Tendai may be understood as a grand synthesis within Japanese Buddhism, rooted in the Chinese Tiantai tradition of Zhiyi and established in Japan by Saichō on Mount Hiei. It inherits Tiantai’s comprehensive method of organizing the Buddha’s teachings and places the Lotus Sūtra at the center, regarding it as the fullest revelation of the Dharma and the key to understanding that all beings possess the potential for Buddhahood. Within this framework, Tendai emphasizes that enlightenment is originally present and that practice serves to awaken what is already inherent. Other teachings and practices are not rejected but interpreted as partial or provisional expressions of this single, ultimate truth.

From this standpoint, Tendai relates to other schools less as a rival and more as a matrix out of which many later traditions emerged. Its curriculum integrated Madhyamaka and Yogācāra philosophy, Pure Land devotion, esoteric ritual, and meditative disciplines resembling what later came to be known as Zen, all harmonized under the vision of the Lotus Sūtra’s “one vehicle.” Esoteric practices, for example, were taken up in a way that paralleled Shingon, yet Tendai tended to treat them as one strand within a larger Lotus-centered tapestry rather than as the supreme and exclusive path. In a similar way, Pure Land nenbutsu, Zen-style meditation, and other methods were accepted as valid, but always as facets of a more encompassing whole.

Historically, this inclusive stance made Mount Hiei a training ground for figures who would go on to found several major Japanese schools. Hōnen and Shinran, who later shaped Pure Land traditions focused on devotion to Amida Buddha, first received their formation within Tendai’s broad doctrinal and practical environment. Eisai and Dōgen, associated with Rinzai and Sōtō Zen respectively, likewise began in Tendai monasteries before articulating paths that placed meditative practice at the center in a more exclusive way. Nichiren, too, emerged from Tendai, sharing its reverence for the Lotus Sūtra while rejecting the openness to multiple practices and insisting on an exclusive focus on that scripture.

Seen in this light, Tendai’s relationship to other schools is both historical and doctrinal: it provided the institutional soil from which many later movements sprang, and it offered a conceptual vision in which seemingly divergent paths could be understood as expressions of a single Dharma. Where later traditions often defined themselves by narrowing their focus—on esoteric ritual, on nenbutsu, on zazen, or on exclusive Lotus devotion—Tendai sought to hold these diverse practices together without abandoning the claim that the Lotus Sūtra reveals the deepest meaning of them all. Its enduring character is that of an eclectic yet ordered synthesis, a tradition that aims to honor the full range of Buddhist teachings while interpreting them through the lens of a unifying, Lotus-centered insight.