Why Not Paradise: The Pure Land of Amitabha

Of all the Buddhists in China, Japan, and Korea, the vast majority follow teachings centered on rebirth in the Pure Land, or Western Paradise, of Amitabha Buddha. All Buddhist sutras are about the mind, the mind and the Buddha, and about reducing, if not eliminating, the apparent distance between the two. What the authors of the first Pure Land texts added was a stage on which that drama could take place. Their choice was an enclosed garden similar to the kind Persians called pairi-da?za- based on Biblical accounts of the Garden of Eden and from which we get the word 'paradise.' When Buddhists decided to imagine a better place to practice, it's not surprising they would conjure such a place, a place where devotees could return to Buddhist basics, a place no more than a thought away. In this small chapbook, Red Pine presents new translations of two of the three sutras sacred to Pure Land Buddhists and has added a preface and footnotes to help readers better understand this spiritual path followed by hundreds of millions of people in the world today.