A nine-year-old boy enters a monastery to answer the only question that matters: how do you escape suffering? The show sits with that question, never rushing it, never pretending philosophy is action. What emerges is a portrait of a person becoming a person, not a saint's origin story, and it moves with the quiet authority of something that knows exactly what it costs to truly believe in anything.

Matsuwakamaru loses his father as an infant, and his beloved mother Kikkou dies when he is eight. Facing her death, he is left wondering where people go when they die, and whether there is any way out of the painful cycle of heaven, hell and rebirth. Driven to find the answer, he enters a Buddhist monastery on Mt. Hiei at just nine years old and takes the name Shinran. This six-episode OVA tells the story of the man who would one day found the Joudo Shinshuu sect of Buddhism.