Kōbō Daishi

Japanese monk

• Born: July 27, 0774
• Birthplace: Byōbugaura, Sanuki province (now Zentsūji, Kagawa prefecture), Japan
• Died: April 22, 0835
• Place of death: Mt. Kōya, Japan

Kōbō Daishi founded the Shingon sect of Buddhism. One of the most important intellectuals in Japanese Buddhist history, he introduced esoteric Buddhism and the study of Sanskrit to Japan, wrote pioneering treatises on Chinese poetics, and was a revered calligrapher.

Early Life

Kūkai, who was given the name Kōbō Daishi (koh-boh di-shee) posthumously in 931, was born to lady Atō Tamayori and Saeki Tagimi, aristocrats whose family was in political decline. A prodigy, at age fifteen, he began studying Chinese classics with a renowned Confucian scholar Atō Ōtari and, at age eighteen, entered the National University, typically a path to an elite bureaucratic career. However, Kūkai eventually dropped out, becoming a wandering Buddhist ascetic without official status.

Kūkai spent years alternately studying scriptures in Nara and meditating in remote regions, where he associated with mountain ascetics of the Natural Wisdom school (Jinenchi shu). In 797, he wrote Sangō shiiki (“Indications of the Goals of the Three Teachings,” 1972), a fictional dialogue comparing Buddhism , Confucianism, and Daoism. It was the first pro-Buddhist polemic in Japan, broad in scholarship and bold in placing even Daoism, then a proscribed religion, above government-promoted Confucianism. It was also a personal justification of a career choice that deeply disappointed Kūkai’s family. He continued to be a shidosō (irregular unordained monk) for six more years.

In 804, a life-changing opportunity arrived: participation, as a Buddhist student (he was officially ordained only on the eve of departure), in an embassy to Chang’an, the capital of the Tang Dynasty (T’ang; 618-907). Apparently his goal was to understand the Mahāvairocana Sūtra, challenging because it was a product of unfamiliar esoteric (tantric) Buddhism and written partly in Sanskrit. Fluent in Chinese, he served as secretary to the ambassador before being placed in Ximing Monastery, a great center of Buddhist scholarship. He studied Sanskrit and south Indian Brahmanical philosophy with Prajñā (734-810?), translator and a master of the TipitŃaka (compiled c. 250 b.c.e.; English translation in Buddhist Scriptures, 1913).

Esoteric Buddhism, then scarcely ninety years old in China, was in vogue in court and had its first native Chinese patriarch, Huiguo (Hui-kuo; 746-805), of the Chonglong (Green Dragon) Monastery. Remarkably, Huiguo quickly accepted Kūkai as a favored student, imparted to him in three months the most secret truths of the esoteric tradition (which depended on personal secret transmission from master to disciple, versus the public, written transmission of exoteric Buddhism), and ordained him a master. Before dying soon after, Huiguo designated Kūkai and Yiming (I-ming), the imperial chaplain, as the two chief transmitters of his teaching, which he enjoined Kūkai to quickly establish in Japan. Kūkai was already depleting his resources by making copies of scriptures, paintings, and ritual implements. Thus, though he apparently had planned to study in China for twenty years, he returned to Japan after an absence of thirty months.

Given the Japanese elite’s proclivity to emulate the high culture of China, Kūkai’s new status as an esoteric Buddhism master seemed to assure a triumphal homecoming. A twist of fate dictated otherwise. Kūkai’s great clerical contemporary, Tendai sect founder Saichō (767-822), who had also gone on the 804 embassy to China, was waiting for a ship back to Japan after spending six months in China, when he encountered an esoteric master who quickly initiated him into esoteric Buddhism. On his return, Emperor Kammu (r. 781-806) recognized Saichō as an esoteric master and had him perform an initiation rite for leading clerics, the first esoteric service in Japan. Thus, Kūkai returned to find a court hesitant to accept his claim to be an authentic master of esoteric Buddhism.

In late 806, in Kyushu, Kūkai sent the emperor Shōrai mokuroru (“A Memorial Presenting a List of Newly Imported Sutras and Other Items,” 1972), describing his accomplishments in China and listing the 142 sutras, 42 Sanskrit texts, 32 commentaries, and 10 paintings he had brought from China. He had to remain outside the capital for three years, awaiting the court’s reply. In 809, he was finally ordered to Takaosanji (now Jingoji), a mountain temple on the northwestern outskirts of Kyoto, where he resided as abbot until 823.

Life’s Work

Although discouraged for many years by the slow progress of his efforts to disseminate the teachings of Huiguo, Kūkai gradually established himself as a religious and cultural leader in early Heian (794-1185) society, partly through his relationship with the new emperor, Saga (r. 809-823), who, like Kūkai, had extraordinary talent in poetry and calligraphy they are remembered as two of the sampitsu (three brushes), Japan’s greatest calligraphers. Saga valued Kūkai’s talent, knowledge of Chinese poetics, and the poetry books he had brought from China, and he often invited the monk to poetry sessions at the palace. In addition, Saga supported his efforts to further esoteric Buddhism.

In 810, Kūkai was allowed to form a group of disciples and perform the initiation ritual (abhiseka). Two years later, Saichō and more than 190 others, including leading Nara priests and members of the court, received the abhiseka from Kūkai, now accepted as an esoteric master. He trained many of Saichō’s disciples and loaned Saichō many scriptures he had brought from China, though insisting they could not be truly understood without personal instruction an issue that eventually divided the two.

Needing a larger esoteric meditation site for his own growing school, in 816, Kūkai obtained from the emperor Saga Mount Kōya, which he had seen as a wandering ascetic. Mount Kōya, along with Tendai’s Mount Hiei, became one of Japan’s two great mountain monasteries. In 823, Saga presented Kūkai with Tōji, one of two state temples flanking Kyoto’s southern entrance, as a training center for his new school, the Shingon (mantra or true words).

Kūkai’s brilliance, energy, organizational skills and versatility made him enormously productive. Still active in court poetry, he wrote studies of Chinese poetics: Bumkyō bifu ron (819; “The Secret Treasure-house of the Mirrors of Poetry,” 1972), condensed the following year as Bumpitsu ganshin shō (820; “The Essentials of Poetry and Prose,” 1972). These works influenced later poets such as Fujiwara no Teika, editor of the Shinkokinshū (1216; new collection of ancient and modern poems), and seventeenth century haiku master Matsuo Bashō.

Donning a civil engineer’s cap, in 821, Kūkai returned to his naive Sanuki Province to build a reservoir (which survives, bearing his name). He also took over construction of still-unfinished Tōji, building the kōdō (lecture hall) and designing its sculptural program to express central Shingon concepts. It is one of the greatest surviving ensembles of early Heian sculpture. In 826, as an adjunct to Tōji, he established the first school in Japan open to children of any class. This noble enterprise, sadly, survived his death a scant decade. The dictionary he created for its students is the oldest extant in Japan.

Although Saichō and his Tendai sect withdrew from older Buddhist institutions, dispensing with Hīnayāna monastic rules (vinaya), seeking to escape the authority of the sōgō (the state board governing Buddhism), and securing separate Tendai ordination on Mount Hiei, Kūkai became part of the establishment, maintaining ties with the Great Nara temples by giving lectures and conducting services there, and initiating large numbers of Nara priests into esotericism. In 822, he constructed an abhiseka hall in front of the Great Buddha Hall of Tōdaiji, the greatest state temple in Japan. He became a leading official in the sōgō in 823 and administrative head of Daianji, the great Nara temple, in 829. In this manner, he made esotericism part of mainstream Japanese Buddhism, a fluid relationship persisting for centuries. Thus, contrary to the conventional view, the Shingon that Kūkai established was not an exclusive sect sharply separated from older Nara Buddhist institutions.

Nevertheless, Shingon espoused many radical notions. Although older traditions (Hīnayāna, Mahāyāna) had emphasized subduing one’s passions or emulating compassionate bodhisattvas, esotericism promised enlightenment (Buddhahood) in this present existence through magical rituals. Its chief scriptures, the Mahāvairocana and Vajrasekhara Sūtras, were declared not to be revelations from Śākyamuni, the historical Buddha (the traditional view of all sutras), but from Mahāvairocana (Dainichi in Japanese), the cosmic Buddha, whom Kūkai conceived in pantheistic terms the source of and thus identical with all Buddhas, bodhisattvas, and sentient beings. Although previous Buddhist concepts of such an ultimate cosmic divinity emphasized formlessness and incomprehensibility, Kūkai personalized Mahāvairocana as wise and compassionate.

Mahāvairocana is revealed through the three mysteries of body, speech, and mind, which are manifested in esoteric ritual in mudras (poses and hand gestures), mantras (the “sound seed” counterparts of other reality), and mandalas (pictorial diagrams conveying profound, ineffable truths). Kūkai asserted that proper performance of esoteric meditation and rituals with mudras, mantras, and mandalas has far greater efficacy than older practices such as simply reciting sutras (as ineffectual, he declared, as reading a medical book to the sick). Kūkai’s belief in the possibility of enlightenment “in this very body” rested on his rigorous nondualism. Mind and body are one, for the Six Great Elements, the “body of Dainichi” earth, water, fire, wind, space, and consciousness, Kūkai’s variant of the Chinese five element theory are all identical with one another.

Because Mahāvairocana is one with everything in the universe, his wisdom is in every person, though for most it is still unrealized. Esoteric ritual meditation, whose form follows detailed prescriptions regarding mudras, mantras, and visualization of mandalas, is the method of realizing Mahāvairocana’s all-embracing wisdom here and now, which is simply, as the Mahāvairocana Sūtra states, to know one’s own mind as it really is.

Kūkai propounded the superiority of esoteric over exoteric Buddhism in Benkenmitsu nikyō ron (c. 814; “The Difference Between Exoteric and Esoteric Buddhism,” 1972); Jūjūshin ron (830; “The Ten Stages of the Development of Mind,” 1972), his most famous work, a broad synthesis of Buddhism and other beliefs that places Shingon at the apex; its abridgement, Hizō hōyaku (830; “The Precious Key to the Secret Treasury,” 1972); and Hannya shingyō hiken (c. 834; “The Secret Key to the Heart Sutra,” 1972). He explicated Shingon’s core assertion that one can achieve enlightenment in this life in Sokushin jōbutsu gi (817; “Attaining Enlightenment in This Very Existence,” 1972), the most systematic exposition of his thought; Shōji jissō gi (c. 817; “The Meanings of Sound, Word, and Reality,” 1972); and Unji gi (c. 817; “The Meanings of the Word Hūm,” 1972). Kūkai’s more practical works treat methods of meditation, revealing a preoccupation with ritual procedures that confirms the magical cast of Shingon.

Kūkai’s profound interest in Sanskrit reflected his desire to understand esoteric rituals and preserve the sounds of their mantras (which Chinese transliterations altered) to guarantee their efficacy. Notably, 20 percent of the texts his novices studied were in Sanskrit. He regarded the phonetic signs of Sanskrit to be truer than Chinese characters because the latter were grounded in illusory objects, according to Buddhism. This view of language dignified the emerging syllabary, kana (which tradition inaccurately says he invented) as a legitimate, even superior, method of writing Japanese. Kana, which caused a cultural revolution in Heian Japan, was clearly shaped by the Sanskrit studies of Kūkai and later esoteric priests.

Significance

Kūkai created an enduring intellectual and institutional structure for Japanese esoteric Buddhism. As a poet, interpreter of Chinese poetry, sponsor of art, instigator of gorgeous religious rituals that captivated the aristocracy, and contributor to the development of kana, Kūkai was a major shaper of Heian court culture, whose influence has endured. The anti-intellectual, magical character of Shingon and its identification of ultimate reality with ordinary phenomena, like popular legends about Kūkai’s miracles and immortality, helped perpetuate the nonrationalistic, nonphilosophical quality of Japanese culture.

Because Shingon asserted that all other divinities derived from Dainichi and shared with Shintō magical use of words (mantra, kotodama), sanctified ritual space, and chief divinities identified with the sun (Dainichi, Amaterasu), it was inevitable that the two faiths would meld together, adding to the blending of Shintō and Buddhism that characterized pre-modern Japan. Finally, the personal master-disciple transmission of Shingon, later replicated in Zen, set a pattern for the teaching of all Japan’s traditional arts.

Bibliography

Abé, Ryūichi. The Weaving of Mantra: Kūkai and the Construction of Esoteric Buddhist Discourse. New York: Columbia University Press, 1999. A brilliant study of great interest to all students of Japanese Buddhism, it persuasively challenges conventional characterizations of Heian Buddhism.

Hadeda, Yoshito S. Kūkai, Major Works: Translated with an Account of His Life and a Study of His Thought. New York: Columbia University Press, 1972. The standard English source on his life and writings.

Kitagawa, Joseph Mituo. On Understanding Japanese Religion. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1987. Contains an interesting chapter on the posthumous worship of Kūkai.

Saunders, E. Dale. Buddhism in Japan, with an Outline of its Origins in India. Tuttle: Tokyo, 1976. A useful survey.