 But all of these descriptions are potentially very misleading, since our understanding of each of these points must be thoroughly modified by the most characteristic premise of Tiantai thought of all, which determines the meaning we intend for the term “thoroughgoing” here: the idea of “self-recontextualization”. As we’ll see in detail below, this is a thinking-through of the basic notion of universal contextualization itself and its constitutive role in the construction of all identities, to the point of seeing it to entail the ambiguating of the identity not only of the contextualized but also of the contextualizer. This notion brings with it a kind of turnaround whereby the full expression of any element of experience, indeed the thorough consideration of any determinate entity at all, intrinsically entails its self-overcoming and self-negation, amounting to its reversal: it is found to include just what it had initially appeared to exclude. This turn of thought may be termed dialectical, but in a way that differs from both Hegelian and Marxian notions of dialectics in that it is neither teleologically progressive nor hierarchical. It has roots in 1) indigenous Chinese interest in the “reversals” observed in the cycles of nature, conceptualized according to the naïve ancient generalization that when anything is pushed its own extreme it will “reverse”, that an increase in a thing’s extension or intensity leads to its self-undermining (e,g., it keeps getting colder until it gets coldest, and then it starts getting warmer), and in 2) the sophisticated ruminations on the nature of conditionality developed in the Emptiness and Two Truths doctrines as expressed in Indian Buddhist logic. What this means is that “thoroughgoing contextualism” will in Tiantai reverse into an assertion of the self-validation of every entity without exception, that “thoroughgoing holism” will in Tiantai self-reverse also into thoroughgoing individualism, “thoroughgoing monism” also into thoroughgoing pluralism, “thoroughgoing immanentism” also into thoroughgoing transcendentalism, along with a claim that these two extremes are, when fully thought through, actually synonyms for one another. It will mean that for all finite conditional entities, exceptionless impermanence is seen to be also exceptionless eternalism, exceptionless anti-substantialism is seen to be also exceptionless substantialism, exceptionless anti-realism is seen to be also exceptionless realism, again supplemented by a claim about the interchangeability of these two seemingly opposed claims. Similarly, thoroughgoing skepticism about all claims is seen to be also a thoroughgoing “trivialism” (the claim that all possible claims are true), thoroughgoing anti-realism also a fanatically absolute realism even for the most fleeting appearances, thoroughgoing renunciation of finite aims, moral rules, moral consequences and moral virtues is seen to be also an exceptionless acceptance of all finite aims and the endorsement of all determinate moral rules, consequences and virtues.