In his work, Collection of Passages on the Land of Peace and Bliss (An-le chi), Tao-ch'o described his vision of his own times. Two facets of this vision stand out: 1) the fact that so much time had elapsed since Shakyamuni's disappearance from the world, and 2) although Buddhist doctrine had developed during this period, in fact, Buddhist practice was available to few. These same two points had been emphasized twenty years earlier by T'an-luan who saw his world as full of suffering and devoid of the Buddha's presence. Tao-ch'o took this notion a step further and described his own times as the age of the final dharma (mappo).

Tao-ch'o adopted this mode of thinking and adapted it to two further categories that he established: "the gateway of the Holy Path" (Jp. shodomon) or the teaching that salvation can be reached through self power or one's own efforts, and “the gateway of the Pure Land" (Jp. jodomon) or the teaching of salvation through the power of Amida Buddha or other power. Tao-ch'o asserted that the Pure Land Path was the only teaching whereby people could attain salvation in the suffering world of the age of the final Dharma.

The distinctive feature of Tao-ch'o's Pure Land teaching was the particular way that he combined the thought of the Sutra of Immeasurable Life (Wu-liang-shou ching) with that of the Meditation Sutra (Kuan wu-liang-shou ching). The center of his interpretation was that the evil people of the lowest level of inferior capacity described in the Meditation Sutra are precisely those whom in the Sutra of Immeasurable Life are identified as being capable of attaining birth in the Pure Land through the merit of Amida Buddha's original vow. This interpretation, that it was precisely these ordinary sinful people who were the proper objects of Amida Buddha's compassion, was to greatly influence the next and the greatest of the Chinese Pure Land patriarchs, Shan-tao.