Dreaming about Kukai

Kūkai 空海 774 – 835)

There are so many ways to tell the story of our lives. One could write a life in paintings or one in birds.

I once tried to write my memoir in oranges.

Today, I was thinking of a patchwork of books. My life as a library.

Chapter One of my Japan Story, Dreaming in Japanese, has me re-reading the first books I read when I arrived in Tokyo, in 1991.

I recall one book in particular: Kūkai: Major Works, by Japanese scholar Yoshito Hakeda.

Kūkai--also known respectfully as Kōbō Daishi 弘法大師 "The Grand Master who Propagated the Dharma"-- is one of the greatest figures in Japanese cultural history. Remembered as the founder of Shingon Buddhism in Japan, the originator of the monastic center at Mt Koya and 88 Temple pilgrimage circuit on Shikoku, a builder of lakes and the possible creator of the kana syllabary systems of the Japanese language—as if all this was not enough, he was also a legendary calligrapher, poet, and wandering saint.

He was, in short, an intellectual giant.

And, It so happened that my first apartment in Japan was within walking distance to the one of the important Shingon Buddhist Temples in the Tokyo area, called Takahata Fudo-son.

I had never heard of Shingon Buddhism before moving to Japan. Being American, I had imagined all the temples in Japan would be Zen Buddhist. But stepping inside Takahata-Fudo-son was like stepping into another world. And that world was Tibetan.

Before coming to Japan, I had marveled at the Tibetan Buddhist temples in the Western Himalaya, in Ladakh –but never in a million years expected to find something similar in Japan. And yet, inside Takahata Fudo-son I saw those same bright mandalas and statues of Tantric deities I had encountered in those towering mountains so far to the west in India and Nepal.

The temple gets its name from one the deities worshipped in the main hall. The statue of Fudo-Myoo is carved in wood. Depicted surrounded by flames and much like the ritual Tibetan Buddhist thunderbolt (the Vajra), this wrathful defender deity cuts through people’s ignorance and delusions.

Yes, he is a Buddhist slayer of evil.

A question the temple seemed to pose: are profound religious truths accessible to people without lengthy instruction?

Shingon Buddhism was based in the notion that there exists a storehouse of secret teachings that can spark immediate enlightenment. And these teachings have been passed down from teacher to student since the time of the Shakyamuni Buddha. The mandala and statues of various Bodhisattva were the esoteric means for allowing the pilgrim’s mind to visualize levels of religious truth that one could not express in words, thereby allowing our ignorance to be cut, ripping away the veil that hides the true reality from us. Not through study and religious understanding but through the shock of this experience.

Outside of Himalayan Buddhism, Japan was one of the few places in the world where one can experience esoteric Buddhism (called Mikkyo, or secret teachings 密教).

Thinking back thirty-some years, I recall that I bought the Kūkai book before I even realized that the temple of Takahata Fudo-son was the sect he developed in the ninth century. My initial curiosity in Kūkai had been aroused in language classes, when my teacher had offhandedly mentioned that the two phonetic systems for writing Japanese, hiragana and katakana had been developed by a monk who had traveled to China and needed a system for pronouncing and reading the sutras he had brought back with him. At that time, I was clinging desperately to Hiragana and so wanted to learn more about the man who had developed this beautiful—and comparatively simple script.

I wish I had my original book so I could see what the young Leanne might have underlined or highlighted.

Imagining myself back then—obsessed with British novelist Rumer Godden and her thrilling life in Kashmir, as well as having fallen in love with Somerset Maugham’s novel about a man’s search for spiritual enlightenment in the Himalaya, The Razor’s Edge— probably what ultimately drew me to the study of Kūkai was his deep commitment to travel in search of the Truth.

In those days, the sea between Japan and China was infamously treacherous. To travel from Japan to the Tang court in Chang’an was dangerous beyond belief. But Kūkai petitioned the court and was finally allowed to travel on the first ship (on board with the official emissary to the Tang Court Fujiwara Kadononaro) in an armada of four Japanese ships that departed in 804. Another legendary Buddhist monk Saichō 最澄 was on Ship Two.

The first ship would drift for a month before finally arriving at a small port in Fukien. It would be many weeks before he would finally reach the Tang capital, and there Kūkai would meet the great master of esoteric Buddhism, Hui-kuo (746–805; Japanese: Keika). This ocurred in 805 and Kūkai quickly became the master’s disciple, receiving his secret teachings as the master lay dying. It was these teaching that he brought back to Japan, founding a new school of Japanese Buddhism. Shingon 真言 means the True Word...

To be continued: Sacred Calligraphy of the East, by John Stevens

·      Kukai: Major Works, Yoshito Hakeda

·      The Weaving of Mantra Paperback by Ryûichi Abé

·      Shingon Refractions: Myoe and the Mantra of Light Kindle Edition

by Mark Unno

·      Japanese Mandalas: Representations of Sacred Geography