Tendai presents mind and body as fundamentally non-dual, two facets of a single, dynamic reality rather than separate substances. Drawing on the Tiantai heritage, it understands all phenomena as expressions of one suchness, so that mental and physical events are equally grounded in the same ultimate truth. Mind and body mutually condition one another, co-emerging through dependent arising rather than standing in a hierarchy where one is superior. This perspective resists any tendency to treat the body as a mere shell or the mind as an isolated, immaterial principle.

This non-dual vision is articulated through the doctrine of “three thousand realms in a single thought-moment” (ichinen sanzen), which teaches that each moment of consciousness contains the entirety of the cosmos. Bodily existence and the physical environment are thus fully included within the functioning of mind, while mind itself is never apart from concrete, embodied life. Every phenomenon—whether labeled mental or physical—simultaneously manifests emptiness, provisional existence, and the middle truth, so that neither side of the pair can claim ultimate status. Both are equally empty, equally provisional, and equally expressions of the middle.

From this standpoint, the body is not an obstacle to awakening but the very site where Buddhahood is realized. Tendai emphasizes that enlightenment is attained “in this very body,” not by fleeing embodiment but by fully integrating body and mind in practice. Rituals, ethical conduct, and meditative disciplines all work with the body–mind complex as a single field in which Buddha-nature is disclosed. The path, then, is not a movement away from the physical toward some disembodied purity, but a deep recognition that mind and body already interpenetrate as expressions of one awakened reality.