Life comes to us as a great, eternal calling, reaching out to us, unfolding around and inside of us, while at the same time holding us, in our entirety,from the unnamable past to the unknowable future. Life’s eternal truth is our truth, just as surely as our temporal clinging and attachment to the dance of self and ego is our truth. The Buddha’s teaching emanates from deep insight into the unending mix of pain and promise that is human life. Buddha sees what we cannot see, sees that we cannot see, and out of unfathomable concern for our well being, calls out to all humankind with the equally unfathomable message of our liberation from self-imposed restrictions, anxieties and turmoil. The Nembutsu tradition, more broadly known as Pure Land Buddhism, understands the whole of the Buddhist teaching and its history as Buddha’s entreaty, Buddha’s call to us to awaken to this eternal promise, a call carried by the compassionate movement that is life itself.
– Jerry Bolick