Genshin

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Genshin (源信 942–1017) was the most influential of a number of Tendai scholars active during the eleventh and twelfth centuries in Japan. He was not a wandering evangelist as Kuuya was, but was an elite cleric who espoused a doctrine of Amidism which taught that because Japan was thought to have entered mappō, the "degenerate age" of the "latter law," the only hope for salvation lay in the reliance on the power of Amitabha. Other doctrines, he claimed, could not aid an individual because they depended on "self-power" (jiriki), which cannot prevail during the chaos of the degenerate age, when the power of another (tariki) is necessary. This doctrine is documented in his treatise Ōjōyōshū ("Essentials of rebirth"), which in later copies of the text came complete with graphic depictions of the joy of the blessed and the suffering of those doomed to chaos.