 As we have seen, Hōnen asserted that the nembutsu as imparted to beings in Amida’s vow differs profoundly from all other practices handed down in Buddhist tradition. Persons might, therefore, perform the utterance of the Buddha’s name as another means of healing the mind and gaining merit, in continuous recitation or as an element of ritual worship or contemplative practice, or they might say the name as the act prescribed in Amida’s vow, entrusting themselves wholly to the working of the Buddha’s compassion and abandoning any notion of their own goodness or effort as contributing to realization. The former manifests self-power, the latter Other Power. Hōnen taught that it is only the latter that remains operative now for us. However, a serious difficulty in understanding this teaching arose among Hōnen’s following, one Hōnen struggled to deal with but was unable to resolve doctrinally.