Both T’ien-t’ai and Hua-yen [Flower Garland School, Kegon] can be seen as attempts to reconceive Indian Mahāyāna insights about the empty and dependent nature of the dharmas and express them in terms of Chinese intellectual categories such as principle (li) and phenomena (shih), essence (t’i) and function (Yung), or nature (hsing) and outward form (hsiang). This involved a significant shift away from the apophatic language of Indian Madhyamaka—which maintains, in its extreme wariness about the limitations of language, that truth can be verbally illuminated only by stating what it is not—to more kataphatic modes of expression. These new modes attempt neither to reimport into Buddhism notions of metaphysical essence nor to claim that there can be adequate verbal descriptions for truth, but to employ positive language in soteriologically effective ways. Moreover, since principle and phenomena are seen as nondual, and this nonduality is expressed in every particular form, the Huayen and T’ien-t’ai totalistic visions also entailed a reconception of the empirical world. No longer was it the product of delusion or a place of suffering to be escaped, but the very realm where truth is to be realized and liberation achieved. This reconception was critical to the sinification of Buddhism and exerted an immense impact on the subsequent development of Buddhism in East Asia. (Page 10)