Tendai had examined the manifold views of reality, and found justification in each of them; and his ambition was to unify them, by looking at every particular existence as if it were an adequate representative of the whole cosmos (dharma-dhatu). His conception of reality is equivalent to seeing every thing sub specie aeternitatis, but his aeternitas differed greatly from that of Spinoza in being not monistic, but “according to the three thousand aspects” — ten realms to each of ten, this hundred in the ten categories of existence, and this thousand multiplied by the three categories of group existence.