Amitabha is the answer to a question the early path could not solve: what about everyone else? Pure Land Buddhism holds that this age is too degenerate and most people too busy for the monastic route, and that Amitabha's vow — that anyone who calls on him will be reborn in his land, where conditions for awakening are perfect — is the vehicle that remains. Practice reduces to the nembutsu, saying the name. Shinran, in thirteenth-century Japan, pushed it to its limit: even the calling is Amitabha's doing, not yours, and the person who thinks their recitation earned it has misunderstood. In sheer numbers this is the largest form of Buddhism in the world, and it looks almost nothing like the meditation-and-emptiness version the West imported.