 The Pure Land teachings are often regarded as popularized, devotional extensions of a more philosophically demanding contemplative tradition based on a core doctrine of emptiness or voidness. In fact, the concepts of multitudes of celestial buddhas and their buddha-fields throughout the cosmos are already in evidence in the earliest strata of extant texts produced by the Mahayana movement, and sutras expounding distant buddha-fields, such as that of Akṣobhya Buddha in the east, are among the first to be translated into Chinese already in the second century CE, with sutras teaching Amida Buddha soon to follow. Thus, sutras teaching methods of achieving liberation from samsaric existence through attaining birth in buddha-fields in other regions of the cosmos—particularly Amida Buddha’s Pure Land—were among the earliest Buddhist scriptures transmitted to China. Further, the teaching of birth into Amida’s buddha-field became the focus of a continuous commentarial tradition that began among such major Indian Mahayana thinkers as Nāgārjuna (c. 150–250) and Vasubandhu (c. 320–400) in India, was transmitted to China as early as the third century CE, and is maintained today in Japan. Thus, it may be said that Pure Land concepts and ideas emerged directly out of elemental strains of Mahayana Buddhist thought at an early stage and underwent continual development in East Asia.