As we have seen, Zhiyi and other Chinese Tiantai thinkers drew on the Lotus Sūtra to integrate the disparate Buddhist teachings into a coherent whole and to explain how all phenomena, being empty of independent substance, interpenetrate and “contain” one another in an interrelated holistic cosmos. Saichō and later Japanese Tendai thinkers took these ideas in new directions. One was the claim that practicing the Lotus Sūtra enables one to realize buddhahood “quickly.” We find some basis for this in the Lotus itself, and the idea had already been proposed in the Chinese Tiantai tradition. Zhiyi’s teacher Huisi (515-577), for example, had written that Lotus practitioners awaken spontaneously and without proceeding through sequential stages of practice, and Zhiyi, as we have seen, saw the possibility of sudden and full awakening to the threefold truth in its entirety as what distinguished the “perfect teaching” from the “distinct teaching”: where bodhisattvas of the provisional Mahāyāna must practice for three incalculable eons to achieve full awakening, practitioners of the sudden and perfect teaching, exemplified by Lotus Sūtra, can do so directly. Saichō also understood the Lotus as the “great direct path” that enabled the realization of buddhahood in only two or three lifetimes, or in some cases, in this very lifetime.