On his return from China, Saichō worked hard to win recognition from the court and in the first month of 806, Saichō's Tendai Lotus school (Tendai-hokke-shū 天台法華宗) won official recognition when the court of the ailing emperor Kanmu issued another edict, this one permitting two annual ordinands (nenbundosha) for Saichō's new school on Mount Hiei. This edict states that, following Saichō's request, the ordinands would be divided between two curricula: the shanagō course, centering on the study of the Mahavairocana Sūtra (this was the Mikkyō curriculum, shana being the abbreviation for Birushana, the Japanese transliteration of Vairocana), and the shikangō course, based on the study of the Mo-ho chih-kuan, the seminal work of the T'ien-t'ai patriarch Chih-i 智顗 (538-597) (this was the Tendai curriculum, shikan being the Japanese reading of Chih-i's central practice of chih-kuan [cessation and contemplation]) (Kenkairon engi, DZ 1, pp. 294-296). Thus from its very inception the Tendai Lotus school was equally based on Mikkyō and T'ien-t'ai. It was as a subdivision of Saichō's new school that Mikkyō first received the official acknowledgment of the imperial court and became a proper subject of study in Japanese Buddhism.