Also mida jōin. Lit. "Amida's meditation mudra." Mida is an abbreviation of *Amida 阿弥陀 (Sk: Amitabha/Amitayus), and jōin is an abbreviation of *zenjō-in 禅定印 (meditation mudra). Also known as rikitan-in 力端印. A hand gesture formed by placing both hands in the lap with the palms turned upwards and the middle, third and little fingers of both hands interlocked; both thumbs touch the tips of both forefingers, which are bent with the third phalanges back to back. The mida-no-jōin is described in the Kongōchō yuga kanjizaiō nyorai shugyōhō 金剛頂瑜伽観自在王如来修行法, and this has been thought to be the textual source of this mudra. However, the original Sanskrit manuscript of this text has no known Tibetan translation. Therefore, in many other countries, Amida forms not the mida-no-jōin but the ordinary meditation mudra *hokkai jōin 法界定印 in Japan, and in China, examples of this mudra are very rare. With the emergence of Esoteric Buddhism mikkyō 密教, the meditation mudra became the distinctive feature of Amida in almost all expressions of Mahayana Buddhism. But in the Japanese Buddhist pantheon *Dainichi 大日 in the *Taizōkai mandara 胎蔵界曼荼羅 also displays the meditation mudra, and the need to distinguish between these two deities led to the differentiation of two types of meditation mudra, namely, Amida's mida-no-jōin and Dainichi's hokkai jōin.