806 nobumi iyanaga
month of the same year. These events are all established in historical
records.
According to some thirteenth-century mikkyō documents, while
in Izu Ninkan took another name, Rennen , and transmitted his
lineage to a monk named Kenren , who would have come from
Tachikawa. After these events, some historical records report that
Ninkan killed himself by jumping from a cliff in the fourth month of
- According to other records, however, he was pardoned some
sixteen years later and returned to Kyōto in 1129. At any rate, little is
known about Ninkan after his exile in Izu (Köck 2000).
Extant are a number of manuscripts of mikkyō transmissions from
the medieval period, many dating from the thirteenth or fourteenth
centuries, which were discovered in the Shōmyōji library at
Kanazawa Bunko. In them we find blood lineages having
the names of famous masters of Daigoji until Shōkaku, then continued
by Rennen, Kenren, and others. None contains the name “Tachikawa,”
but from what we know of Ninkan’s life story it is presumed that these
manuscripts are the transmission documents of the Tachikawa-ryū.
The name Kenren is otherwise unknown, and the only evidence that
he came from Tachikawa is attested by some thirteenth-century docu-
ments. That Rennen was another of Ninkan’s names is also attested
only by documents of the same period (Kushida 1964, 333, 337–38).
It is surprising that a Shingon lineage claimed as its founder a nota-
ble “criminal” such as Ninkan, and while this point is debatable, in the
absence of any other evidence, it compels belief. Alternately, perhaps
Rennen could have been the name of another of Shōkaku’s disciples,
rather than Ninkan.
Kakuin (1097–1164), a disciple of Kenren, is a well-known fig-
ure and a younger brother of Yōgen (1075–1151), who founded
the Hojuin-ryū lineage of the Hirosawa-ryū. He
had close relations with Ejū (active ca. 1135), the author of the
famous iconographic compilation the Zuzōshō ( TZ 3) and was
one of the masters of Shinkaku (1117–1180), author of the Bes-
son zakki ( TZ 3) (Frank 2000, 222–24, 233–41).
Some of the names found in the blood lineage documents are those
of famous Shingon masters such as Dōhan (1178–1252), Raiyu
(1226–1304), and Dōjun (?–1321) (Kushida 1964, 378, 388).
At any rate, examination of the contents of these manuscripts reveals
that they are simply normal ritual transmissions of Shingon rituals,