Kūkai’s Shingon Philosophy: Embodiment

Abstract

Kūkai 空海 (774–835), posthumous title, Kōbō Daishi 弘法大師, is remembered for many things in addition to being the founder of the Japanese Shingon 真言 school of Buddhism. He was not only an important early Buddhist master but became a cultural hero par excellence. A renowned calligrapher, ritual specialist, author of dictionaries, specialist in Chinese poetry and even a civil engineer, Kūkai’s accomplishments were wide ranging. Perhaps more than any of the other “great men” in Japanese Buddhist history, Kūkai is revered by persons belonging to all Buddhist sects as a kind of trans-sectarian holy person. Pilgrimages to his mausoleum on Mount Kōya have been a regular feature of the national landscape for over a millennium, and the graveyard surrounding it is one of the largest in Japan, so sacred has this ground become. The extent to which this fame is fully deserved, or, instead, deftly manufactured after his death, remains hard to say with certainty. Yet his great mastery of multiple skills and his huge impact on the culture of his day, as well as of subsequent generations, cannot be denied. In the popular eye, Kūkai’s philosophical efforts are not commonly highlighted. Even among scholars of Buddhist history, his contributions to Japanese thought are sometimes said to lie more in his systematization of ideas than in his originality. While it is certainly true that he was a systematizer, I do not think the masterful synthetic vision he had for unifying various strains of Buddhist thought and practice was insignificant, nor do I think he had little originality in his ideas. In fact, it seems that aspects of his philosophical genius have often been neglected, perhaps due, in part, to a perception that his fame on other counts was exaggerated. Modern scholars within the Shingon tradition (often priests themselves) have produced abundant studies of Kūkai’s thought; yet these tend to contain little critical assessment since they often fall within the genre of sectarian theological works. The task of this essay is to present a fair-handed treatment of some of the central ideas in Kūkai’s more philosophical works.