Kukai

Kūkai (空海) or Kōbō-Daishi (弘法大師) , 774—835 CE: Japanese monk, scholar, and artist, founder of the Shingon or “True Word” school of Buddhism. Kūkai is famous as a calligrapher (see Shodo), engineer and is said to have invented kana, the syllabary in which, in combination with Chinese characters (Kanji) the Japanese language is written. His religious writing, some 50 works, expound the esoteric Shingon doctrine, of which the major ones have been translated into English by Hakeda (see below). Kūkai is also said to have written the iroha, one of the most famous poems in Japanese, which uses every phonetic kana syllable.

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835: Events...

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