Kūkai

Kukai, founder of Shingon Buddhism, is among the most multidimensional figures in Japanese intellectual history. Born in 774 in Sanuki province on Shikoku, he was given the childhood name Mao. At fifteen he travelled to the capital and at eighteen entered the elite Daigaku-ryo. Soon dissatisfied with bureaucratic life, he abandoned this path to wander the mountains of Shikoku and Omine.

In his early twenties he undertook the hundred-day Kokuzo Gumonji practice at Mt Otaki, where he reported seeing the morning star enter his mouth. At the great temples of Nara he encountered the Mahavairocana Sutra and, realising no Japanese master could fully transmit the esoteric teachings, resolved to travel to China.

In 804, at thirty-one, he sailed with the sixteenth embassy to Tang China and reached Chang'an. At Qinglongsi he became the disciple of Master Huiguo, who in only six months transmitted both the Womb Realm and Diamond Realm mandalas and conferred the highest abhisheka. Kukai returned to Japan in 806.

From 809, under Emperor Saga, his Shingon teaching flourished. In 816 he was granted Mt Koya, and in 823 the temple Toji in Kyoto. His Jujushinron (830) classifies the human mind into ten ascending stages, integrating Confucianism, Daoism, Hinayana and Mahayana Buddhism under esoteric Buddhism — an unusually inclusive philosophy of religion for its time.

Kukai's stature went beyond religion. He was counted as one of the Three Brushes of Heian calligraphy. As an engineer he rebuilt the Manno reservoir in 821. As an educator he opened the Shugei Shuchiin academy in 828, the first Japanese school open to commoners. His core doctrine of sokushin jobutsu — buddhahood in this very body — affirmed that enlightenment can be realised here and now. He entered eternal meditation at Mt Koya in 835 and was posthumously titled Kobo Daishi in 921.