Tiantai
Tiantai (天台宗) is one of the thirteen schools of Buddhism in China and Japan, also called the "Lotus Sutra School."In China: A Mahāyāna school established by Zhiyi of Tiantai mountain. Zhiyi, taking the Lotus Sutra as his basis, classified the other Buddhist sūtras into five periods and eight types of teachings; he discussed the theory of perfect interpenetration of the triple truth and taught the rapid attainment of Buddhahood through the practice of observing the mind. The Chinese line of transmission starts with Huiwen of the Northern Chi and follows with Huisi. Next Zhiyi explained the three great scriptures of the school emphasizing both scriptural study and practice. The sixth patriarch, Jingqi also popularized the sect through his commentaries on these three scriptures.
Also see Cheontae for Korea and Tendai for Japan.
The Tian Tai (Wade-Giles: T'ien T'ai) school was founded by the patriarch Zhi-yi (Wade-Giles: Chih-i) (538-597) during the Sui dynasty in China.
Zhi-yi organized all existing pre-Mahayana and Mahayana sutras into a five-part scheme, comprising the various levels of teaching revealed by the Buddha and culminating in the Lotus Sutra, which he held to be the supreme synthesis of Buddhist doctrine.
Tian Tai thus became proverbially broad, able to absorb and give rise to other movements within Buddhism. It also took up a principle of threefold truth derived from Nagarjuna:
See also: Chinese BuddhismExternal Link
The following, from a former duplicate article, should be merged with the above text
The transient world of phenomena is thus seen as one with the unchanging, undifferentiated ground of existence. This doctrine was elaborated in a complex cosmology of 3,000 interpenetrating realms of existence.
