Tiantai
Creators: name: Chen, Lang
Publisher: name: Database of Religious History (DRH)
Year: 2022

description: Tiantai was the first Buddhist school founded in China. Though it traced its origin to the Indian philosophersaint Nagarjuna and ultimately to the Shakyamuni Buddha himself, its intellectual character was shaped by Zhiyi (538–97), a Chinese monk. Zhiyi made two sojourns to Mount Tiantai, a mountain in southeastern China, and asked in his will that the Sui Prince Yang Guang build a monastery there. The school was subsequently named after the mountain, which literally means “platform of the sky.” The Tiantai School was not formed by the time Zhiyi died, but Guanding (561-632), one of his disciples, constructed a Tiantai lineage by connecting Zhiyi to the historical Buddha, an Indian figure who had lived centuries earlier. This is considered by modern scholars “a watershed in the history of religious ideas” in that it constitutes a defining element in the development of group identity and sectarian consciousness within Chinese Buddhism. The intellectual foundations of Tiantai took shape in a period when a long-divided China was transformed into a unified state. Zhiyi, originally from an elite family in the south, integrated Buddhism as philosophy popular among southern elites at the time, with meditation techniques that he inherited from his teacher Huisi (514-577), a northerner. As a result, Tiantai is characterized by a strong philosophical content and at the same time an emphasis on meditative practice; these are considered the two wings of a bird. Tiantai was deeply influenced by the Madhyamaka philosophy of Indian Buddhism and developed the Madhyamaka idea of Two Truths (i.e. the absolute truth and the conventional truth) into Three Truths (or the Threefold Truth): 1) all things are empty in the sense that they are produced through causes and conditions and therefor have no self-nature; 2) they do have tentative or provisional existence; 3) being both empty and provisional is the nature of everything, which is the Truth of the Mean. Tiantai believes that all beings can be divided into ten realms — the hell dwellers, hungry ghosts, animals, human beings, demigods, heavenly gods, voice hearers, pratyeka-buddhas, bodhisattvas, and buddhas. In Tiantai thought, these are so interwoven and interpenetrated that they are “immanent in a single instant of thought.” In other words, in every thought-moment, all possible worlds are involved. For the same reason, after a doctrinal debate within Tiantai in the 10th – 11th century, the idea of “inherent evil in nature” or “inherent inclusion” became orthodox. It is believed that human nature, as well as the nature of all beings, contains the nature of beings of other nine realms, which is to say, humans, buddhas, hell dwellers and so forth all have both good and evil in their nature. This idea distinguishes Tiantai not only from other schools of Chinese Buddhism, which consider the Buddha Nature purely enlightened and good, but also from mainstream Confucianism, which believes that all humans are born with a purely good nature. This feature attracted supporters to Tiantai in the late imperial era (16th - 19th centuries), who tended to challenge Confucian ideology. Like other schools in Chinese Buddhism, Tiantai as a religious group is not congregational and thus its organization has remained loose and its identity fluid. Except for about a dozen of eminent monks historically recognized as patriarchs in the Tiantai lineage, most monastics and lay Buddhists do not strongly identify themselves with any particular school and usually study under masters specializing in various schools. For this reason, Tiantai had been studied by modern scholars mainly as school of philosophy and doctrines. But this approach, equating Tiantai Buddhism simply with its philosophy, tends to eclipse the significance of Tiantai’s social network, its contributions to Buddhist rituals and communal life, and other important aspects that more and more scholars have been taking on in their research on Tiantai.