Who is Kobo Daishi?

The man who started it all. And by all I mean Shingon Buddhism.

Monk, teacher, scholar, artist, folk hero, engineer, frickin Public Administrator. . .much like El Santo, it is easier to say what Kobo Daishi isn't then to try to list his many titles and accomplishments. There simply isn't a parallel to him in American history, but if you mashed together Benjamin Franklin and Paul Bunyan, and then a dash of Joseph Smith minus the polygamy, you basically have the American equivalent of Kobo Daishi. His shadow can be seen everywhere in the land of the rising sun.

Born in 774 in Sanuki province to middling aristocratic parents, his childhood name was Mao, or True Fish. Awesome, that's similar to my self-applied Native American name, Sinking Fish! If you believe all the tall tales about Kobo Daishi, he was basically born already at Arahat level, which is just a step away from enlightenment, and supposedly could already summon moderately powerful spirits from the Buddhist pantheon before he was in middle school. But even without the embellishment, the boy who was to become a saint showed talent early, excelling in Chinese classics and calligraphy. He went to the government university to prepare for life as a bureaucrat, but he became disillusioned with the petty minutiae of civic codes. He began to follow his true calling: a life devoted to the pursuit of enlightenment.

Unfortunately, the government approved Buddhist temples of the time held no answers for the young scholar. He decided to pursue an ascetic lifestyle, wandering from place to place as a penniless monk, and pushing himself to ever greater austerities. While chanting for weeks in a cave on the Muroto coastline, he had a strange vision: the morning star descended from heaven and went into his mouth. Personally I would take that as an excuse to take a crapload of aspirin and call in sick for a week, but for him it was an auspicious sign. He took the new name Kukai, which means sea and sky. There's actually a sumo wrestler named that right now!

Years of chanting sutras in the wilderness gave Kukai both incredible willpower and astonishing memory, both skills that would prove useful in his next adventure: a trip to China to learn about Esoteric/Orthodox Buddhism from the Buddhist sage Hui-kuo. Nasty storms aside, Kukai made it to China in one piece and began what was planned to be a 20 year residence studying the tenets of this ancient Buddhist sect. But it was not to be. His master Hui-kuo was already old, and he knew that his life would end soon. They hit the books hard, and Kukai mastered his study of ancient Buddhism in a manner of months. And they all said chanting was a waste of time, pffft. Kukai returned to Japan as the 8th patriarch of Esoteric Buddhism, which in Japan is known as Shingon Buddhism, or the True Word sect. True dat.

Though tall tales surround Kukai's entire life, it is during his adult years that the stories really get out of control. Most of the temples have at least one legend about Kukai connected to them: on Shosanji, he subdued a fire breathing serpent; at another temple, he struck the ground with his staff and created a well that cures blindness; at yet another site, he found a sacred amulet that he threw FROM CHINA and decided to establish a temple on the spot! But once again, even without the tall tales, his life is a testament to faith, compassion, and achievement. Kukai is credited with inventing the written language of Japan. As opposed to Chinese characters, this writing system is an alphabet, so that people without the money for a formal education could express themselves in written form. He supervised construction of a reservoir in his home province which is still used to this day, 1300 years later! He started a school that provided an education to anyone, regardless of social or financial standing. (This school was dismantled 10 years after Kukai's death. Stupid bureaucrats.) And his crowning achievement was the establishment of the mountain retreat at Mount Koya, which to this day remains the headquarters of Shingon Buddhism. A hundred years after his supposed death, Kukai was given the posthumous title Kobo Daishi, or Great Saint Who Spread the Doctrine, and it is by this name he is most commonly referred.

Wait, did that say supposed death? Yes, you read that right. Hardcore followers of Shingon Buddhism believe that Kobo Daishi did not die, but in fact entered a state of extremely deep eternal meditation. He will remain in this state until the coming of the future Buddha, at which time I guess he'll kick off that pesky death thing and go back to his old ways, wandering and teaching and chanting all over the countryside. I'm not sure I can 100% say that it'll go down like that. That being said, I can indeed feel his influence right here beside me on every step of this pilgrimage, helping me up when I fall, and smacking me in the noggin when I do something stupid. He`s my kind of saint.