The earliest [T’ien-t’ai/Tendai Origin Myth] is the biography of Chih-i by his disciple Kuan-ting (561-632), according to which Hui-ssu (515-577) welcomed Chih-i as a disciple, saying, “In the past, we heard the Lotus together on Sacred [Eagle] Peak; impelled by this karmic connection, you have now come again!” The tradition that Hui-ssu and Chih-i had together heard the Buddha’s original preaching of the Lotus Sūtra was widespread in China, even outside the T’ien-t’ai school, and appears to have represented their shared mastery of the “Lotus samādhi,” the insight into the profound meaning of the Lotus Sūtra that Chih-i would later express as the threefold truth. Prominent among Japanese antecedents for the incorporation of this account into the Eshin and Danna origin myth is the lineage that Saichō drew up for his newly established Tendai school, which identifies Hui-ssu and Chih-i in the line of transmission as “auditors on Sacred [Eagle] Peak in India.” Saichō traced the historical roots of his lineage to Hui-ssu and Chih-i; however, the Buddha with whom he began the lineage is not the historical Śākyamuni, but, in the words of the Fo-shūo kuan P’u-hsien P’u-sa hsing-fa Ching, Śākyamuni who is “Vairocana Pervading All Places.” As noted in chapter l, this early conflation of the historical Śākyamuni with the omnipresent cosmic Buddha would undergo major development in Tendai esoteric thought. Eventually it also gave rise to the tradition, recurring in medieval Tendai ritual and doctrinal transmission texts, that “the assembly on Sacred [Eagle] Peak is solemnly [present] and has not yet dispersed” (ryōzen ichie ennen misan). (Page 102-103)