 These anaologies, homely and somewhat goofy as they are, may start to give some sense of the intuitions that undergird Tiantai’s architectonic philosophical system, which may help orient us as we move into the actual technical arguments and commitments developed there. This is especially important in the Tiantai case, as the conclusions to which its theoretical edifice lead will initialy strike many if not most readers as wildly outlandish and counterintuitive; some attention to these everyday experiences—coming upon something in the world, having some tentative grasp of what it is but with a built-in incompletion clause pointed toward the future, finding out more about it, reinterpreting and recalibrating our understanding accordingly, adjusting our foregroundings and backgroundings, and so on—may help to spur some reflections on the concepts normally brought to bear in interpreting these experiences. It also helps us understand the Tiantai claim that its most shocking stipuations are nothing special, not the bizarro-world privileges of some remote ontological plane, but are rather inescapable entailments of everyday experience of all sentient beings—for this process of things appearing one way and turning out another is almost a definition of “experience” as such. Nevertheless, analogies are never perfect, always partially mirroring the structure they are intended to explicate but never doing so completely, and we must not allow the attractive accessibility of such examples to mislead us into resting content with only a loose sense of the logical entailments of this sort of thinking. For a more rigorous grasp of the reasoning on which so many of the outrageous epistemological, ontological and soteriological claims of this school rest, we must approach the meaning of “neither-same-nor-different” more systemtaically.