Denominations
Tiantai
Buddhism
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Origin 538 to 597 CE
The first fully Chinese school of Buddhist thought, named for the mountain in Zhejiang where Zhiyi taught, and built on the claim that the Lotus Sutra is the highest and most complete of the Buddha's teachings. Its organising achievement is the panjiao, a classification that sorts the whole inherited and mutually contradictory canon into periods and modes of teaching, so that apparent contradictions become stages in one pedagogy adapted to hearers of different capacity. Doctrinally it is known for two positions. The threefold truth extends the Madhyamaka two truths with a third that holds emptiness and provisional existence together as a single middle. The three thousand realms in a single moment of thought asserts that every possible state of existence, from hell to buddhahood, is present in each instant of any mind, from which it follows that buddhahood is not somewhere else. Practice joins scholastic study to a demanding programme of meditation and repentance rites.
Facts
Belief
Defining Doctrinal PositionAll the teachings ranked in a graded classification (panjiao) 1Tradition: Buddhism Defining Doctrinal PositionOne vehicle: every teaching leads to a single buddhahood 2 Defining Doctrinal PositionEmptiness, provisional existence and the middle held as one 2 Status
Status TodayLiving tradition, practised today 1 Organisation
GovernanceAuthority through monastic ordination lineage and its seats 1 OrdinationCelibacy required of the ordained 1 OrdinationOrdination is into a monastic order, not to a congregation 1 Practice
Liturgical LanguageClassical Chinese (read in Sino-Japanese where used in Japan) 1 Origins
Origin Period Place of OriginMount Tiantai, in Zhejiang 1 History
Separation or Divergence Separation or DivergenceTiantai formed as a school of doctrinal classification within Chinese Buddhism rather than by separating from anything 1 Learn More
Zhiyi and the Lotus Synthesis
Tiantai is a school of Chinese Buddhism named for Mount Tiantai in Zhejiang province, where its effective founder, the monk Zhiyi (538-597), taught in the sixth century. It was among the first distinctively Chinese, as opposed to imported Indian, schools of Buddhism, and it is celebrated for the systematic comprehensiveness with which Zhiyi organised the whole inherited mass of Buddhist scripture and doctrine into a single coherent scheme.
Tiantai takes the Lotus Sutra as the highest and most complete of the Buddha's teachings, and on its basis Zhiyi devised a famous system of doctrinal classification (panjiao) that ranked the various sutras as successive stages in the Buddha's pedagogy, culminating in the Lotus. At the heart of Tiantai philosophy stands the Threefold Truth (that all phenomena are simultaneously empty of intrinsic nature, provisionally existent, and both at once in a middle that includes them), and the teaching of the mutual inclusion of all realms of existence in a single moment of thought (the "three thousand realms in one thought-moment"). With this went an elaborate programme of calming-and-insight meditation.
Influence, Transmission and Reach
Tiantai's synthesis made it one of the most philosophically sophisticated of the Chinese Buddhist schools, and its scheme for harmonising the diverse and seemingly contradictory scriptures proved widely influential across East Asian Buddhism. The school flourished in the Tang dynasty, suffered in the persecution of Buddhism in 845, and was later revived; its texts and lineage were transmitted to Japan, where Saicho founded the Tendai school on Mount Hiei in the early ninth century, and to Korea (as Cheontae) and Vietnam. Its exaltation of the Lotus Sutra and its inclusive, all-embracing vision fed into later movements, and the Lotus-centred devotion it fostered lies in the background of the Nichiren tradition that emerged from Tendai in Japan.
Tiantai continues as a living school of Chinese Buddhism, with Mount Tiantai as its ancestral centre, and it retains adherents in China, Taiwan and the wider Chinese Buddhist world. Scholars regard it, together with the Huayan school, as one of the two great systematic philosophies of Chinese Buddhism and as a decisive step in the naturalisation of the Indian religion into a fully Chinese form, whose influence on Japanese Buddhism through Tendai was especially far-reaching.
Cross-Tradition Connections
Associated With
This source names Tiantai directly: "Press, is an academic introduction to Tiantai Buddhism's distinctive philosophical concept of emptiness and omnipresence, working from the school's own classical Chinese textual sources."
This source names Tiantai directly: "his journey to China in 804 to study Tiantai teachings."
Belongs to Tradition
Branch Of
Contained In
A Chinese Mahayana school built on the Lotus Sutra.
Derived from This
Saicho carried the Tiantai teaching from China to Japan, where it became Tendai.
Founded By
He is counted the founder of the school, and its doctrinal classification of the canon is his.
Holds Element
The Great Compassion repentance rite that Tiantai developed is built around this dharani, which is why the school recites it at length rather than in passing.
Objects and Practices of This Tradition
Tiantai holds buddha-nature universal, and Zhanran extended it to insentient things, which is the position Japanese Tendai later took further still.
Dependent origination is affirmed as the ground of the emptiness the first truth states.
Zhiyi built the school on the Lotus Sutra's one vehicle, which gave him the warrant to arrange every other sutra as a stage on the way to it rather than as a rival to it.
The Lotus Sutra, ranked as the Buddha's final and complete teaching by the patriarch Zhiyi, is this school's central scripture.
The reckoning of the latter age was elaborated in Chinese Buddhism and carried in the Tiantai curriculum, from which the Japanese schools inherited it.
Zhiyi's own foundational treatise on Tiantai's own zhiguan meditation method, delivered and compiled entirely in China more than two centuries before the Japanese Tendai school existed to inherit it.
Emptiness is retained in full from Madhyamaka and is the first of the three truths.
The three truths, that a thing is empty, is provisionally there, and is both at once, are Tiantai's own contribution and the formulation Zhiyi used to move past the Indian two truths.
Tiantai reads the two truths of Madhyamaka as incomplete and preserves them inside the three rather than discarding them.
Position On
Non-injury is held in Tiantai.
The three poisons are held in Tiantai.
Not-self is held in Tiantai.
Impermanence is held in Tiantai.
The bodhisattva motivation is held in Tiantai.
Buddhahood is held in Tiantai as the goal every vehicle is directed at, and the school holds it open in principle to every being and to beings in every realm.
Giving is held in Tiantai as the first of the perfections.
Dharma is held in Tiantai, and the school's classification of the teachings is an account of how the whole of it is one dharma delivered in stages.
Suffering is held in Tiantai.
Original enlightenment as a developed body of teaching belongs to medieval Japanese Tendai rather than to Chinese Tiantai. The Chinese school supplies the material it is built from, chiefly the mutual containment of the ten realms, without arriving at the Japanese doctrine.
Karma is held in Tiantai.
Nirvana is held in Tiantai, and the school's reading of it is governed by the one vehicle: the cessation the earlier teaching describes is provisional and opens onto buddhahood.
Collected absorption is held in Tiantai, and Zhiyi's manual of calming and contemplation is one of the most detailed treatments of meditative practice in Chinese Buddhism.
Samsara is held in Tiantai, and the school's account of the three thousand realms present in a single moment of thought places samsara and awakening in the same instant rather than at two ends of a road.
Tiantai takes the question up as a matter of classification rather than of choosing a side: the school's scheme sorts the teachings into sudden and gradual, among other categories, and treats the Lotus as standing outside both.
The five aggregates are held in Tiantai.
The four immeasurables are held in Tiantai.
The four truths are held in Tiantai and are read through the school's classification as one of the levels at which the teaching is delivered.
The eightfold path is held in Tiantai.
The six realms are held in Tiantai, and the school counts them among the ten realms whose mutual containment is the ground of its central formula.
The three jewels and going for refuge are held in Tiantai.
The three marks are held in Tiantai.
Held Differently
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