Shinran, the founder of this sect in Japan, was born A.D. 1173 and died in the year 1262. He was very naturally one who had been first educated in the Jō-dō sect, then the ruling one at the imperial court in Kiōto. Shall we call him a Japanese Luther, because of his insistence on salvation by faith only? He is popularly believed to have been descended from one of the Shintō gods, being on his father's side the twenty-first in the line of generation. On his mother's side he was of the lineage of the Minamoto or Genji, a clan sprung from Mikados and famous during centuries for its victorious warriors. Hō-nen was his teacher, and like his teacher, Shinran studied at the great monastery near Kiōto, learning first the doctrine of the Tendai, and then, at the age of twenty-nine, receiving from Hō-nen the tenets of the Jō-dō sect. Shortly after, at thirty years of age, he began to promulgate his doctrines. Then he took a step as new to Buddhism, as was Luther's union with Katharine von Bora, to the ecclesiasticism of his time. He married a lady of the imperial court, named Tamayori, who was the daughter of the Kuambaku or premier. Shinran thus taught by example, if not formally and by written precept, that marriage was honorable, and that celibacy was an invention of the priests not warranted by primitive Buddhism. Penance, fasting, prescribed diet, pilgrimages, isolation from society whether as hermits or in the cloister, and generally amulets and charms, are all tabooed by this sect. Monasteries imposing life-vows are unknown within its pale. Family life takes the place of monkish seclusion. Devout prayer, purity, earnestness of life and trust in Buddha himself as the only worker of perfect righteousness, are insisted upon. Morality is taught to be more important than orthodoxy. In practice, the Shin sect even more than the Jō-dō, teaches that it is faith in Buddha, which accomplishes the salvation of the believer. Instead of waiting for death in order to come under the protection of Amida, the faithful soul is at once received into the care of the Boundlessly Compassionate. In a word, the Shin sect believes in instantaneous conversion and sanctification. Between the Roman and the Reformed soteriology of Christendom, was Melancthonism or the coōperate union of the divine and the human will. So, the old Buddhism prior to Shinran taught a phase of synergism, or the union of faith and works. Shinran, in his "Reformed" Buddhism, taught the simplicity of faith.