Kukai was a Japanese Buddhist monk who founded the Shingon sect. This great scholar's activities extended beyond the domain of the purely religious, including the building of roads, irrigation canals, and temples.
Background
Kūkai was born into an aristocratic family in Sanuki Province (now Kagawa Prefecture) on the northeastern coast of the island of Shikoku in 774. At birth he was given the name Saeki no Mao — or, Mao of the Saeki Family. His father and several other family members were local aristocrats and his ancestors had even been provincial governors in the past. The Saeki family was an offshoot of the Ōtomo family, which, until just after Kūkai's birth, played an important role in the imperial court. However, in 785, during construction of the new capital in Nagaoka, Ōtomo no Tsuguto was charged with the assassination of Fujiwara no Tanetsugu and the Ōtomo and Saeki families lost all prestige and influence.
Education
At the age of 18 (in 791), having passed the entrance exams, he left his uncle's house and entered the State Confucian College in Nara (usually referred to as the university as a translation of the Japanese daigaku). There, he continued his Confucian-based studies of poetry and rhetoric in preparation for a court career. However, at some time during this period, he met a monk who introduced him to the esoteric Mantra of Kokūzō (Akashagarbha) and the Gumonji Hō, an esoteric Morning Star meditation practice which is centered on this mantra to the bodhisattva Kokūzō. At this point, his life took a dramatic turn and his studies started to wander off the normal Confucian track. From then on, in addition to his required Confucian studies at the college, he began to read both Taoist and Mahayana Buddhist literature as well. However, as Yoshito Hakeda points out in his book, "...his interest in Buddhism arose not so much from book learning as from the actual experience of meditation. This point is important to an understanding of his religion as a whole."
These new teachings must have gone directly to his heart. The impact of what he read seems to have affected him immediately, and within a year of arriving at the college he had begun to return on a regular and frequent basis to the forests and mountains of Shikoku in order to devote himself to rigorous and ascetic meditative practices. In fact, since the Gumonji Hō meditative practice typically takes about 100 days to perform (10,000 recitations of the mantra per day for 100 days), and since no student could miss more than 100 days of classes before being dismissed from the college, Mao was probably a student in name only after his first years of studies.
There are most likely three possible reasons for his then dropping out of college. One possibility says that, since no student was allowed to stay at the college past the age of 25, when Mao turned 24, he decided to admit that he wasn't going to become a bureaucrat and quit his studies. A second possibility cited is the political problems that the Saeki and Ōtomo clans were undergoing due to the murder and turmoil that occurred as construction began on a new capital in Nagaoka (and hence cancelled). Realizing that his family name made it doubtful he would be accepted in the imperial court, he dropped out of the college that's sole purpose was to train bureaucrats. Thirdly, some say that at first sight he was completely smitten with Buddhism and never went back to Confucianism or Taoism. (Taoism was forbidden in Japan at the time but bureaucrats knew of it and read about it.)
In any case, against the wishes of his family, and to their deepest disappointment, he left the college and the capital and returned to Shikoku to become an itinerant mountain ascetic.
Career
At the age of 24, he completed the final version of his first treatise, the Sangô shîki (Indications of the Goals of the Three Teachings) that covers and compares the teachings of Confucianism, Taoism, and Buddhism. Herein one can discern Kûkai's reasons for turning from Confucianism to Buddhism. In the text, Kûkai relates how as a student he met a Buddhist priest who taught him an esoteric meditative practice called the Kokûzôgumonji no ho (“Âkâśagarbha's method for seeking hearing and retaining”), which involved the recitation of a mantra a million times and was supposed to endow the practitioner with miraculous powers of memory and understanding.
What Kûkai found in Buddhism was a concrete path towards enlightenment (and liberation from suffering) that involves bodily practice and direct experience rather than mere theoretical speculation. Kûkai however did not involve himself in the official schools of the Nara Buddhist orthodoxy for they emphasized the exegetical study of the scriptures without providing any theoretical grounding for ritual practice. Instead he remained in the remote mountain regions of his native Shikoku as an unofficial and privately ordained mendicant. It appears that between the ages of 24 and 31, he wandered through its various mountains and sacred sites, practicing asceticism. Noticing the many different branches and sûtras (scriptures) of Buddhism, he hoped to find its unifying essence that would also bridge the gap between ritual and experience on the one hand and doctrine and theory on the other hand. It was during this search that he came across the mid-seventh century esoteric Buddhist text of the Dainichi-kyô (Skrt: Mahâvairocana Sûtra; Chn: Ta-ji Ching; “Great Sun scripture”). Intuiting that this text, with its dual emphasis upon esoteric practice and doctrine, would provide the kind of knowledge that he was seeking, Kûkai decided to travel to China to study it.
It was only in 804 at the age of 30 or 31 that Kûkai was thus officially ordained so that he could travel with an official government embassy to China. He travelled to Ch’ang-an, the great cosmopolitan capital of the T’ang (Tang) dynasty, where he resided for thirty months. During this period, he studied Indian Buddhism, Hindu teachings, and Sanskrit with two Indian monks. But more significantly he met Hui-kuo (Huiguo; Jpn: Keika) (746–805), the seventh patriarch of Chen-yen (Zhenyan; Jpn: Shingon; Skrt: Mantrayâna) Buddhism, from whom he received initiation into the two lineages of Chen-yen esoteric Buddhism, one centered around the Vajradhâtu (Diamond realm) mandala based on the Vajraśekhara Sûtra (“Adamantine {or Diamond} Pinnacle scripture”) and the other focussing upon the Garbha (Womb) mandala based on the Mahâvairocana Sûtra. Kûkai's accomplishment during his stay in China is phenomenal in that not only did he manage to succeed Hui-kuo in becoming the eighth patriarch of esoteric Buddhism, he also managed to study Sanskrit, Chinese poetry and calligraphy, and various other minor arts.
Kûkai returned to Japan in 806 at the age of 33. He arrived in Kyushu with a voluminous amount of sûtras, collections of mandala paintings, treatises and commentaries, books of poetry, and ritual paraphernalia. In Kyushu, he composed the Shorai mokuroku (A Memorial Presenting a List of Newly Imported Sûtras and Other Items) that gives a brief account of his activities in China, describes what distinguishes esoteric Buddhism, and lists the items he had collected and brought back to Japan. However he was not permitted to enter the capital due to political unrest and was obliged to remain in Kyushu for another three years. Only with the retirement of Emperor Heizei (r. 806–809), did the new Emperor Saga order Kûkai in 809 to move to the new capital of Kyoto to reside at Takaosan-ji, the center of the Kyoto Buddhist world, where he remained until 823. Under the patronage of the new emperor, Kûkai became appointed over the years to various administrative positions of several important official temples. This allowed him to perform the first public esoteric ritual for “nation-protection,” followed by other public esoteric ceremonies, including mass initiation rituals and the founding of an annual ritual (the Mishuhô) to be held at court, hence gaining official recognition for the efficacy of esoteric Buddhism and preparing the rise of Buddhism as an ideological force in medieval Japan.
It was during his period at Takaosan-ji that he wrote some of his major treatises of philosophical interest to us, such as Benkenmitsu nikkyôron (Treatise on the Differences Between Esoteric and Exoteric Teachings) around 814, and the so-called Sanbu-sho (“Three Writings”) of Sokushinjôbutsugi (On the Meaning of “Attaining Buddhahood in this Very Embodied Existence”), Shôjijissôgi (On the Meanings of “Sound, Sign, and Reality”), and Unjigi (On the Meaning of the Syllable Hûm) in the 820s. And towards the end of his life he completed in 830 what has been considered to be his magnum opus, the Himitsu mandara jûjûshinron (Treatise on the Ten States of the Mind as a Secret Mandala) in ten volumes, and soon afterward, completed its summary version, the Hizô hôyaku (The Precious Key to the Secret Treasury) in three volumes.
In 816 Kûkai began building a monastic center in Mt. Kôya, and there he died in 835 at the age of 61. In 921, he posthumously received from Emperor Daigo and his court, the honorific title, Kôbô Daishi (“Great Teacher Who Spread the Dharma”).
Religion
Shingon, which means "true word" (that is, mantra), is an esoteric sect depending on the oral transmission of mysteries: thought, word, and act. Thought is represented by meditation and Yogic concentration, in which mandalas (cosmograms) are the object of meditation; the word is represented by mantra, or "magical formulas," which correspond to cosmic forces which the adept can thus incorporate; and the act is represented by mudra, or "hand gestures," kinds of seals of veracity corresponding to given mantra. This lore is secret and is passed along only to initiates, hence the term Esoteric Buddhism, by which Shingon is frequently known.
For Kukai that which is beautiful partakes of the Buddha, and much of the appeal of Esoteric Buddhism lies in this esthetic concept. Art was painting and sculpture, music and literature, gestures and acts, and implements of civilization and religion. Shingon especially encouraged the arts of painting and sculpture. Some of the greatest religious art of all times was inspired by Shingon ideas.
Views
Kûkai has been regarded as the first comprehensively philosophical thinker in Japanese intellectual history. The influence of Mahâyâna philosophy is noticeable but they are interpreted through the lens of Mantrayâna with its emphasis upon the inseparability of ritual practice from theoretical doctrine. Traditionally, his thought has been divided into the following aspects: 1) the theoretical (kyôsô) which explicates the uniqueness and distinction of esoteric Buddhism (mikkyô) as opposed to exoteric Buddhism (kengyô) and demonstrates its validity and efficaciousness; and 2) the practical (jisô), which prescribes his method of meditation and ritual. Ultimately however the theoretical and the practical are inseparable in Kûkai's thought. Within the deep profundity and subtleties of his doctrine, one recognizes philosophical elements inherited from Madhyamaka, Yogâcâra, T’ien-t’ai (Tiantai), and Huayen (Huayan) Buddhist thought. But with these are incorporated the elements of devotional piety and magico-esoteric practice even in his theoretical writings. What is especially pronounced and distinct in his thought is the significance of bodily experience and practice. Buddhist truths for Kûkai were not simply meant to be intellectually mused over but to be experienced through bodily practice. One might say then that for Kûkai it is the body that provides the medium whereby theory and practice, doctrine and ritual, thought and experience, are non-dualistic.
A major contribution made by Kûkai for the orthodoxy of Nara Buddhism with his systematization of esoteric doctrines, was to bridge the gap between textual study and ritual practice. Kûkai's works provided for the first time a theoretical grounding for the incantation of mantras and dhâranīs and other esoteric practices already present in Nara Buddhism. It did this by explicating their relationship to the doctrines expressed in the scriptural texts. While esoteric elements were already present in Nara Buddhism, their very raison d’etre, other than as forms of magic, and their very connection to Buddhist doctrines had been left in the dark. Kûkai's success may be attributable to his ability to provide a sound and intelligible systematic exposition of the meanings of the esoteric elements of Buddhism and of the interrelationships between text, ritual, and icon. In doing so it succeeded in bridging the gap between esoteric rituals and scriptural doctrines. (Abe 1999, 11) Kûkai had to work out such an exposition in order to establish and legitimize the independence and role of his Shingon Buddhism vis-à-vis the other forms of Buddhism already existent in Nara Japan.
Quotations:
Do not seek to follow in the footsteps of the men of old; seek what they sought.