I am very much intrigued by Buddhism and I really think that this book will will teach me more about this religion.  I just hope the local bookstores here have it in their stocks.

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I like your observation about Shinran, Scott:

In another departure from more traditional Pure Land schools of Buddhism, Shinran Shonin advocated that birth in the Pure Land was settled in the midst of life rather than at death. When one entrusts oneselves to Amida Buddha birth there is settled at that moment. This is equivalent to the stage of non-retrogression along the bodhisattva path, a characteristic of Mahayana Buddhism, or shinjin.

In my own way of thinking, Shinran's teaching can be interpreted to mean that, at the very moment we entrust ourselves to the planetary ecological processes that necessarily embrace all life, and from which therefore nothing is ever excluded (or "forsaken," to use Shinran's word), at that moment we experience our birth in the Pure Land as "settled."

It has always impressed me that Shinran requested his body be fed to the fishes of the Kamo River when he died. This didn't happen of course. The nembutsu devotee he modeled his life on, Kyoshin, could have his body devoured by dogs a few centuries earlier, but mostly because he died in relative obscurity in an outlying agricultural region. Shinran had many devoted disciples by the time of his death, and so instead of Nature we get a stupa.

Nature, it seems to me, is the real stupa and the real teaching. I do believe that Shiran understood this, albeit in terms of a spiritual symbol, rather than an ecological one. Today, however, I firmly believe that he would speak of Amida in terms of ecological/evolutionary processes from which nothing is left over and nothing is left out.