Chinese exegetes debated how this primordially awakened buddha should be understood. Was he a finite being who had attained enlightenment an incalculably long time ago? Or was he without beginning or end? Zhiyi argued that the Buddha of the “Lifespan” chapter unites in one all three kinds of buddha “body” set forth in Mahāyāna teachings: the dharma body (dharmakāya), or timeless truth conceived as a “body”; the reward or enjoyment body (sambhogakāya), a subtle body endowed with transcendent powers resulting from a buddha’s countless eons of practice; and the manifest or emanation body (nirmāvakāya), the historical person who appears in the world. While the dharma body was understood as having neither beginning or end, conventionally, the reward body was said to have a beginning, and the manifested body, both a beginning and end. For Zhiyi, however, the buddha of the perfect teaching possesses all three bodies in one, interfused and interpenetrating. This concept inflects, in terms of the buddha, the nondual logic of “one in many, many in one” that we have already encountered with the threefold truth and the three thousand realms in a single thought-moment. Through this integration, the reward and manifested bodies participate in the timelessness of the dharma body, which does not exist apart from the other two. Notions of the primordial buddha’s constant presence in the phenomenal world were further developed by esoteric Buddhist thinkers, both in China and Japan, who equated the primordial Śākyamuni of the “Lifespan” chapter with the omnipresent cosmic buddha Mahāvairocana (J. Dainichi) who manifests as all phenomena.