 Zhiyan claims that the teachings of the Avatamsaka Sutra overcome the limitations of the “elementary” and “advanced” Mahayana. (He claims this virtue for the teachings of the Lotus Sutra as well.) For Zhiyan, the Avatamsaka Sutra reveals an unmediated vision of ultimate reality that resolves all conflict among opposites. He calls this a vision of the “dharma-realm of dependent arising.” This realm stands in contrast, conceptually, with the realm of “dependent origination” (Skt. pratitya-samutpada) familiar from earlier Buddhist teaching. The realm of dependent origination concerns relations of dependence among conditioned and illusory dharmas, and in particular relations that help to sustain or extinguish samsaric modes of experience. By contrast, the dharma-realm of dependent arising concerns relations that pertain to nirvanic modes of experience. The most pertinent of these relations, for Zhiyan’s panjiao, is the relation between the unmediated vision of ultimate reality and nirvanic experience itself. According to Zhiyan, these stand to each other as cause and result, respectively. He calls the teaching that pertains to the first (cause) the “sudden” teaching; and the teaching that pertains to the second (result), the “round” teaching. Ranking result as superior to cause thereby completes his five-tiered panjiao. 