Dohan 道範(1178?-1252) was a monk of the Shingon school 真言宗 on Mt. Kōya 高野山 in the early Kamakura 鎌倉 period. The aim of this paper is to investigate his ideas on the Pure Land 浄土 in the Himitsu-nenbutsu-shō 秘密念仏抄, one of his representative works on Amida Buddha 阿弥陀仏 and the Pure Land from the viewpoint of Esoteric Buddhism. In this work, Dōhan quotes some passages from the works of Nakanogawa Jippan 中川実範(?-1144) and Kakuban 覚鑁(1095-1143) as pioneers of the esoteric interpretation of the Pure Land. He presents a new system of ideas on the basis of their works. I examine them from three points of view, that is, his ideas on Amida Buddha, the Pure Land, and myōgō 名号 or the Buddha's name, and consider how Dohan accepted earlier ideas and what the characteristics of his ideas were. According to Dōhan, conventional ideas about the Pure Land and Amida are at an immature stage of understanding, and at a deeper level Amida is thought to be the same as Dainichi Nyorai 大日如来, the main Buddha of Esoteric Buddhism. He also states that the land of Gokuraku 極楽浄土 is not actually in the west but in the minds of all creatures, and that raigō 来迎, or Amida's coming to meet a dying person, does not mean that Amida actually comes to take him to the real Pure Land, but that with some training he sees the Buddha in his mind. With regard to myōgō, he developed Kakuban's idea that every word is a mantra 真言, and asserts that chanting Amida's name and chanting mantras have quite the same meaning. In addition, Dohan asserts that various virtues are included in the three letters of A-mi-da. And in conclusion, he even says that the entire world of a ma?dala is included in the name of Amida. One might venture to say that the interpretation of the name of Amida in the Shingon school attained its ultimate stage in his system. In this way, Dōhan radically reinterpreted the concepts of Amida, the Pure Land, myōgō, and so on from his position based on the doctrines of Esoteric Buddhism. He considered that the ideas of the Pure Land and Amida Buddha were part of Shingon doctrine and insists on the superiority of Esoteric Buddhism by subsuming these ideas under the system of Esoteric Buddhism. Thus, his ideas were different from a "fusion" of Esoteric Buddhism and Pure Land Buddhism, which was a characteristic of the interpretation of the Pure Land in the Shingon school before him.
