Possible roots of the pure land Buddhist notion of practice in light of some early Buddhist sources

Many constitutive ideas of Pure Land Buddhism can be found even in the earliest strata of Buddhist texts, such as the Pāli canon. They concern the characteristics of the Buddha, descriptions of some idealised lands as well as a set of practices and attitudes leading to rebirth in such lands. I will illustrate that several seminal ideas of these practices and attitudes, like faith (p. pasanna, saddhā), vows (p. paṇidhi) or recollections (p. anussati), are connected in the Pāli canon with householders or with monks of minor abilities and are oriented towards the goal of reaching heaven instead of attaining nirvana. The development of practice in the Pure Land tradition may thus be seen as a consequence of (a) putting emphasis on Early Buddhist practices leading to easy rebirth in heaven as well as (b) adapting these to new ideas in cosmology, thus replacing heavens with pure lands. The paper is an expanded version of the presentation delivered at the international conference “The Pure Land in Buddhist Cultures: History, Image, Praxis, Thought” held in Vancouver in 2013.