 Among the founders of the so-called Kamakura New Religions, the Pure Land philosopher Hōnen (1133–1212) expressed a seminal idea that keynoted the greater movement. (See the entry on   Japanese Pure Land Philosophy, section 3.)  A noted Tendai master of Mt Hiei’s texts and practices, both esoteric and exoteric, he was frustrated with his personal failure to find any liberating insight. As a Tendai philosopher, however, he recognized one teaching that could lead to a new philosophical approach, namely, the holographic paradigm of the whole-in-every-part. Tendai had used it to go from simplicity to reveal ever greater levels of complexity, but might it now also be reversed? Could it not be used to pare complexity down to a minimal particularity that would still be all-inclusive? The key would not be to set out to embrace the whole, but instead to select one thing––one practice, one teaching, one text—and to focus on that, realizing that by the holographic paradigm ultimately nothing would be lost. By that line of thought, Hōnen came to his idea of selection (senjaku or senchaku) as the guiding strategy for his engaged philosophy. By engaging a properly selected single teaching or practice, one does not abandon the holistic view but instead discovers it as inscribed in that particular. That philosophical modus operandi became the guiding principle for all three of the major branches of Kamakura-period philosophies: Pure Land, Zen, and Nichiren.