The bulk of "Demythologizing Pure Land Buddhism" is a collection of essays by Rijin Yasuda (1900-1982), a Shin Buddhist thinker in the modernizing tradition of Kiyozawa Manshi (1863-1903). Yasuda "taught a conception of Amida and the Pure Land that made them existential realities in the present," as translator Paul B. Watt puts it in his introduction: The Pure Land for Yasuda was not a cosmic bliss dimension but rather "that place where sentient beings discover their true identity as the Tathagata."