three virtues of spiritual body, wisdom and deliverance. The man who is
able successfully to complete this course of discipline and practice is
no ordinary person, but is supposed to possess merit produced from good
actions performed in a former state of existence. The doctrine by which
man may do so, is called the gate of the Holy Path.

During the fifteen hundred years after Buddha there were from time to
time, such personages in the world, who attained the end of the Holy
Path; but in these latter days people are more insincere, covetous and
contentious, and the discipline is too hard for degenerate times and
men. The three trainings already spoken of are the correct causes of
deliverance; but if people think them as useless as last year's almanac,
when can they complete their deliverance? H[=o]-nen, deeply meditating
on this, shut up the gate of the Holy Path and opened that of the Pure
Land; for in the former the effective deliverance is expected in this
world by the three trainings of morality, thought and learning, but in
the latter the great fruit of going to be born in the Pure Land after
death, is expected through the sole practice of repeating Buddha's name.

Moreover, it is not easy to accomplish the cause and effect of the Holy
Path, but both those of the doctrine of the Pure Land are very easy to
be completed. The difference is like that between travelling by land and
travelling by water.[6] The doctrines preached by the Buddha are
eighty-four thousand in number; that is to say, he taught one kind of
people one system, that of the Holy Path, and another kind that of the
Pure Land. The Pure Land doctrine of H[=o]-nen was derived from the
sutra preached by the great teacher Shaka.

This simple doctrine of "land travel to Paradise" was one which the
people of Japan could easily understand, and it became amazingly