 These four types of content are viewed by Tiantai thinkers not as four different teachings, but as really increasingly subtle explications of one and the same content, the basic Buddhist teaching, via more and more expansive recontextualizations. Tiantai classifies all the teachings found in the Mahāyāna Buddhist scriptures into these four general types, according to the degree to which they have developed the understanding of the basic Buddhist concepts of universal conditionality, i.e., of Impermanence, Suffering, and Non-Self. It should be noted again that all four of these types are regarded as “true teachings” of the Buddha—true in the sense of validly propounded as a way of liberating sentient beings from suffering in some particular context—and that all are equally also not considered uniquely true descriptions of reality. Moreover, in keeping with the general Tiantai approach to interpretation, they are not really different teachings at all: they are viewed as alternate expositions of the same idea as it is recontextualized, to varying degrees of thoroughness as appropriate, even though—as we shall see—they appear prima facie to be in direct contradiction to one another. As such, this schema provides us with a strong general model of the Tiantai conception of the self-overcoming of suffering, impermanence and non-self, wherein they are overcome by remaining exactly as they were, indeed even more so, and thereby are revealed to also be their own opposites.