 The question of the relationship between a person’s act of nembutsu and Amida Buddha’s Other Power—or between trust in Amida’s vow, which infuses each human act of nembutsu with Other Power, and the practice of the nembutsu, which has been devised and made efficacious for beings by the Buddha—raises profound questions concerning the sources and significance of human subjectivity and agency. Above all, the emergence of such issues within the context of a thoroughgoing application of the general Mahayana critique of self-attachment in religious praxis gave rise to the most innovative philosophical reflection in the Japanese Pure Land tradition. Thus, it is among disciples of Hōnen who tended toward the pole of emphasis on trust or on the adequacy of a single utterance an engagement with issues that have a distinct resonance with intellectual concerns today. This is because such disciples found it necessary to take up questions of one’s self-awareness in the relationship between being and Buddha in the immediate present and to delineate a groundwork for deconstructing commonsense subject-object dualisms applied to this relationship without recourse to abstract conceptions of mystical transcendence.