but ultimately rejected the view that contemplation is all-sufficient, while still claiming to derive his doctrine from Nagarjuna.  He had a special veneration for the Lotus Sutra and paid attention to ceremonial.  He held that although the Buddha-mind is present in all living beings, yet they do not of themselves come to the knowledge and use of it, so that instruction is necessary to remove error and establish true ideas.  The phrase Chih-kuan[817] is almost the motto of the school:  it is a translation of the two words Samatha and Vipassana, taken to mean calm and insight.

The T’ien-T’ai is distinguished by its many-sided and almost encyclopaedic character.  Chih-I did not like the exclusiveness of the Contemplative School.  He approved impartially of ecstasy, literature, ceremonial and discipline:  he wished to find a place for everything and a point of view from which every doctrine might be admitted to have some value.  Thus he divided the teaching of the Buddha into five periods, regarded as progressive not contradictory, and expounded respectively in (a) the Hua-yen Sutra; (b) the Hinayana Sutras; (c) the Leng-yen-ching; (d) the Prajna-paramita; (e) the Lotus Sutra which is the crown, quintessence and plenitude of all Buddhism.  He also divided religion into eight parts,[818] sometimes counted as four, the latter half of the list being the more important.  The names are collection, progress, distinction and completion.  These terms indicate different ways of looking at religion, all legitimate but not equally comprehensive or just in perspective.  By collection is meant the Hinayana, the name being apparently due to the variously catalogued phenomena which occupy the disciple in the early stages of his progress:  the scriptures, divisions of the universe, states of the human minds and so on.  Progress (T’ung, which might also be rendered as transition or communication) is applicable to the Hina and Mahayana alike and regards the religious life as a series of stages rising from the state of an unconverted man to that of a Buddha.  Pieh, or distinction, is applicable only to the Mahayana and means the special excellences of a Bodhisattva.  Yuan, completeness or plenitude, is the doctrine of the Lotus which embraces all aspects of religion.  In a similar spirit of synthesis and conciliation Chih-I uses Nagarjuna’s view that truth is not of one kind.  From the stand-point of absolute truth all phenomena are void or unreal; on the other hand they are indubitably real for practical purposes.  More just is the middle view which builds up the religious character.  It sees that all phenomena both exist and do not exist and that thought cannot content itself with the hypothesis either of their real existence or of the void.  Chih-I’s teaching as to the nature of the Buddha is almost theistic.  It regards the fundamental (pen) Buddhahood as not merely the highest reality but as constant activity exerting itself for the good of all beings.  Distinguished from this fundamental Buddhahood is the derivative Buddhahood or trace (chi) left by the Buddha among men to educate them.  There has been considerable discussion in the school as to the relative excellence of the pen and the chi.[819]