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or many of us, Kukai (774-835) is the most important Japanese man we’ve barely heard of. A renowned calligrapher, he is argued to have been responsible for the invention of Hiragana. As a religious leader (known posthumously as Kobo Daishi), he founded the Shingon (or “true word”) sect of Esoteric Buddhism. Many of the most famous pilgrimage routes of western Japan, including western Honshu’s 33-temple Saikoku Kannon and the Shikoku 88, are connected to Shingon. From 819 until his death, Kukai lived and taught on Mount Koya, in the mountains of Wakayama. It remains, to this day, the headquarters of Shingon Buddhism.
I first heard about Kukai in 2019. I was preparing to move to Ehime in Shikoku from Iwate Prefecture, and the first thing I learned about the island and its culture was the existence of an 88-temple Shingon pilgrimage. For centuries, pilgrims from around Japan have walked, prayed, and meditated here. The Japanese experience of pilgrimage is well represented in the book Musume Junreiki. Its author, Takamure Itsue, a young upper-class woman, traveled to Shikoku from Kyushu in 1918. In recent decades, a substantial body of pilgrimage memoirs has been published by pilgrims from all around the world; the most famous of these is Japanese Pilgrimage by the American Oliver Statler. From Statler’s book, I learned about Mount Koya and Kukai’s legacy there. A Global Pilgrimage People undertake pilgrimages for many reasons. Safe childbirth was one major historical motivation. Recovery from illness was another, with many sick pilgrims having died along the trail. One nonJapanese pilgrim
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