 The principal metaphysical question occasioned by Japanese Pure Land Buddhism arises most naturally concerning the meaning of a being’s birth in the Pure Land and the ontological status of Amida Buddha. Although Western researchers have often been confident in imposing substantialist assumptions on Pure Land thought, asserting, for example, that Hōnen and his followers thought of the Pure Land as a geographical place, and although many Pure Land Buddhists assume that past thinkers regarded the Dharmakara-Amida narrative as historical in a modern sense, in fact the dominant traditional motif in treating questions of the reality of Amida and the Pure Land reflects, not such notions as substance, identity, autonomy, and permanence, but an interactive, dynamic movement across provisional dichotomies of formless reality and form, enlightened wisdom and ignorance, transtemporality and time, buddha and sentient being. This thinking characterized by the discriminative perception of the world of beings rooted in the nondiscriminative apprehension of reality may be seen in relation to the question of the real existence of beings born in the Pure Land in the following passage from the sixth century Chinese Pure Land thinker Tanluan (476–542):