This dissertation aims to be a contribution to redressing deficits in the existing scholarship of Tiantai Buddhist thought in Anglophone America and further facilitating future intercultural dialogue in the philosophy of religions. In particular, it investigates ways in which a set of Tiantai’s philosophical premises rooted in the tradition’s flagship doctrine of Three Truths expressed in the mutually subsuming relation of various philosophical categories is used by Zhiyi, and attempts to draw its implications by examining Tiantai doctrines that deabsolutize the boundaries of the pairs of opposites such as self and other, the seen and unseen, conscious and unconscious, and delusion and enlightenment. In showing Tiantai’s claims for the ultimate incoherence of finding the priority in each pair of these opposites respectively, the dissertation argues that the thoroughgoing lack of primacy in the pair of opposites results in the identity of these opposites and thus reveals that the Buddhahood is inherent to sentient beings’ each moment of practice. In a larger context of the academic study of religions, Zhiyi’s elaboration of Three Truths can offer a response to an issue embedded in the relation between universal and particular, and their parallel relation between related pairs of concepts such as whole and part, and ends and means. Postmodernist critics have considered one of the philosophical problems inherent to this relation to lie in a certain conception of exclusion: the realization of the true universality involves some form of the negation and neglect of the particular, even when some “essential” aspect of it is regarded as preserved. In this relation of negation, something about the particular has to be given up to synthesize with the universal. The same issue is found in the relation between whole and part, and between ends and means. Means are surrendered and eventually negated by the ends. In light of this, the present dissertation attempts to contribute an “omnitelic” conception of totality, universality and result evolving out of the initially atelic Buddhist premises, that, by virtue of bringing no single finality to it, offers a philosophical framework that helps us rethink the relation between universal and particular that produces no sacrifice of any aspect of finite beings. This unique framework of Tiantai not only allows infinite play of all quiddities within it but also paradoxically brings coherence to the relation among all of these quiddities without losing any aspect of their identities, and hence, affirming the value of them all. A significance of this omnitelic framework is in that it philosophically undergirds buddhas and bodhisattvas’ post-enlightened act and their salvific compassionate responses to the suffering of all sentient beings. The thematic choice of Zhiyi’s discussion is based on my interest in the problem of “the relation of negation” embedded in teleology. As the final chapter of this dissertation discusses, a chief example of this is in the Western thought represented in Hegel’s concept of the cunning of reason that exemplifies “dialectic progression”, in contrast to Tiantai’s “omnitelic circulation.”