Kukai, posthumous name Kobo Daishi, one of the best known and most beloved Buddhist saints in Japan, founder of the popular Shingon (True Word) school of Buddhism that emphasizes spells, magic formulas, ceremonials, and masses for the dead. He contributed greatly to the development of Japanese art and literature and pioneered in public education.

Kukai was born into one of the great aristocratic families of the time and as a youth was trained in the Confucian Classics. In 791, at the age of 17, he is said to have completed his first major work, the Sango Shiiki ("Essentials of the Three Teachings"), in which he proclaimed the superiority of Buddhism over Confucianism and Taoism. Buddhism, he wrote, contained everything that was worthwhile in the other two beliefs, and it also showed more concern than either for man's existence after death. Desiring to learn more about Buddhism, Kukai went to China in 804. In the Chinese capital of Ch'ang-an, he met the great Buddhist master Hui-kuo (746-805) and became the master's favorite disciple, receiving his secret teachings when he lay dying. Returning to Japan, Kukai was given the Imperial Sanction to promulgate his new doctrines. In 816 he built a temple on Mt. Koya, in central Japan, which remains one of the largest and most vigorous monasteries in the country; in the late 1970s the Shingon sect had about 12,500 temples and shrines and almost 12,000,000 believers.

Besides his role as philosopher and religious leader, Kukai was also a poet, and artist, and a calligrapher. He exerted a great influence on the development of Japanese religious art over the next two centuries. In fact, much of the art that survives from this period depicts Shingon Buddhist deities. His major work, the Juju Shinron ("The Ten Stages of Consciousness"), written in Chinese in a poetic style, classified Confucianism, Taoism, and all the existing Buddhist literature into 10 stages, the last and highest stage being that of Shingon philosophy. This work assures Kukai a leading rank among the intellectual figures of Japanese Buddhism.

(Extracted from Encyclopedia Britannica)