rdfs:comment
| - Kūkai (空海), also known posthumously as Kōbō-Daishi(弘法大師), 774–835, was a Japanese monk, scholar, poet, and artist, founder of the Shingon or "True Word" school of Buddhism. Shingon followers usually refer to him by the honorific titles of Odaishisama(お大師様) and Daishi-Henjō-Kongō(大師遍照金剛).
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abstract
| - Kūkai (空海), also known posthumously as Kōbō-Daishi(弘法大師), 774–835, was a Japanese monk, scholar, poet, and artist, founder of the Shingon or "True Word" school of Buddhism. Shingon followers usually refer to him by the honorific titles of Odaishisama(お大師様) and Daishi-Henjō-Kongō(大師遍照金剛). Kūkai is famous as a calligrapher (see Japanese calligraphy) and engineer, and is said to have invented kana, the syllabary in which, in combination with Chinese characters (kanji) the Japanese language is written (although this claim has not been proven). His religious writings, some fifty works, expound the esoteric Shingon doctrine. The major ones have been translated into English by Yoshito Hakeda (see references below). According to tradition, Kūkai wrote the iroha, one of the most famous poems in Japanese, which uses every phonetic kana syllable.
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