Kukai 774 – 835

Kukai, posthumously known as Kobo Daishi, was a Japanese Buddhist monk, calligrapher, poet, and the founder of the esoteric Shingon school. After studies in China under the Tantric master Hui-kuo, he returned to Japan and established a monastic complex on Mount Koya that remains the spiritual center of Shingon. His Ten Stages of the Development of Mind set out a hierarchical view of the religious traditions known to him, with esoteric Buddhism at the summit, while his treatises on language and phonetic theory shaped Japanese intellectual culture for centuries. He is one of the most revered figures in Japanese religion.

Kukai — known posthumously as Kobo Daishi, the 'great teacher who spread the dharma' — was born in 774 in the province of Sanuki on the island of Shikoku, into the provincial nobility. He studied Confucian and Taoist classics in the imperial capital, but in his early twenties left the official Confucian academy for itinerant Buddhist asceticism among the mountain ascetics of Shikoku.

In 804 he sailed for China as a junior member of the Japanese embassy and made his way to Chang'an, where he received the full transmission of esoteric (mikkyo) Buddhism from Master Huiguo at the Qinglong-si in 805 and returned to Japan two years later with a vast cargo of texts, ritual implements, and images. He founded the monastery of Mount Koya in 816 and served as abbot of the Toji in Kyoto from 823. His works include the Sango Shiiki (The Indications of the Three Teachings), the Sokushin Jobutsu Gi (Attaining Buddhahood in This Very Body), the Hizo Hoyaku (Precious Key to the Secret Treasury), and treatises on Sanskrit and on calligraphy.

Kukai is the founder of Shingon, the principal Japanese school of esoteric Buddhism, and one of the great cultural synthesizers of the Heian period — calligrapher, poet, engineer of irrigation works, and educator. By the tradition he entered final meditative absorption at Mount Koya in 835, where his disciples maintain that he abides until the coming of the future Buddha Maitreya.