Saicho: The Establishment of the Japanese Tendai School

Paul Groner is a scholar of Japanese Buddhism, and this University of Hawaii Press book is his standard academic study of Saicho, the founder of the Japanese Tendai school, and of the school's early establishment and doctrine, including its central teaching of the One Vehicle, Ekayana, and the Three Truths. Its strength is close engagement with the Japanese and Chinese textual sources for Saicho's life and thought, situating Tendai's founding doctrine within the wider East Asian Buddhist debates it was responding to. Its limit is that it is a focused study of Saicho and Tendai's own founding synthesis specifically, so a claim about esoteric Buddhism or Vajrayana traditions more broadly, outside Tendai's own particular development of them, needs a source addressing those separate traditions rather than being drawn from this study alone.