704 elizabeth tinsley
Kūkai’s understanding of existent esotericism facilitated his clas-
sification of other religions and the officially recognized forms of
Buddhism in Japan into a sequence of levels, or “ten stages of the
mind.” This system culminated with Shingon, encompassing all the
other levels, at its peak. This hierarchical yet synthetic approach was
applied most thoroughly in the Ten Stages, but appears in a number
of his other works as well. Kūkai’s location of the esoteric in rela-
tion to the exoteric is a strategy that does not appear in the works
of his Indian predecessors. Furthermore, the establishment of esoteric
texts as a bibliographical category is not found in Chinese catalogues
of Buddhist works. These taxonomic strategies allowed esoteric Bud-
dhism to become a distinct category in Japanese Buddhism (Abé 1999,
176–84).
In his Letter of Propagation (Kan’ensho , 815; Zoku henjō
hakki seireishū hoketsushō , 9 fascicles;
KZ 8: 173–76), Kūkai writes, “The Exoteric Teaching and the Eso-
teric Teaching are distinguished from each other in their methods
of leading beings to enlightenment” (KZ 8: 173–74; trans. Abé 1999,
207). He goes on to explain that the exoteric teachings were tailored
to the capability of the audience and preached, for example, by the
nirmāṇakāya buddha (Śākyamuni), in contrast to esoteric teachings
that are preached by the dharmakāya ( ; “Dharma body”), and
were timeless and unchanging.
Accordingly, the progenitor of the genealogy to which Kūkai ascribed
was the dharmakāya and did not include Śākyamuni, the historical
Buddha to whom the Mahāyāna schools traced the scriptures. This
understanding posited an irreconcilable difference between Shingon
teaching and the teachings of the Nara schools. One of the concerns
of the Nara clergy regarding this claim was the legitimacy of Shingon
teaching, which could be qualified only by a verifiable transmission
lineage. Kūkai responded to this in both the Distinguishing and the
Record, interpreting scripture to present a legitimate genealogy.
A related issue that he addressed in response to issues raised by
Tokuitsu in his Unresolved Issues on the Shingon School (Shingon shū
miketsumon , T. 2458, written in 815 at earliest), was
the claim that the dharmakāya could preach the Dharma (hosshin
seppō ). According to Mahāyāna interpretations of scripture,
the dharmakāya was beyond conceptualization and transcendent of
language. That is to say, even if the process of attaining enlightenment
could be explained, the realm of it was indescribable. In the Distin-