New City

While I knew that Augustine wrote about the City of God, I didn't realise that the Buddhists (or at least, the Pure Land ones) had the City of Doubt.  

Here's Charles B Jones, writing about the various theories behind the core Pure Land practice of reciting the name of Amitabha Buddha (nianfo), with this passage:

Still, as noted above, one’s frame of mind while doing the invocations mattered a great deal. No one ever proposed that the mere oral repetition of the name brought one to rebirth even if one did not believe in it. Faith seemed to matter, though many authors pointed out that the sūtras spoke of a place just outside the Pure Land called the “City of Doubt” (Ch.: yicheng) where those who performed nianfo without complete conviction went. From there they would see the Pure Land and develop enough faith to attain rebirth in it after a while. (There is, however, a story in the Chinese sources about a parrot who achieved rebirth simply because it imitated its owner’s nianfo.)