61. KŪKAI AND THE DEVELOPMENT OF
SHINGON BUDDHISM
Elizabeth TinsleyMythology, canonization, and sectarian concerns have done much to
delineate the contours of Japanese religious history in both the popu-
lar and scholarly spheres, and this is no more so the case than in por-
trayals of the priest Kūkai (774–835), celebrated as the founder
of the Shingon (lit.,“true word”; zhenyan; mantrayāna) school of
esoteric Buddhism (Jpn. mikkyō ) in Japan. He is also known as
Kōbō Daishi (“Great Teacher [who] spread the Dharma”),
a posthumous title conferred in 921. Kūkai came to occupy the realms
of legend and folktale as a multitalented miracle-worker endowed with
soteriological powers.^1 For its part, sectarian scholarship has cast him
as representative of the Buddhism of the Heian period (794–1185),
which is contrasted to, and perceived as displacing, the Buddhism of
the Nara period (710–794).
Inasmuch as the myths, sectarian laudation, and popular adulation
reveal much about the ideological projects of the cultures that shaped
them, they have also generated and reinforced misunderstandings of
Kūkai’s activities, and of the configuration of religious practices in
Japan’s history as a whole. In order to clarify the significance of the
development of Shingon in Japan, recent studies have tended to focus
on Kūkai’s interactions with the imperial court and the clergy, and on
his cooperation with and deviation from orthodox Buddhist thought
and praxis.^2
(^1) On the legends and hagiography, see Hinonishi, ed., 1988.
(^2) Ryuichi Abé 1999 and Jun Fujii 2008 have done much to emphasize the impor-
tance of contextualizing Kūkai’s achievements within the historical context, and to
shift the approach away from idealizing, sectarian portrayals. Abé reassesses Kūkai’s
achievements, proposing that he had developed in Shingon a politically and cultur-
ally influential Buddhist discourse. Fujii examines the influence of the Nara schools
and Saicho on the development of Kūkai’s Shingon philosophy. Studies of Kūkai in
English remain rather limited, but biographical accounts are available in Hakeda 1972,
and Kitagawa 1987: 182–202.