Kukai the Universal: Scenes from His Life [Hardcover]

Shiba Ryotaro (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 25, 2003

This comprehensive work chronicles the life of Kukai, the monk who brought Buddhism to Japan in the ninth century and is considered to be the father of Japanese culture.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Shiba (1923-1996) is Japan's most respected historical novelist of the 20th century. Although he began his career as a journalist, he had written 57 novels by the time of his death. He coined his own method of envisioning history, called "Shiba-shika," or "Shiba's view of history." Winner of the Naoki Prize and the Order of Culture. --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 400 pages
• Publisher: ICG Muse (October 25, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 4925080474
• ISBN-13: 978-4925080477
• Product Dimensions: 8.8 x 6.3 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.5 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,468,009 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars How do you show the true Kukai?, June 1, 2010

A Kid's Review

This review is from: Kukai the Universal: Scenes from His Life (Hardcover)

The review by "Crazy Fox," from January 24, 2010, completely misses the bigger picture, so I am posting a counterweight.

The legacy of Kukai permeates the very fabric of the Japanese culture. He is the greatest Japanese Buddhist saint of all times. He introduced Esoteric Buddhism to Japan, founded the Shingon sect of Buddhism and nourished other branches of Buddhism as well. He is credited with the creation of hiragana, a Japanese syllabary modeled on Sanskrit. He is the founder of temples and centers of religious learning. He is the author of numerous religious tracts. He is a paragon of calligraphy, both in Japan and in China. The list goes on and on.

The trouble is that he lived over a thousand years ago. After such a long time, the verifiable historical information about Kukai is scant, while legends about him would fill volumes. How, then, does an honest, meticulous historian with a poetic flair, who is passionate about his subject, as Ryotaro Shiba obviously was, approach Kukai?

Shiba spent over ten years working on this book. He understood that he would not be able to recreate Kukai's life in minute detail, but instead focused, masterfully, on recreating the atmosphere in which Kukai was steeped and which influenced his world-view and endeavors. In Shiba's book we see Japan of the end of Nara period, a culture in turmoil, trying to absorb and assimilate immigrant clans from the Continent and the newly conquered tribes from Japan's own frontier. Buddhist sects jockey with each other and with Taoism and Confucianism for influence with the imperial court. The government, eager to follow the path of culture and civilization, establishes a university to train scholars and administrators and sends embassies to China with missions of political, cultural and religious exchange.

Into this society in flux was born Kukai, a scion of an influential provincial clan, who was brilliant from the start and seemed destined for great things in life. Contrary to his family's expectations, instead of following the established career path of civil service, he dropped out of the university and, drawn to Buddhism, spent years living in obscurity, working on his original theological research that would lay down the framework of Esoteric Buddhism in Japan. But in order to give his future school the legitimacy of the direct continuity of the tradition, which is extremely important in Buddhism, Kukai had to travel to China to receive the transmission of Dharma from Master Huiguo, the head of the school of Esoteric Buddhism there.

Shiba's description of Kukai's stay in Chang'an is, in my opinion, the real treasure of this book. Kukai, a previously unknown young monk from a country that was culturally, at that time, little more than a satellite of the Tang China, thanks to his previous preparatory work and natural talent, exploded like a rocket onto the vibrant, cosmopolitan scene of the Tang capital city, which at that time boasted the ultimate political and economic power and literary and theological sophistication second to none in Asia. He was quickly able to round off his studies with Sanskrit, Indian Buddhism, poetry and calligraphy, to become a complete scholar of his time. The fact that he was able to receive the Dharma transmission from the ailing Master Huiguo in a few months speaks volumes about Kukai's attainments in his chosen path. Furthermore, the fact that Kukai's company and friendship was sought by China's literati and the cultural elite, including famous scholars, poets, calligraphers, courtiers and religious leaders, shows what kind of a phenomenon he had become in a country that was very hard to impress at that time. But it is Shiba's crowning achievement to be able to reproduce in his book, from an untold number of primary sources and his own poetic vision of history, a picture of Chang'an that almost makes the spectacular early 9th century city, and Kukai in it, to come to life, to the reader's delight.

In Shiba's convincing opinion, this stay in Chang'an was the highlight of Kukai's life, which made him who he was, gave him a tremendous leverage with the Japanese imperial court and the Buddhist community and allowed him to proceed unimpeded to become what he ultimately became in the history of Japan. To experience this and other fascinating circumstances in Kukai's life, simply read this book and be transported by the masterful author to a time, place and state of mind far from our own.

4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars "You are a brave one, indeed, to undertake such a special journey...", January 24, 2010

By 

Crazy Fox (Chicago, IL USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Kukai the Universal: Scenes from His Life (Hardcover)

Shiba Ryotaro is one of those names you tend to come across if you dabble in Japanese literature for too long, a historical novelist and critic as widely read and even one might say revered in Japan as he is obscure elsewhere. This discrepancy mildly aroused my curiosity but I could always find an excuse to put it on the back-burner. On the other hand, I have had a long and abiding interest in the monk Kukai and the form of Buddhism he established in Japan, so when I came across "Kukai the Universal" it seemed like a golden opportunity to introduce myself to the work of a great writer as he addresses a subject dear to my heart. With a healthy bit of anticipation then I began reading this book, setting myself up for a letdown, I suppose. Whether this is representative of Shiba's overall work I can't judge, but as it stands it's a rather mediocre treatment of an important subject.

If I had to put my finger on what the primary malfunction of this book is, I would have to say that it is too fictional to be good history and yet too historical to be good fiction. There are a great many lacunae in our knowledge of Kukai's life, especially in his younger years; these Shiba feels free to blithely fill in with his literary imagination without really alerting the reader that he's essentially making stuff up. And what he makes up is neither particularly convincing nor psychologically insightful. Still, Shiba has clearly done exhaustive research and so cleaves closely to what is known for sure of Kukai's life, so that the work never quite achieves the compelling lineaments of a storytelling narrative. At times too Shiba tends to glorify Kukai to superhuman though not quite miraculous status, and then he'll go to the other extreme and try to humanize his subject by obsessively focusing on his allegedly overactive libido--which I can't help suspecting tells us more about Shiba than Kukai (at least that Shiba has read too much Freud, anyway). A strange asymmetry infects the book, too: seemingly half the book is devoted to Kukai's relatively short stay in the Tang capital Chang'an and his trip there and back, while the decades Kukai spent in Japan slowly establishing Shingon Buddhism gets like a rushed chapter or two. One might assume from this reading that the only thing Kukai's important for is ticking off Saicho. Just to top things off, a shallow, imprecise, and stereotyped knowledge of Buddhism mars the book badly.

Shiba is on more solid ground when it comes to straightforward history, though, and his contextual discussions of Tang China and early Heian Japan are of interest. His treatment of the falling-out between Kukai and Saicho is pretty good too if only because he quotes extensively from their correspondence and so lets them do the talking. Ironically though, the book's most intriguing and redeeming moments are the personal digressions and detours. These minor ramblings pepper the work more so towards the end: little anecdotes about conversations Shiba had with various Buddhist monks about Kukai and Shingon Buddhism, memories of hiking on the Kii peninsula with friends during WWII and accidentally coming across Koyasan (Shingon's headquarter temple complex), accounts by friends of their nearly deadly experiences of faith in Kukai, and such. These little tidbits are as fascinating, illuminating and evocative as they are fragmentary and all too sporadic. One ends up wishing Shiba had let himself get sidetracked more. But these little gems will keep the patient or persistent reader plodding along what is otherwise a rather rocky road of lackluster prose.