Shinran Shōnin

Shinran Shōnin (1173–1263) was a Japanese Buddhist priest, the disciple of Hōnen and the founder of the Jōdo Shinshū, or True Pure Land, school. Because the nembutsu movement was suppressed, he was defrocked and exiled in 1207, and he later lived and taught among ordinary people in eastern Japan before returning to Kyoto.

The poems here are his wasan, hymns in praise of Amida Buddha, the Pure Land and the line of teachers who handed down the faith. They follow the English version by S. Yamabe and L. Adams Beck, published as Buddhist Psalms in the Wisdom of the East series (London: John Murray, 1921), rendered as numbered prose-verse. The translators' own dates are not established, but the book's date is.