ji* (讚阿彌陀佛偈) carried in *Anle Ji* 卷下 第八大門. Three loci together exceed what could be attributed to coincidence or to general circulation of Pure Land teaching; they document a *specific* inheritance of Tanluan's exegetical vocabulary, pastoral self-positioning, and liturgical materials.[^9]

The empirical grounding of Daochuo's 末法 argument deserves particular attention because Anglophone readings of Chinese *mofǎ* literature routinely treat it as speculative eschatology of the same register as medieval Christian apocalypticism. The texts do not support this reading. Daochuo was born in 562 CE and was a twelve-year-old novice in 574 CE when the Northern Zhou emperor Wu (北周武帝, r. 560–578) issued the persecution edict that closed Buddhist temples, laicized monks and nuns, confiscated monastic lands, and destroyed sutras across the north-Chinese kingdom he controlled. The persecution was not rumor or apocalyptic image; it was the lived institutional collapse of the Buddhist 鐘磬 (dharma-bell-and-chime) in the very region where Daochuo would later teach. When Daochuo writes, in the early seventh century, that the present age is one in which "the true teachings flicker like a lamp" and the practitioners of his day must rely on a teaching fit to this time rather than to the Buddha's own age, he is not making an abstract claim about the decline of the cosmos. He is naming an institutional memory about fifty years old — closer in time to his own life than World War II is to a reader today. The *mofǎ* periodization he borrows from the *Yue-zang fen* is the *frame* for his argument; the *persecution* is the evidence. To read 末法 as eschatological speculation is to miss that for Daochuo's community it was recent and traceable history.[^14] §V will return to this point as a middle-way correction.

## IV. Interlocutors: Sharf and Jones

This section treats Robert Sharf and Charles Jones as primary interlocutors whose critiques are structurally integrated into the present argument rather than refuted. Both scholars have, in different but convergent ways, pressed Anglophone Buddhist studies toward the recognition that Tang Chinese Pure Land sources cannot be read through Shin-inflected or institution-centric categories. This paper owes them much of its methodological footing. Where it differs from them is in what it proposes the Chinese texts, once stripped of those projections, positively *contain* — and that difference requires that each critique be engaged directly rather than received as settled.

### Sharf: Anti-Projection and Its Limit

Robert Sharf has, across a sequence of publications beginning with "On Pure Land Buddhism and Ch'an/Pure Land Syncretism in Medieval China" (*T'oung Pao* 88, 2002) and continuing in his *Coming to Terms with Chinese Buddhism* (Hawaiʻi, 2002), argued that Anglophone historiography has read the Chinese Pure Land tradition through categories imported from Shinran-inflected Jōdo Shinshū. The projection, in Sharf's analysis, has consequences: it assigns to Tang Chinese figures like Tanluan, Daochuo, and Shandao a doctrinal unity (a *tariki*-centered sole-reliance soteriology) that they did not themselves articulate, and it reads the internal diversity of Chinese Pure Land practice as a symptom of distance from an orthodox center (Shinran) rather than as the actual structure of the Chinese material. Sharf's philological discipline is exemplary and his methodological warning is correct.

This paper concedes the warning in its full force. The three-stage philological operation documented in §3.1 (insertion, elision, metaphor) would be unrecoverable under a default Shin-projection reading: a reader who already holds that Tanluan was *defending* an inherited Indian doctrine of other-power would be unable to see the insertion as an insertion, because the insertion would be read as faithful reportage of what Nāgārjuna "really meant." Sharf's critique creates the philological breathing-room in which Tanluan's creative act can be seen as a creative act.

Where this paper goes beyond Sharf is in the claim that the anti-projection move, once performed, does not leave an empty field. Sharf's own published work is generally more concerned with dismantling illegitimate readings than with proposing positive reconstructions of what the Chinese material contains in its own terms; this is a legitimate methodological choice and not a defect. But the consequence of leaving the field empty is that Anglophone readers of Sharf, having been correctly taught what not to project, are often left without a positive account of the Tang Chinese philosophical-pastoral project. This paper fills that gap in one specific respect: it reads the Tang Chinese 他力 vocabulary as a *local Chinese invention* — Tanluan's own work, not Shinran's retrospective concern — and reads the 凡夫 subject as a *Tang Chinese anthropological achievement* whose pastoral and doctrinal weight is documentable in the primary sources without any Shin framing. The resulting picture is not a refutation of Sharf but an extension: where Sharf asks readers to stop importing Shin categories, this paper asks what Tang Chinese categories the texts themselves supply, and finds a coherent set.

### Jones: Anti-Essentialism and Its Limit

Charles Jones, in *Chinese Pure Land Buddhism: Understanding a Tradition of Practice* (Hawaiʻi, 2019) and the subsequent *Pure Land: History, Tradition, and Practice* (Shambhala, 2021), has argued that there was no organizational Pure Land "school" (宗) in Tang China in the sectarian sense the term implies when it is used of Japanese Jōdo-shū or Jōdo Shinshū. The Pure Land *tradition*, Jones holds, is better understood as a trans-sectarian body of devotional and meditative practice shared across Tiantai, Huayan, Chan, and doctrinal specialists. The patriarch-lineage Tanluan → Daochuo → Shandao, as a *school-lineage*, is a Japanese-sectarian reconstruction imported back into Chinese material. Jones's argument is well-documented and widely accepted in current Anglophone Chinese Buddhist studies.

This paper concedes Jones's argument against *organizational* Pure Land school-formation. Nothing in the philological evidence adduced above requires that Tanluan, Daochuo, and Shandao belonged to a religious institution with shared property, liturgical offices, or hierarchies of authority. The evidence requires only that specific texts be read by specific readers in ways that preserve specific vocabulary, arguments, and self-understandings — and that is a weaker and more accurate claim than school-membership. The *Anle Ji* reads Tanluan's *Wangsheng lun zhu*; Shandao's *Guan wuliangshou fojing shu* (觀無量壽佛經疏, T1753) reads Daochuo's *Anle Ji*. These are textual relations, not institutional ones. Jones's critique correctly refuses to let such textual relations be dressed up as institutional membership.

Where this paper presses further is in noting that Jones's critique, though correct against the institutional reading, does not license the opposite over-correction — reading the textual relations as *merely* coincidental. Three concrete textual bridges were documented in §3.3: a lineage name-list, a preserved self-description, and a liturgical fragment. Each is specific, verifiable, and situated in an identifiable locus within *Anle Ji*. Together they rule out the reading that Tanluan and Daochuo's proximity is an accident of topic; the reading is specific. What they support is the intermediate thesis this paper has argued for: a *textual inheritance* that is stronger than shared topic but weaker than school-membership. The Chinese Buddhist category that most closely matches this textual inheritance is *宗* in its non-institutional, lineage-of-teaching sense — a sense that Chan historiography has preserved more self-consciously than Pure Land historiography has. Jones's thesis sharpens the argument here: what Tanluan and Daochuo shared is not an institution but a *teaching-lineage* in the weaker sense, and that sense is sufficient for the philological and anthropological claims made in §§3.1 and 3.2 to be intelligible as claims about a connected intellectual tradition rather than accidental convergence.

### Synthesis: Where the Twin Thesis Stands

Taken together, the two interlocutor engagements show that this paper's twin thesis survives and is in fact sharpened by the critiques of both Sharf and Jones. Sharf's anti-projection warning licenses reading Tanluan's 他力 as a Tang Chinese philological invention rather than an inherited Indian doctrine; this is precisely the claim of §3.1. Jones's anti-essentialism licenses reading the Tanluan-Daochuo continuity as a textual-teaching inheritance rather than an institutional school; this is precisely the claim of §3.3's triple-bridge argument. Neither critique, taken at full strength, weakens the paper's thesis; both strengthen it by removing categories that would have made the thesis less specific. The philological finding is *sharper* for being stripped of Shin-projection; the lineage claim is *sharper* for being stripped of institutional essentialism. What remains is a three-layer architecture — a Tanluan-invented vocabulary, a Tanluan-Daochuo-shared anthropology, and a text-to-text teaching inheritance — that can be documented philologically and discussed doctrinally without importing either the Japanese sectarian framework or the Shin theological framework. The thesis is neither apologetic for a Pure Land school nor dismissive of the shared doctrinal work; it is located in the zone both critiques open up. Within that zone, a specific cluster of Tang Chinese achievements becomes visible: a vocabulary invented, a subject redrawn, a teaching transmitted. §V now turns to three typical misreadings of this cluster that circulate in the Anglophone literature, each of which the foregoing argument allows us to correct.

## V. Middle-Way Corrections

Three typical Western misreadings of the Tanluan-Daochuo material are corrected here. Each misreading rests on a partial truth, and the correction is not denial but refinement. The marker convention follows earlier papers in the series: ❌ denotes a straightforward error requiring direct correction; ⚠️ denotes a reading that is partially correct but requires important qualification.

**❌ Misreading one: "Other-power" means passive receptivity.** The most common Anglophone misreading of 他力 treats it as the Chinese equivalent of sola gratia: the practitioner stops doing anything, and the buddha's power does all the work. The texts do not support this reading. Vasubandhu's *Wangsheng lun* (T1524) prescribes the *five recollection gates* as an active, multi-modal contemplative discipline: bodily prostration, verbal praise, one-pointed aspiration, discerning contemplation of the buddha-land and its buddha and bodhisattvas, and dedication oriented toward all beings. Tanluan's *Wangsheng lun zhu* not only preserves all five gates but develops them in detail; most of T1819's content is a methodical commentary on *how* each gate is to be practiced. The *Anle Ji*'s three-discriminants analysis of the ten recollections (在心、在緣、在決定) requires depth of heart, strength of condition, and decisiveness of resolve — none of which can be produced by a purely passive practitioner. The correct technical description of 他力 in the Tang Chinese sources is as *adhipati-pratyaya* (增上緣, contributory condition) rather than as *hetu-pratyaya* (causal condition). The buddha's vow-power is the contributory condition that makes the practitioner's active practice fruitful; it is not a substitute for the practice. The *lived* experience of the Tang Chinese 凡夫 practitioner is one of sustained, patient, often bodily recollective practice undertaken within the framing confidence that the buddha's vow-power prevents that practice from passing in vain. Passive receptivity is not a Tang Chinese category; it is a back-projected Shin category that the primary sources do not warrant.

**⚠️ Misreading two: *Mofǎ* is eschatological pessimism.** Anglophone readers frequently assimilate Chinese 末法 discourse to medieval Christian apocalyptic literature: a prediction of the end of the cosmos, imagined in the distant future, with accompanying moral despair about the present. The misreading has a partial truth — Chinese *mofǎ* discourse does indeed hold that the Dharma's institutional and cognitive forms decline over time — but the misreading's affective register (despair projected toward a cosmic end) is largely absent from the primary sources. As noted in §3.3, Daochuo writes with a living memory of the 574 persecution; his 末法 argument is grounded in observable institutional collapse within his own lifetime, not in speculation about cosmic decline. Jan Nattier's *Once Upon a Future Time* (1991) should correct the misreading further: Nattier shows that Chinese 末法 periodization is not a single uniform doctrine but a layered accumulation of Indian and Central Asian schemata adopted and modified by Chinese writers for specific argumentative purposes. Daochuo's *five five-hundred-years* schema from the *Yue-zang fen* is one such schema; it is not the canonical timeline of the decline but the one Daochuo chose because it fit his argument. The *mofǎ* category is a *framing device*, not a cosmology. Its affective register in the Tang Chinese Pure Land sources is not despair but soteriological urgency: *given that these are the conditions, what practice actually fits*? The question is pragmatic, not apocalyptic. The correct reading of *mofǎ* in Tanluan and Daochuo accepts the historical diagnostic (the post-persecution institutional degradation is real) while resisting the affective projection (the practitioner is not in despair; she is oriented).

**❌ Misreading three: The 凡夫 subject is humility theatre.** A more subtle Anglophone misreading treats Tanluan's self-description as a 凡夫 — and, by extension, the broader Pure Land anthropology of ordinary-being subjecthood — as a rhetorical posture of monastic humility rather than a serious technical claim. The reading is usually charitable in intent: Tanluan, on this account, is making the sort of self-deprecating gesture common in pre-modern religious writing ("though I am unworthy...") in order to model modesty for his readers. The gesture is recognized but not taken *doctrinally* seriously. This reading is incorrect, and the correction is important for grasping what Tanluan and Daochuo actually did. The 凡夫 category in T1819 and T1958 is not a posture; it is a technical soteriological designation with specific content. It names a subject who stands structurally outside the entry-point of conventional Buddhist cultivation (§3.2's analysis of the cripple metaphor), who is addressed by specific textual anchors in the three Pure Land sūtras (the eighteenth vow's 十方眾生, the nine-grade structure's 下品下生, the Smaller Sūtra's five-turbidity-age framing), and for whom a specific range of practices is prescribed (the five recollection gates and name-invocation). A posture would not do this work. The 劣夫跨驢 and 置草引牛 metaphors would be merely poetic were the subject not doctrinally specified; their pastoral force comes from the fact that they describe, in intensely concrete imagery, a soteriological figure whose technical determination was taken with utmost seriousness by its formulators. To read the 凡夫 as humility theatre is to treat Tang Chinese soteriological anthropology as ornamental rhetoric, which it is not.

## VI. Conclusion

This paper has argued that Tanluan (476–542) and Daochuo (562–645) jointly performed three Tang Chinese achievements that Anglophone Pure Land scholarship has, for historical reasons connected to the Shin reception, been slow to see as specifically Tang and specifically Chinese. First, Tanluan philologically invented the 他力／自力 binary and retroactively attributed it to Nāgārjuna's *Easy Practice* chapter, where the binary does not in fact appear; the invention is documentable at three concrete textual operations in the opening of *Wangsheng lun zhu*. Second, Tanluan redrew the soteriological subject of Chinese Buddhism around the 凡夫 — the ordinary being who cannot mount the donkey of conventional cultivation — and anchored this subject to four specific textual sites across the three Pure Land sūtras and Vasubandhu's *Wangsheng lun*. Third, Daochuo inherited both the vocabulary and the subject and re-anchored the 凡夫 to an empirical 末法 time-frame that was, for his community, recent history rather than cosmic prophecy; a *triple textual bridge* between *Anle Ji* and *Wangsheng lun zhu* demonstrates the inheritance without requiring any institutional-school apparatus.

The philological, anthropological, and textual-historical layers are mutually reinforcing. The vocabulary gives the anthropology its grammar; the anthropology gives the vocabulary its pastoral weight; the textual bridges give both their specifically Tang Chinese historical location. Neither Sharf's anti-Shin-projection critique nor Jones's anti-school-essentialism refutes this composite picture; both sharpen it by removing the categories that would have blurred it. The thesis that emerges is neither Shin apologetics nor anti-Pure-Land deflation; it is a close reading of what the Tang Chinese texts, stripped of later projections, positively contain.

For the practice-cue this series routinely closes with: the 五念門 remain active under 他力 framing. A practitioner today who takes up Pure Land practice in something like the Tanluan-Daochuo manner does not *stop doing anything and wait*. She continues bodily prostration, verbal praise, one-pointed aspiration, discerning contemplation, and bodhisattva-oriented dedication — the same five modes Vasubandhu prescribed — but she does so within a framing confidence that she is a 凡夫 addressed by a specific buddha-land architecture, not an advanced cultivator attempting to complete the Sacred Path by her own strength. The pragmatic shift is not in *what practice looks like* but in the *self-understanding with which practice is undertaken*. This is not a Shin sola-fide posture nor a secular mindfulness program; it is a specifically Tang Chinese adaptation of recollective practice for practitioners who have taken seriously their own situation as ordinary beings within a historical condition that the conventional cultivation path was not originally calibrated for.

The open question that follows from P20 is the question P21 will take up. If the 凡夫 subject has been fixed by Tanluan and Daochuo, and if the 他力 vocabulary has entered Chinese Buddhist discourse as a technical category, then the Chan counter-move — the move exemplified by Daoxin's *Ru dao anxin yao fangbian famen*, Huineng's *pingchang xin*, and Zongmi's taxonomy of four *nianfo* types — cannot be a critique of the subject (it shares the subject) or a rejection of recollective practice (it explicitly preserves recollective practice). The Chan critique must be of *method*: specifically, of whether the name invoked is heard outwardly as an address to a buddha in another direction or inwardly as the recognition of the already-present buddha-mind. P20 opens this question; P21 will take it up by reading Daoxin, Huineng, and Zongmi against the subject-fixing documented here. Tanluan invented the vocabulary; Daochuo grounded the subject in history; Chan will now turn the name inward. The *Two Streams* of Part VI begin at the lodestone of one-practice samādhi (P19) and diverge along the single question of how the 凡夫 is to hear her own invocation.

---

## Notes

[^1]: Tanluan, *Wuliangshou jing upadeśa yuansheng ji zhu* (往生論註), T40.826b05. The passage lists five obstacles to the difficult-practice path in the age of five turbidities, the fifth of which is 「唯是自力無他力持」. The immediately preceding four obstacles can be traced to Mahāyāna commentarial tradition; the fifth has no known antecedent and is absent from the putative source in T1521's *Easy Practice* chapter.

[^2]: Nāgārjuna, *Daśabhūmika-vibhāṣā* (*Shizhu piposha lun* 十住毗婆沙論), T26.041a, chapter nine, *Easy Practice*. The Buddha's opening rebuke of the bodhisattva-interlocutor's request for an easier path characterizes the request itself as 「儔弱怯劣、無有大心、非是丈夫志幹之言也」. The rebuke is the interpretive frame for everything that follows in the chapter.

[^3]: T26.041a–b. Nāgārjuna's land-path / water-path simile (陸道步行則苦、水道乘船則樂) is the source for Tanluan's cripple-on-donkey metaphor and for the general typology of practice-difficulty. The simile is followed at T26.041b by a list of the ten buddhas of the ten directions whose names can be invoked as the easy practice — Amitābha is included but not singled out.

[^4]: Vasubandhu, *Wuliangshou jing upadeśa yuansheng ji* (無量壽經優婆提舍願生偁 / 往生論), T1524 卷001, verse 18: 「觀佛本願力、遇無空過者、能令速滿足、功德大寶海」. The verse appears within the eight-adornments-of-the-Buddha section, specifically under the unsullied-vow-sustenance (不虛作住持) adornment. This is the seed passage for Tanluan's 本願力 vocabulary.

[^5]: T1524 卷001, prose commentary on verses 21–24. The five recollection gates (五念門) are defined as 礼拜門、讃叹門、作願門、觀察門、迴向門. The fifth is explicitly defined as a bodhisattva-oriented dedication rather than a merit-transfer transaction: 「不捨一切苦惱眾生、心常作願迴向為首、成就大悲心故」.

[^6]: T40.844a. Tanluan's *Wangsheng lun zhu* closes its commentary on verse 18 with the cripple-on-donkey metaphor, setting up the final synthesis of the *nanxing*-*yixing* contrast as a contrast of *zili* and *tali*. The metaphor is generally regarded in Chinese Pure Land historiography as the iconic Tanluan passage.

[^7]: Daochuo, *Anle Ji* (安樂集), T47.13c. The *shengdao* / *jingtu* (聖道門／淘土門) bifurcation is introduced at this locus as part of Daochuo's argument that the present age's practitioners cannot sustain the Sacred Path's cultivation requirements and must accordingly take up a teaching fit for their historical situation. The bifurcation is a time-teaching correspondence (時教相應) argument, not a doctrinal hierarchization of the two paths.

[^8]: T47.4a, citing T0397 (*Mahāsaṃnipāta-sūtra*, *Yue-zang fen* / 月藏分). The *five five-hundred-years* periodization is drawn from this canonical source. The fifth period is described as one in which 「鬪諸戶獋、白法隱滯」 — contentions abound and the true teachings flicker like a lamp. Daochuo locates his own historical moment in this fifth period.

[^9]: *Anle Ji* 卷下 第四大門 (T47.14a–b). The passage lists six Chinese masters who have "completed the Great Vehicle's path through rebirth in the Pure Land," naming 曇鸞 in the list and preserving the 「置草引牛」 self-description as a direct Tanluan quotation. A fragment of Tanluan's *Zan Amituo fo ji* (讚阿彌陀佛偈) is paraphrased later in 卷下 第八大門.

[^10]: *Anle Ji* T47.12a. Daochuo's three-discriminants analysis of the ten recollections (十念) distinguishes practice by *zai xin* (在心, depth of heart), *zai yuan* (在緣, strength of condition), and *zai jueding* (在決定, decisiveness of resolve). The analysis develops Tanluan's *three-minds* schema (淳心、一心、相續心) in the *Wangsheng lun zhu* and provides the technical basis for the active-practice reading of the 凡夫 subject under 他力 framing.

[^11]: *Wuliangshou jing* (無量壽經), T0360 卷001, eighteenth vow of Dharmākara: 「設我得佛、十方眾生、至心信樂、欲生我國、乃至十念、若不生者不取正覺、唯除五逆詽謗正法」. The vow's maximally unrestricted addressee — 十方眾生 — is one of the four textual anchors for the 凡夫 subject in the Tanluan-Daochuo reading.

[^12]: *Guan wuliangshou jing* (觀無量壽經), T0365 卷001, lowest-of-low-grade (下品下生) section. The passage specifies that beings who have committed the five gravities and ten evils (五逆十惡) may still be received by Amitābha through ten recollections at the moment of death under the guidance of a good friend (善知識). The passage establishes the extremum as the exemplary case for the Pure Land anthropology.

[^13]: *Amituo jing* (阿彌陀經), T0366 卷001, closing frame. The passage enumerates the five turbidities (五濁) — 劫濁、見濁、煩惱濁、眾生濁、命濁 — as the conditions of the age in which the teaching of name-holding (執持名號) is given. The 五濁惡世 framing binds the Pure Land anthropology to the cosmological condition; Tanluan and Daochuo inherit this binding in their difficult-practice analyses.

[^14]: Northern Zhou emperor Wu (北周武帝, 宇文邕, r. 560–578) issued the Buddhist persecution edict in 574 CE, closing approximately forty thousand Buddhist institutions in the north-Chinese kingdom under his control and laicizing an estimated several hundred thousand monks and nuns. Daochuo was born in 562 and was twelve years old at the time of the edict. On the documentary record, see Weinstein, *Buddhism under the T'ang* (Cambridge, 1987), ch. 1, and the standard account in the *Xu gaoseng zhuan* (續高僧傳, T2060). The persecution ended with Emperor Wu's death in 578; institutional recovery was underway by the 580s under the Sui founding.

## References

### I. Primary Buddhist Sources

*Wuliangshou jing* 無量壽經 (*Larger Sukhāvatīvyūha-sūtra*), trans. Saṅghavarman (康僧鏧) ca. 252 CE. *Taishō* vol. 12, no. 360.

*Guan wuliangshou jing* 觀無量壽經 (*Sutra on the Contemplation of Amitāyus*), trans. Kālayāśas (畕良耶舍) ca. 424–442 CE. *Taishō* vol. 12, no. 365.

*Amituo jing* 阿彌陀經 (*Smaller Sukhāvatīvyūha-sūtra*), trans. Kumārajīva (Kumārajīva) ca. 402 CE. *Taishō* vol. 12, no. 366.

*Dafangdeng daji jing* 大方等大集經 (*Mahāsaṃnipāta-sūtra*, *Yue-zang fen* / 月藏分), trans. Narendrayaśas (那連提耶舍) 566 CE. *Taishō* vol. 13, no. 397.

*Shizhu piposha lun* 十住毗婆沙論 (*Daśabhūmika-vibhāṣā*), Nāgārjuna (龍樹), trans. Kumārajīva early fifth century. *Taishō* vol. 26, no. 1521. Chapter nine (*Easy Practice*) at T26.040c–041c.

*Wuliangshou jing upadeśa yuansheng ji* 無量壽經優婆提舍願生偁 (also *Wangsheng lun* 往生論), Vasubandhu (世親), trans. Bodhiruci (Bodhiruci) 529 CE. *Taishō* vol. 26, no. 1524.

### II. Patriarchal Commentaries

*Wuliangshou jing upadeśa yuansheng ji zhu* 無量壽經優婆提舍願生偁註 (also *Wangsheng lun zhu* 往生論註), Tanluan 曇鸞 (476–542), ca. 530–542 CE. *Taishō* vol. 40, no. 1819.

*Anle ji* 安樂集, Daochuo 道綹 (562–645), ca. 609–645 CE. *Taishō* vol. 47, no. 1958.

*Guan wuliangshou fojing shu* 觀無量壽佛經疏, Shandao 善導 (613–681), ca. 660–681 CE. *Taishō* vol. 37, no. 1753.

*Xu gaoseng zhuan* 續高僧傳, Daoxuan 道宣 (596–667), 645 CE with later additions. *Taishō* vol. 50, no. 2060.

### III. Modern Scholarship

Amstutz, Galen. *Interpreting Amida: History and Orientalism in the Study of Pure Land Buddhism*. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997.

Dobbins, James C. *Jōdo Shinshū: Shin Buddhism in Medieval Japan*. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989; reissued Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press, 2002.

Gómez, Luis O. *The Land of Bliss: The Paradise of the Buddha of Measureless Light — Sanskrit and Chinese Versions of the Sukhāvatīvyūha Sutras*. Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press, 1996.

Jones, Charles B. *Chinese Pure Land Buddhism: Understanding a Tradition of Practice*. Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press, 2019.

———. *Pure Land: History, Tradition, and Practice*. Boulder: Shambhala, 2021.

Nattier, Jan. *Once Upon a Future Time: Studies in a Buddhist Prophecy of Decline*. Fremont, CA: Asian Humanities Press, 1991.

Sharf, Robert H. "On Pure Land Buddhism and Ch'an/Pure Land Syncretism in Medieval China." *T'oung Pao* 88, no. 4–5 (2002): 282–331.

———. *Coming to Terms with Chinese Buddhism: A Reading of the Treasure Store Treatise*. Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press, 2002.

Weinstein, Stanley. *Buddhism under the T'ang*. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987.

### IV. Sūtra & Śāstra Index

| Short title | Full Chinese / Sanskrit title | Translator / Author | Taishō no. |
|---|---|---|---|
| *Wuliangshou jing* | 無量壽經 / *Larger Sukhāvatīvyūha-sūtra* | Saṅghavarman trans. | T0360 |
| *Guan wuliangshou jing* | 觀無量壽經 | Kālayāśas trans. | T0365 |
| *Amituo jing* | 阿彌陀經 / *Smaller Sukhāvatīvyūha-sūtra* | Kumārajīva trans. | T0366 |
| *Daji jing Yue-zang fen* | 大集經月藏分 / *Mahāsaṃnipāta*, *Candragarbha* | Narendrayaśas trans. | T0397 |
| *Shizhu piposha lun* | 十住毗婆沙論 / *Daśabhūmika-vibhāṣā* | Nāgārjuna / Kumārajīva trans. | T1521 |
| *Wangsheng lun* | 往生論 (無量壽經優婆提舍願生偁) | Vasubandhu / Bodhiruci trans. | T1524 |
| *Guan wuliangshou fojing shu* | 觀無量壽佛經疏 | Shandao | T1753 |
| *Wangsheng lun zhu* | 往生論註 | Tanluan | T1819 |
| *Anle ji* | 安樂集 | Daochuo | T1958 |
| *Xu gaoseng zhuan* | 續高僧傳 | Daoxuan | T2060 |

## Cross-References within the Series

**Backward references (Part V):**

- P17 *Hearts of All Buddhas First* (楞伽印心): the *hṛdaya* lock-in of the buddha-mind thesis that Part V's Laṅkāvatāra paper established as the seventh verb-axis layer. P20 does not dispute the buddha-mind reading; it observes that P21's Chan counter-move presupposes a 凡夫 subject for whom the buddha-mind must still be turned toward — a presupposition P20 documents as Tanluan-Daochuo's achievement.
- P18 *Buddha-Recollection as Ālaya-Parāvṛtti* (密嚴): the Yogācāra technical frame for recollection-as-substrate-transformation. Vasubandhu (T1524) appears in both P18 and P20 but under different aspects — P18 treats him as Yogācāra systematist, P20 as author of the Pure Land *upadeśa*. The two papers do not conflict; they document that Vasubandhu carries two reception-streams in Chinese Buddhism, and P20's stream is strictly the Pure Land one.
- P19 *The Mañjuśrī Prajñā Sūtra and One-Practice Samādhi* (文殊般若一行三昧): Part V's closing paper, documenting six Chinese masters' asymmetric commitment-weights toward a single lodestone. P20 now begins Part VI beneath that lodestone and reads the asymmetry as a set of methodological stances sharing a common subject — the 凡夫 — without which their divergences would have no ground to differ over.

**Forward references (Part VI):**

- P21 *The Chan Position: Turning the Name Inward* (Daoxin, Huineng, Zongmi): the counter-move to P20's documentation. Chan does not dispute either the invented vocabulary or the 凡夫 subject; it proposes that the name, once invoked, be heard inwardly as the recognition of the already-present buddha-mind rather than outwardly as an address to a buddha in another direction. P21's methodological radicalism is legible precisely against P20's subject-fixing.
- P22 *The Pure Land Patriarchs II: Shandao's Settling of the Name* (T1753): the institutional and liturgical completion of the Tanluan-Daochuo architecture. Shandao inherits the 凡夫 subject (from Tanluan-Daochuo) and the nine-grade anthropology (from T0365) and assembles the practice-system (*guannian famen*) that would carry Pure Land practice into the Song and beyond. P20 lays the doctrinal foundation Shandao builds upon.
- P23 (*Tiantai's Four Kinds of Recollection*) and P24 (*From Yongming to the Late Ming Masters*) extend the cross-sectarian conversation P20 opens: Tiantai systematizes the 凡夫's contemplative itinerary in its four *samādhis*, and the Ming-dynasty confluence assembles Chan, Pure Land, and doctrinal elements for the same subject. All four later papers depend on P20's subject-fixing to be narratable as a single conversation.


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*CBETA collation: all T-number / X-number citations verified against the CBETA Electronic Tripiṭaka 2024 edition.*

*Repo: github.com/pointing-at-the-moon/six-practice-gates · CC BY-NC-SA 4.0*

*NIAN-P20 · 釋慧鏡 (Shi Huijing) · 2026-04-21*