The Pure Land School's recitation of "Amitabha Buddha" is
actually a parameter optimization algorithm. In the last episode, I talked about how Dharani is a
compression algorithm invented by humans 2,500 years ago.
After that video was released,
one question exploded in the comments section:
"So, is the Pure Land School's recitation of Amitabha Buddha
based on this principle?
" Another even more pointed question was: "According to your logic, if
I recite 'one, two, three, four, five, six' ten thousand
times, will the
effect be the same?
" To be honest,
these two questions are excellent.
They directly point to a topic I've always wanted to explore.
There's a Buddhist practice that
claims "ten thousand practitioners, ten thousand go to the Pure Land," even a
three-year-old can do it—just four
words: Amitabha Buddha.
You just keep reciting these four words, and at the
moment of your death, Amitabha
Buddha will come to pick you up and take you to the
Western Paradise.
Hearing this, are you already thinking of scrolling away?
This seems too much like superstition, right?
A group of old ladies in a temple, scrolling through prayer beads and
chanting, and they can
go to heaven? To be
honest,
I used to think that way too,
because that's how my mother chanted.
I never thought there was any logic to it.
Until recently, when I incorporated Pure Land practice into the established framework of this series—
Yogacara, predictive coding, Tathagatagarbha, and
Dharani—and re-analyzed it,
I was completely stunned. The
ingenuity of this system's design
far exceeded my expectations.
Today, I want to answer a core question: How can the phrase "Amitabha"
rewrite the underlying structure of your consciousness?
Hello
everyone,
I'm Wang Lijie.
First, let me address the question of "Is reciting 'one, two, three, four, five, six' effective?"
because it's actually the key to today's entire content.
Last time, I talked about four types of Dharani—Dharma Dharani, Meaning
Dharani, Mantra Dharani, and Patience Dharani. Reciting 'one,
two, three, four, five, six'
only provides the first level of effect—attention anchoring.
But the four characters "Amitabha" are far more than just a string of syllables.
Behind them lies an entire belief system,
emotional resonance, and a "parameter tuning scheme" repeatedly verified by countless practitioners over two thousand years.
These four characters are an entry point
to an extremely sophisticated multi-layered consciousness rewriting system.
Reciting "one, two, three, four, five, six" is like training AI with random noise. It
has input,
but no structure,
no direction. Reciting
the Buddha's name, however,
is a highly optimized, directional fine-tuning process with a clear objective function.
Today, we'll reverse engineer this system to dissect its intricacies. Let's establish
a premise:
our series on Buddhism is
n't about persuading you to follow any particular sect,
but rather about using it to deconstruct the underlying mechanisms of human consciousness and cognition.
If you truly want to cultivate yourself, you
can certainly understand more advanced methods
or find a path more suitable for you.
But in this episode,
I want to examine a phenomenon—among the many sects of Buddhism,
Pure Land Buddhism has the most followers,
far surpassing the second-place
sect. Is Zen Buddhism cool? Yes. Is Yogacara
Buddhism profound? Yes. Is the Avatamsaka Sutra
beautiful? Yes.
But in terms of user numbers,
all are crushed by four words—"Amitabha." There
must be some underlying mechanism at work behind this.
Today, we'll do one thing: reverse engineer this mechanism.
Okay,
let's quickly build a framework. The
core logic of Pure Land Buddhism is extremely simple, just
three words—faith, aspiration, and practice. Faith... It
's about believing in the existence of Amitabha Buddha,
who created a place called the Pure Land. "Wish" means
you sincerely want to go there. "
Action"
means you achieve it through the concrete act of reciting the Buddha's name. It
seems similar to the Christian belief in "belief in God for eternal life," right?
Superficially, it is indeed very similar,
but the underlying mechanisms are completely different.
Let's peel back the layers. The
first layer:
what exactly happens in your brain and consciousness during the act of reciting the Buddha's name? In the
last episode, when we talked about Dharani, we established several key concepts:
attention anchoring, neural entrainment, and detachment from consciousness. The
act of reciting the Buddha's name
primarily involves these three things.
But I'll start with the most basic. What happens to
a person's nervous system when they sit there repeatedly reciting "Amitabha Buddha,
Amitabha Buddha, Amitabha Buddha"?
Multiple neuroscience studies have confirmed that
this repetitive focused behavior is
highly similar in neural mechanisms to focused attention training in meditation.
Long-term practitioners experience an increase in the thickness of the prefrontal cortex and a
decrease in the reactivity of the amygdala. The
prefrontal cortex manages decision-making and emotional regulation, while the
amygdala manages stress responses such as fear and anxiety.
In other words, the
repetitive act of reciting the Buddha's name... While it does physically
change your brain structure,
if it's just about attention training,
I could just count my breaths.
Why insist on chanting the Buddha's name?
Remember what we talked about in the last episode about meditation? The
essence of "cessation" isn't eliminating thoughts,
but changing the direction of attention. When
you anchor your attention in one place, your consciousness
loses its raw material, and
thoughts extinguish themselves—not suppression,
but detachment.
I talked about five anchoring methods: breath counting,
body scanning, mantra recitation, walking meditation, and marking. Chanting the
Buddha's name
is essentially the sixth,
and the easiest of the six. The Buddha's name
is that anchor point.
You don't need to learn any complex techniques,
observe subtle changes in your breath, or
understand dependent origination and emptiness.
You just chant four words, and
your attention is automatically drawn in, and your
consciousness is automatically detached.
This is why the Pure Land School claims to "universally benefit all three roots, sharp and
dull"—this anchor point works regardless of your aptitude.
But anchoring attention is only the first level; the
second level of chanting the Buddha's name is
much deeper. In the last
episode about Dharani,
I explained the concept of "neural entrainment" in detail—the
specific frequency and rhythm of sound.
The ability to "pull" your brainwaves from a scattered state to an ordered state is
not mystical;
it's a phenomenon supported by numerous experiments in neuroscience. When
you repeatedly recite a fixed combination of syllables,
its sound wave frequency, breathing rhythm, and repetitive oral muscle movements work
synergistically to
gradually pull your nervous system from a high-frequency scattered state to a low-frequency synchronized state.
Furthermore, remember the key distinction I made in the last episode? The mechanisms of
Dharani's emptying of consciousness
and brainwashing's suppression of consciousness are
completely different.
Dharani allows the consciousness to naturally calm down,
allowing deeper things to emerge.
Brainwashing uses high-intensity repetition to cover up your judgment.
This distinction directly explains a classic level of understanding in Buddhist practice:
Reciting without intention – your mouth is reciting, but your
mind is thinking about what to eat for dinner.
This only has the most superficial sound wave stimulation effect,
better than nothing. Reciting with
faith and aspiration – your emotional system is mobilized, your
attention is anchored more deeply, and the
efficiency of neural entrainment is greatly improved. Single-minded concentration –
your entire consciousness is completely integrated into the Buddha's
name, and the conscious mind is completely emptyed. At
this point, what happens is not just attention training. At
this point,
you've reached the third level,
which is also the second level of answering the question "Is reciting 'one, two, three, four, five, six' okay?"
Without the support of a system of faith and aspiration,
your emotional system won't be mobilized, and the
depth of anchoring won't increase.
You'll feel bored and want to stop after reciting it for the thirtieth time.
But those who recite the Buddha's name continue reciting it even after the thirty thousandth time
because faith and aspiration provide them with continuous motivation.
"Faith and aspiration" is not just a religious doctrine;
it's an engineering design that maintains the intensity and duration of training.
Without it, the number of
fine-tuning training rounds won't be enough, and the
parameter updates won't be sufficient. The
third level
is the truly core of Pure Land practice.
It rewrites the underlying parameters of your consciousness.
We've previously discussed the Alaya consciousness, which is the
eighth consciousness, the storehouse consciousness, in Yogacara philosophy.
I liken it to the parameter space of a large language model.
All your experiences, habits, and behavioral patterns are
stored in the Alaya consciousness in the form of "seeds."
These seeds aren't statically stored there; they
are activated under specific conditions,
emerging as your current perceptions, emotions, and judgments. Why do you get
angry when you encounter certain things?
Why do you inexplicably dislike certain people? It's
not because of what happened at that moment.
It's not because a corresponding seed in your seed bank has been triggered, but because
you spend two hours reciting Amitabha Buddha's name every day. From the perspective of Yogacara philosophy,
each recitation of "Amitabha Buddha"
plants a new seed in your Alaya consciousness.
This seed is pure, peaceful, and conscious.
You plant one seed with each recitation,
ten thousand
seeds with ten thousand recitations, and
millions of seeds in a year. What do
these seeds do?
They gradually change the parameter distribution of your entire seed bank.
Using our large language model as an analogy, this process
is like targeted fine-tuning.
You are using a large amount of new training data to
gradually change the old parameter weights.
Originally, your model's default output for the input "stress" was "anxiety."
After extensive training with reciting Amitabha Buddha's name, the
same input
might output "peace."
Each recitation of Amitabha Buddha's name is a miniature backpropagation,
updating the gradient deep within your consciousness.
In the last episode about Dharani,
I said that daily life does "pre-training" for the Alaya consciousness—
massive but chaotic and
extremely inefficient.
Dharani does "fine-tuning"—precise and targeted.
Reciting the Buddha's name is a specific application of the Dharani principle in the Pure Land Dharma,
except that it focuses its fine-tuning on a very clear goal:
"purification."
However, I want to add an angle I didn't explore in the previous episode.
We established a key consensus in the episode about Tathagatagarbha:
you inherently possess all the conditions for Buddhahood, but this is
obscured by ignorance.
Tathagatagarbha is not something you "acquire,"
but something you already "are."
Remember the analogy of gold ore? The
gold is always in the ore.
You're not adding gold to the ore;
you're washing away the sand and impurities.
What does this logic mean in reciting the Buddha's name? Reciting the
Buddha's name isn't "adding" a new substance called Buddha-nature to your seed bank. It
's "diluting" the concentration of old seeds of greed, anger, and ignorance.
Each time you plant a pure seed, the
proportion of seeds of greed, anger, and ignorance decreases.
When the concentration of pure seeds reaches a certain level, the
inherent light of Tathagatagarbha begins to shine through,
just as gold is naturally revealed after the sand is washed away. In the
previous episode, I said "Dharani washes away the sand," and reciting
the Buddha's name is also washing away the sand.
The difference is that Dharani is more like a general cleansing program,
while reciting the Buddha's name is a cleansing solution with a complete operating system.
It not only provides cleansing tools
but also a power system (faith and aspiration), a
navigation system (the direction of the Pure Land), and a user interface (extremely
simple operation in four words).
Therefore,
from the perspective of Tathagatagarbha, the act of reciting the Buddha's name is
essentially not "construction"
but "cleansing."
You are not creating a Buddha;
you are wiping a mirror. In
the end, the
mirror's inherent reflective ability is naturally restored.
Speaking of this,
we need to enter the fourth level - where exactly is the Pure Land? The
traditional view is that the
Pure Land is in the West,
ten trillion Buddha-lands away from us.
This view is the most discouraging for modern people, right? It
sounds like a myth.
But there is another sentence in the Buddhist scriptures,
from the Vimalakirti Sutra - "When the mind is pure, the Buddha-land is pure." If we put
these six words into the
predictive coding framework we established in the episode on "The Neuroscientific Truth of Meditation," the
meaning becomes extremely precise.
Remember those twelve words?
"Following the mind of sentient beings,
according to the extent of knowledge,
discovering according to karma." The
world you perceive is not "objectively existing" and then "discovered" by you. It's not
your prior beliefs that determine the world you "render."
Your brain is the editor-in-chief;
it first writes the draft
and then sends reporters to find evidence. Most of the time, the
evidence the reporters find precisely corroborates the editor-in-chief's draft
because your perceptual system filters out all information that doesn't fit the prediction.
This is conceptualization—
narrative superimposed on the data stream of dependent origination.
What are your usual prior beliefs?
"The world is dangerous, people are selfish,
resources are scarce, I am not good enough.
" These prior beliefs
exist in your Alaya consciousness as seeds,
constantly "rendering" the reality you perceive.
Every piece of bad news you see,
every experience of being let down,
reinforces these seeds. Karmic discovery
follows these karmas.
What is the Amitabha recitation training doing? It's
rewriting your prior beliefs.
Every time you recite "Amitabha,"
your consciousness system is doing one thing:
replacing a scarce, fearful, and uneasy belief with a pure, safe, and perfect one.
This isn't self-deception;
it's modifying the parameters of the rendering engine.
When you have enough pure seeds, and your prior beliefs are rewritten to a certain extent...
Your perceptual system begins to "render" a different world. It's not that the
physical world has changed,
but that the world you see has changed.
This is the precise meaning of "a pure mind creates a pure Buddha-land." The Pure
Land is not a physical location that you have to fly to ten trillion Buddha-lands to reach. The Pure Land
is a way of presenting your consciousness under specific parameter states. An
Alaya consciousness filled with seeds of greed, anger, and ignorance renders the
Saha world.
An Alaya consciousness that has been retrained with a large number of pure seeds renders the
Pure Land. The same
underlying reality, different
prior knowledge,
different worlds. At the
fifth level,
I want to talk about a point that the Pure Land school is most easily attacked: the
issue of external power versus self-power.
In the comments section of the last Dharani episode,
a comment received many likes. The gist of it was
: "The blogger's point is insightful,
but besides self-adjustment, chanting mantras also involves the process of external
power blessing.
Otherwise, you could just create
meaningless syllables to chant.
Chanting mantras can also call the corresponding Bodhisattva, making the
signal transmission complete.
" I take this feedback very seriously
because it points to a dimension that I cannot cover with my scientific framework.
My framework can explain "why repetitive chanting affects neural mechanisms." It's
"effective,"
but it doesn't explain "why reciting this string of syllables has different effects than reciting that string of syllables.
"
If the difference truly exists,
traditional Buddhism believes that specific Buddha names and mantras carry the vows and blessings of Buddhas and Bodhisattvas—a
power beyond the scope of neuroscience.
I don't deny this dimension,
but I can't verify it scientifically.
So, on this channel, I only talk about what I can,
but I admit that what
I'm talking about might only be the tip of the iceberg. There
might be things underwater that my framework can't reach.
Speaking of which,
Pure Land Buddhism is often looked down upon by Zen practitioners, who
say it's a "method of relying on external power,"
not advanced enough. Zen
emphasizes self-enlightenment,
not relying on external seeking, directly
pointing to the mind,
seeing one's true nature and becoming a Buddha—
how cool is that?
In comparison, Pure
Land Buddhism says, "I can't do it myself;
I have to rely on Amitabha Buddha to save me." It does sound a bit
cowardly,
but if you think carefully about
where the boundary is between "relying on external power" and "relying on oneself," let
me give you an analogy.
You use AI to write code and
eventually create a great program.
Is this achievement your "self-power" or the AI's "external power"?
You say it was written by AI.
But without your requests, prompts, and judgments, AI ca
n't produce anything.
You say you wrote it yourself,
but without AI's capabilities,
you might not be able to type a single line of code,
or it might take three days and three nights.
So whose credit is it?
The answer is: this distinction itself is false. The
results emerge "between" you and AI.
This is what we've been saying:
consciousness is an event that occurs "between."
But if we add the framework of Tathagatagarbha,
this question can be pushed a step further.
If Tathagatagarbha is true—Buddha-nature is built into you,
not acquired from the outside—
then who are you calling when you chant "Amitabha"? On the
surface, you are calling for an external Buddha,
but in reality,
you are calling for your own inner Buddha-nature.
You think you are calling for someone else to save you,
but you are actually calling for yourself to wake up.
This is like having a nightmare where
you are desperately calling for help.
You are shouting "Help!"
But the power that truly wakes you up is not in any character in the dream;
it is within yourself—it is your
"ability to wake up" as the dreamer.
Your cries are not summoning external rescue;
your cries themselves are activating your inner awakening mechanism. The
key and lock analogy is only the first layer: the
matching of "other-power" and "self-power" produces the "opening" event. A
deeper layer is that the key and lock are originally cast from the same piece of metal.
Amitabha Buddha and your Buddha-nature are never
two separate things.
Therefore, you see the "
other-power vs. self-power" debate; it
may have started with the wrong question. The
traditional view says it's the blessing of Buddhas and Bodhisattvas; the
scientific framework says it's the reshaping of your own nervous system; the
Tathagatagarbha perspective says "self and other are not two." These
three interpretations are valid at different levels
and are compatible with each other.
You don't need to choose sides.
There's a very important concept in Buddhism called "expedient means" (
Sanskrit upaya), which means
strategic means used to achieve a greater goal. It's
not deception, but teaching according to
aptitude. The Lotus Sutra
has a famous parable called the "Three Carts in a Burning House Parable."
A father's house is on fire, and the
children are playing inside and don't want to come out.
The father calls out that there are sheep carts, deer carts, and ox carts waiting for them outside. When the
children run out, they find that
their father has given them the same large white ox cart, far exceeding their expectations. The
three carts represent different paths of practice. The
large white ox cart represents ultimate awakening—there is only one destination.
However, there can be many entry points. Let
me extend this analogy.
In the original text, the three carts correspond to the three vehicles of the Śrāvaka, Pratyekabuddha, and Bodhisattva.
But if we extend the spirit of this metaphor to the level of sectarian schools,
Zen's direct pointing to the mind is like that ox cart—
direct, intense, and for those with good aptitude. The Yogacara
school's precise analysis is like a deer cart—requiring strong intellectual abilities.
Pure Land's recitation of Buddha's name is like a sheep cart—anyone can get on.
But ultimately, everyone gets the same big white ox cart.
Therefore, the Pure Land Dharma is not a "lower version of Buddhism";
it is the "most accessible and convenient method." A
low threshold does not mean a low ceiling. The
Lotus Sutra and the concept of "convenient method" are too
rich in content;
I will break them down in detail in the next episode.
This actually brings us back to the phenomenon we mentioned at the beginning:
why does the Pure Land school have far more users than other schools?
Because its customer acquisition cost is the lowest. You don't need to meditate until your
legs break,
you don't need to read hundreds of scriptures, you
don't need to understand profound philosophies like dependent origination and emptiness.
You just need to recite four words.
It lowers the threshold for awakening to almost zero.
Anyone,
regardless of their education level, intelligence, or social status, can achieve this. All of these
can be accessed through these four words to enter this consciousness rewriting system.
This is its growth flywheel that crushes all competitors. The
extremely low operational threshold,
coupled with a multi-layered, interconnected underlying mechanism, makes it
simple and easy for novice users to use, while
advanced users find the underlying architecture extremely ingenious. Is
n't this the definition of a top-tier product?
Sixth layer:
I'll talk about one of the most questionable concepts in Pure Land Buddhism – the final thought at the moment of death. Pure
Land Buddhism says that
even if you've committed countless evil deeds
throughout your life, as long as you sincerely recite "Amitabha" at the moment of death, you
can be reborn in the Pure Land.
This sounds too easy, right? A
lifetime of murder and arson, and you
go to heaven just by reciting a Buddha's name at the moment of death?
But if you understand this from the perspective of seed theory, it has a
completely different meaning.
First, can a
person who has committed countless evil deeds
truly recite that Buddha's name from the bottom of their heart at the moment of death?
Almost impossible.
Why?
Because their seed bank is full of evil seeds. The
moment of death is when a person's consciousness is most vulnerable. At
this time, what manifests is definitely your strongest seed. If
you never recite the Buddha's name normally, the
seed of reciting the Buddha's name has no power to manifest at the moment of death.
Therefore, the threshold for "the final thought at the moment of death" is
far higher than it seems on the surface.
But conversely…
If a person can truly generate a sincere thought at the moment of death—
note,
not just uttering it verbally, but
genuinely generating that pure, yearning-for-awakening thought in their heart—the
power of that single thought is indeed immense.
In the episode discussing "No-Self and Reincarnation," we
used an analogy: a cloud of karmic probability. Accumulated karma from past lives
forms a probability cloud,
like a quantum superposition state.
More good karma increases the probability of rebirth in a good realm;
more bad karma
increases the probability of rebirth in a bad realm. The
thought at the moment of death
is the final observation of this probability cloud;
it determines the direction in which the wave function collapses. From the
perspective of a large language model,
normally your model has countless parallel tasks running, and your
attention is scattered across various things.
Each gradient update of reciting Buddha's name is diluted by other noise.
But at the moment of death,
all other tasks are forcibly shut down.
Fame,
wealth, and
relationships are all lost;
everything collapses.
All your computing power is concentrated on this final inference task.
If the direction of this final inference is pure,
its impact on the parameter space will be extremely amplified,
equivalent to a gradient update where the learning rate is suddenly adjusted to its highest level. The
collapse of the superposition probability cloud in the final observation – combining these
two metaphors,
you'll understand: the final thought at the moment of death is not a "last chance to cheat," but a
final review of your entire seed bank at the most crucial moment. This is why
Pure Land Buddhism emphasizes reciting the Buddha's name regularly,
not because the Buddha's name has any magical power,
but because you need to train the seed of "reciting the Buddha's name" to your strongest weight in daily life, so that
it can become your default output at the crucial moment of death.
This also explains a common confusion:
why eminent monks emphasize "daily practice" –
because the final thought at the moment of death is not a "last-minute cramming," but the
final manifestation of your lifelong cultivation.
What seeds you plant, that's what will
manifest at death;
this is the law of cause and effect, there are
no shortcuts. At
this point,
I want to summarize all the clues into a diagram:
What exactly does reciting the Buddha's name do in practice?
First layer: Anchoring attention. The Buddha's name
is the anchor point, pulling
scattered attention back –
this is the function of "cessation."
Second layer: Neural entrainment. The
frequency and rhythm of sound waves change the state of brain waves, moving
from scattered to ordered –
this is the physical mechanism of Dharani we discussed in the previous episode.
Third layer: Rewriting the seed bank.
Each recitation of the Buddha's name is a miniature, directional fine-tuning,
planting a pure seed in the Alaya consciousness and
gradually changing the parameter distribution.
This is the mechanism of Yogacara philosophy. The
fourth layer: rewriting a priori beliefs. When the
pure seeds accumulate to a certain amount,
your predictive coding system begins to render the world with new a priori beliefs. A pure
mind makes a pure Buddha-land.
This is the predictive coding mechanism of the Surangama Sutra. The
fifth layer: clearing away obscurations. The
ultimate effect of all these processes is not to "build" anything new,
but to clear away the obscurations on the inherent light of the Tathagatagarbha. The
gold is always there;
you are just washing away the sand. With these
five layers stacked together,
you can see the complete architecture of this system.
And its most remarkable feature is that the user interface is extremely simple. In short,
anyone can use it.
You can completely ignore the five layers of mechanisms mentioned above. As
long as you recite,
it works. Just like
you don't need to understand network communication protocols to access the internet, or you do
n't need to understand the gravitational wave equations to throw a ball.
You see, in the last
episode, I said at the end that Dharani is a "consciousness calibration program that can run without understanding the principles.
" Reciting
the Buddha's name is a concrete example of this program,
and it may be the one with the best user experience among all examples.
This is probably the ultimate answer to why Pure Land Buddhism surpasses all other schools. It's
not because it's the most profound,
but because it encapsulates the most profound mechanisms within the simplest operations.
Finally, I want to share some personal thoughts. I
mentioned my mother at the beginning;
she has been reciting Amitabha Buddha's name for many years.
I used to think this was just superstition of the older generation.
She didn't understand Alaya-vijnana,
predictive coding, or directional fine-tuning.
She simply spent all her spare time
reciting Amitabha Buddha's name.
Even when busy with housework,
as long as she didn't need to use
her brain or mouth, she would still recite. Now, looking at this again, I suddenly realized: she may not know what she's doing, but she is indeed doing it. Every time she recites a Buddha's name, her attention is anchored, her nervous system is synchronized, her
seed bank is updated,
her a priori beliefs are fine-tuned, and
her Tathagatagarbha is polished a little.
She doesn't need to know these terms,
just as you don't need to know the names of digestive enzymes. The
food you eat will still be digested.
This may be the deepest wisdom of the Pure Land school.
It trusts your consciousness system to work on its own.
You don't need to understand it;
you just need to activate it.
And what we're doing in this series
is simply trying to understand that constantly working mechanism.
Next time,
I will talk about the Lotus Sutra. The Buddha himself spoke this meta-narrative.
He taught for over forty years, and
all paths, including the Pure Land school, are
essentially "expedient means"
—strategic methods to allow people of different capacities to embark on the path. There is
only one destination,
but why are there so many entrances? The Lotus Sutra
provides the highest-level structural explanation for this in Buddhism.
I am Wang Lijie.
See you next time.