Like all the other Buddhist traditions we have considered, Pure Land is a Mahayana sect. And like various other Buddhist traditions, it spread from India to China in the 2nd century CE. Some centuries later it then spread to Japan and other regions in the Chinese cultural sphere.
In Pure Land, devotees worship Amitabha, a Buddha that presides over a heavenly realm. It was believed that if one could secure a rebirth in Amitabha’s heaven, one could then have a paradise-like existence without hardship and more easily attain an even better life from there on.