Amitābha
THE MOST WIDELY INVOKED BUDDHA IN EAST ASIA and the corpus held nothing of him. The Pure Land traditions are built on his vow and on the recitation of his name; the retrieved treatment gives his place in the five-Buddha scheme and not the vow, so the record gives the place. THE FIVE ARE A SYSTEM AND NOT A LIST: each carries a direction, a colour, an element, a mudra, a symbol, a wisdom, AND A NEGATIVE EMOTION TURNED INTO AWAKENED UNDERSTANDING. The registry holds domains and can hold the direction and the wisdom; it has no field for 'the affliction this Buddha is the transformation of', which is the substance of the scheme, and that is recorded here rather than flattened away. TYPE deity IS THE NEAREST CATEGORY THIS SCHEMA HAS AND THE TRADITION DOES NOT USE IT. Buddhism does not regard a Buddha as a god; the devas this corpus already holds under the Buddhist key are, in this tradition's own view, unenlightened beings inside samsara, and a Buddha stands above them precisely by NOT being one. The record says so rather than letting the type field make the claim.
Domains
- the west
Relations
- of the five wisdom buddhas with: Vairocana
Sources
- Reference treatment of the Five Dhyani Buddhas: Vairocana is in the centre, Akshobhya in the East, Ratnasambhava in the South, Amitabha in the West and Amoghasiddhi in the North; the Five Dhyani Buddhas, or Tathagatas, the Five Wisdom Buddhas or Five Jinas, are representations of enlightened awareness in Vajrayana Buddhism, each associated with a colour, direction, element, mudra, symbol, wisdom, and a negative emotion turned into awakened understanding.