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.