The Mother of Japanese Buddhism

Because Tendai gathered so many strands of practice under one roof, Mount Hiei became the seedbed from which much of later Japanese Buddhism grew: the founders of the great Kamakura-period movements (Honen and Shinran of the Pure Land schools, Nichiren, and Dogen of Soto Zen), were all trained as Tendai monks before setting out on their own paths.

For this reason Tendai is often called the "mother" of Japanese Buddhism. As an institution the school grew immensely wealthy and powerful in the medieval period, maintaining armies of warrior-monks (sohei) and playing a major role in court and national politics, until Mount Hiei was razed by the warlord Oda Nobunaga in 1571; it was later rebuilt. Tendai continues today as one of the established schools of Japanese Buddhism, with Enryaku-ji as its head temple and a network of temples across Japan, and it is known for demanding ascetic disciplines such as the kaihogyo, the thousand-day marathon of mountain circumambulation. Scholars treat Tendai as the Japanese form of the Tiantai tradition and as a foundational, encyclopaedic school whose comprehensiveness shaped the entire subsequent history of Buddhism in Japan.