Other power

• 1. Introduction

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  Other power is a concept at the heart of East Asian Mahayana Buddhism, and its name alone raises a question that has occupied Buddhist thinkers for well over a thousand years: if you cannot save yourself, can something beyond you do it for you? In Chinese it is called tali, in Japanese tariki, and it refers to the power of a Buddha to inspire, sustain, and ultimately carry a living being to the Pure Land, that realm where becoming a Buddha is made easy. The idea stands in direct tension with a contrasting principle, self power, which holds that the practitioner must earn enlightenment through personal effort. The scholar Mark L. Blum describes other power as "something 'received' or 'influenced' from the sacred world beyond the self." That single line opens a vast argument. Should a person strive with all their might, or surrender completely to a force greater than themselves? The history of other power is the history of that argument, traced across India, China, Korea, and Japan, through sutras, commentaries, and the lives of monks who staked everything on their answer.

• 2. Indian Roots

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  Long before Chinese translators coined the phrase tali, Indian Mahayana texts were already wrestling with the idea that the Buddha's power reaches outward to touch living beings. The Sanskrit term buddhanubbhava refers to the Buddha's majesty and causal power, and the Prajnaparamita sutras depict disciples speaking not from their own understanding but, as one passage puts it, through the Buddha's power. A companion concept, buddhaadhisthana, names the sustaining or supporting force of the Buddha, his capacity to bless and inspire. Robert H. Sharf notes that these terms "are ubiquitous in Buddhist materials, where they denote the incursion of the divine into the mundane realm."

  The early Buddhist schools did not agree on how powerful the Buddha actually was. The Mahasanghika schools took the most expansive view, holding that the Buddha's body, supernatural power, and lifespan were unlimited. Their text the Lokanuavartana sutra states that the wisdom, merits, and power of the Buddha are immeasurable, and that the strength of the Buddha is irresistible, inexhaustible, and able to shake all Buddhalands with a single finger. The Mahavastu, one of the few surviving Mahasanghika texts, goes further: the purity of the Buddha is so great, it declares, that worshipping the Buddha by merely walking around a stupa or offering flowers is sufficient for the attainment of nirvana.

  Along with direct sustaining power, the Indian tradition also developed the concept of parinaamana, the transference of merit, by which a Buddha infuses living beings with measureless spiritual goodness. The bodhisattva vows made by a future Buddha were also understood to generate vast spiritual force, described in Sanskrit as purva-pranidhaana-vasa, the power of the past vow. It is this vow power that later became one of the primary synonyms for other power in East Asian Buddhism.

• 3. Sutras and Their Claims

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  The Astasahasrika Prajnaparamita Sutra, one of the foundational Perfection of Wisdom texts, opens with a striking passage about the Buddha's disciples. Whatever a disciple teaches, it says, should be understood as the Tathagata's own work, since the disciples train in the dharma demonstrated by the Tathagata and their teaching is "just an outpouring of the Tathagata's demonstration of dharma." A later dialogue in the same sutra asks whether bodhisattvas study the perfection of wisdom through the Buddha's might, sustaining power, and grace, and the Buddha's answer is yes: they are sustained and seen by the Tathagata with his Buddha-eye.

  The Da zhidu lun, a vast commentary attributed to the tradition, pushes the claim further: the power of the Buddha is immeasurable, and saving all beings of the three-thousandfold world system is described as a trifle for him. The commentary then asks an unavoidable question: if this is true, why are any other Buddhas needed, and why have all beings not already been saved? Three reasons are offered. Beings are infinite in number and do not ripen at the same moment. The causes and conditions that shape each being vary. And the universe itself is unlimited in number, so that there are always more beings to reach.

  The Gandavyuha sutra offers a still more vivid picture of the Buddha's power. The sutra begins with the Buddha entering samadhi and then magically transforming Jeta's grove into a limitless space filled with jewels and gold. The Buddha Vairocana appears as the king and source of all spiritual power, with bodhisattvas arranged below him like ministers in an Indian monarchy, Manjusri and Samantabhadra serving as chief ministers and Maitreya as the crown prince. The sutra states plainly that "it would not be possible for the world of humans and gods to understand the power of the tathagata except through the power of the tathagata."

• 4. Tantric Channels

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  In the period of Mantrayana or Esoteric Buddhism, the Buddha's power was brought into a new kind of relationship with human practice. Ritual theory generally held that the use of mantras, mudras, and mandalas allowed a tantric practitioner to reproduce and embody the power of the Buddhas. The Root Manual of the Rites of Manjushri states: "The power of all the buddhas, and the bodhisattvas who are full of wisdom, manifests itself as an accomplishment in all activities that involve the mantras."

  In Japan, the Shingon tradition engaged with these ideas from the time of Kukai (774-835), whose text the Sokushin jobutsugi describes adhisthana through an image of water and reflected light. The word jia, meaning to add, indicates that the radiance of the Buddha reflects in the minds of beings as the sun reflects on water. The word chi, meaning to hold, is when the practitioner perceives that radiance as though seeing a reflection. Shingon writers who addressed Pure Land practice, such as Dohan, drew on this image while also affirming that ultimately the Buddha and the practitioner are non-dual, linking the Shingon framework to the broader Chinese concept of sympathetic resonance.

• 5. Chinese Pure Land Foundations

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  Tanluan (476-542) was the first Chinese thinker to give the term other power a doctrinal home in Pure Land Buddhism. He describes other power as "the dominant causal condition" for attaining Buddhahood and illustrates it with a series of compact comparisons: a lame man who boards a boat can travel a thousand li in one day not by his own movement but by the power of the vessel; a hundred men's woodpile accumulated over a hundred years can be burned to ash in half a day by a bean-sized spark. On the easy path, Tanluan writes, one simply aspires to be born in the Pure Land with faith in the Buddha as the cause, is carried by the power of the Buddha's vow, and immediately enters the stage of the rightly settled.

  The 7th century patriarch Shandao never used the term other power directly, but he described equivalent ideas through phrases like buddha-power, sacred power, and vow power. His most distinctive move was to argue that birth in the Pure Land was available to ordinary people of any background, including those who had committed the five heinous crimes. Even ten recitations of Amitabha's name, Shandao taught, could carry a person to the Pure Land through the inconceivable power of the Buddha. According to Charles Jones, it was Tanluan and Shandao together who first defended and popularized the position that ordinary beings could reach the Pure Land through the Buddha's power alone. Before them, Chinese authors had argued that extensive practice and accumulated merit were required.

  At around the same time in Korea, the monk Wonhyo (617-686) defended a similar view in his commentary on the Larger Sutra, holding that birth in the Pure Land could be attained by relying on the other power of the compassion of the Buddha rather than on one's own self power. Bodhiruci's translation of the Sandhinirmocana-sutra, one of the Chinese canonical texts, contains a passage that points even earlier to other power's doctrinal weight, stating that "the characteristics of other-power are the characteristics of ultimate truth."

• 6. Resonance and Non-Duality

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  Chinese Buddhist thinkers developed a rich vocabulary for describing how self power and other power might cooperate rather than simply oppose each other. The Huayan patriarch Zhiyan (c. 602-668) acknowledged that the divine power of the Buddha cannot be received through self power alone, but he also insisted that after the Buddha's empowerment, bodhisattvas continue to rely on the power of their own practices and vows. His successor Fazang (643-712) argued that other power and self power should be understood as interfused.

  The concept of sympathetic resonance, rendered in Chinese as ganying, became one of the most widely used frameworks for explaining this interaction. Yunqi Zhuhong (1535-1615) described it as a kind of attunement comparable to a plucked string on a lute causing a nearby string to resonate. When a practitioner faithfully recites Amitabha's name wishing to be reborn in the Pure Land, the practitioner stimulates the Buddha's compassionate response and the two minds attune to each other. Yuan Hongdao (1568-1610) drew on a series of natural images to describe this: one mighty wind producing noise in dozens of small openings, large amounts of water trickling through a mountain to assist thousands of ants in tunnel-making, and reed-mat sails helping many boats catch the wind.

  The Tiantai scholar Zhiyi captured the same dynamic with a water metaphor of his own: water does not rise, nor does the moon descend, yet in a single instant the one moon appears in manifold waters. When the mind is clear and calm, the Buddha appears. Jixing Chewu (1741-1810) pressed further into non-duality, arguing that on the level of ultimate reality there is no distinction between sentient beings and Amitabha. Sentient beings are within the mind of Amitabha, and Amitabha is within the mind of sentient beings. Chewu puts it as a kind of philosophical loop: if sentient beings within the mind of Amitabha recollect the Amitabha within the mind of sentient beings, how could Amitabha fail to respond?

• 7. Japanese Absolute Surrender

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  Honen (1133-1212), the 12th century founder of Japanese Pure Land Buddhism, gave other power one of its most memorable formulations. He described it as having implicit faith in the nembutsu without looking back on one's virtuous or vicious deeds. His illustrations are vivid: a fly that lands on the tail of a fiery horse will travel a thousand miles the instant the horse leaps. A large boulder placed on a ship will reach the far shore not by its own mobility but by the ship's power. It is because of this reliance on the Buddha's power that the nembutsu is an easy practice, Honen argued, and precisely because it is easy it is available to all kinds of people, a direct challenge to the traditional view that difficult practices accessible mainly to monks were the superior path.

  Honen's own writings mention the term tariki only a few times. It was his disciples who made it a major topic of debate. Ryukan wrote a work called The Matter of Self-Power and Other-Power, arguing that nembutsu practice relying on self power will not be effective. Shinran (1173-1263), the founder of Jodo Shinshu, personally made a handwritten copy of this text, and it is the only surviving copy today.

  Shinran carried the logic of other power to its most radical conclusion. For Shinran, a practitioner must first come to recognize themselves as a foolish being incapable of reaching Buddhahood through personal effort, and then abandon entirely the calculating mind that relies on the self. He writes that other power means "to be free of any form of calculation," and elsewhere that "other-power is entrusting ourselves to the primal vow and our birth becoming firmly settled; hence it is altogether without one's own working." The natural and effortless unfolding of the Buddha's power that results, which Shinran called jinen-honi, occurs only when all self-judgment and conceit have been dropped. The tradition debate continued into the Edo period, when Jinrei (1749-1817) argued for a strict exclusivism that rejected all practices outside of other-power orientation, while Ryosho (1788-1842) took a more expansive view, seeing other power as ultimately all-embracing, even encompassing what looked like self-power practice from the outside.