Zhiyi built Chinese Buddhism's first great home-grown system of thought
Orphaned by war at seventeen and a monk by eighteen, Zhiyi went on to found the Tiantai school, which spread to Korea, Japan and Vietnam. The scholar David Chappell ranks him beside Thomas Aquinas and al-Ghazali as one of history's great organisers of religious thought and practice.
Zhiyi lived from 538 to 597, born with the surname Chen in what is now Hubei. When a Western Wei army took his home city of Jiangling, he lost both parents. At 23 he met Nanyue Huisi, a master of meditation and the Lotus Sutra, who reportedly greeted him as an old friend from a past life at Vulture's Peak. Zhiyi trained with him from 560 to 567 before being approved as his successor.
He then taught for eight years in the southern capital, Jinling, but concluded his efforts there were bearing little fruit. In 575 he withdrew to Mount Tiantai in Zhejiang, which gave the school its name, and stayed about eleven years, around the time a northern emperor was persecuting Buddhism. Recalled to the capital in 585, he lectured on the Lotus Sutra and conferred bodhisattva precepts on the prince who later became Emperor Yang of Sui, receiving the title Zhizhe, the Wise One.
Zhiyi was the first major Chinese Buddhist to build a complete system based chiefly on Chinese interpretation. The Lotus Sutra served as his lens for all other Mahayana teaching, though he also drew on Nagarjuna. His signature idea, the Threefold Truth, holds together emptiness, provisional existence and a unifying middle. His vast meditation manual, the Great Calming and Insight, blends Indian methods with new ones, and a shorter guide, the Small Calming and Insight, was probably China's first practical meditation handbook and shaped Chan practice.
Almost none of this would survive without his disciple Guanding, one of about thirty-two direct students, who edited the lectures into the three great Tiantai texts. Many other works bear Zhiyi's name, but modern scholars treat several, including those on Pure Land and Guanyin, as later additions. His repentance rites remain in Chinese Buddhist use today, and his ideas fed Japanese Tendai, Pure Land and Nichiren traditions.
Source: Zhiyi
