Message-ID: <Pine.NEB.4.58.0312181350100.20774@panix3.panix.com>
From: Alan Sondheim <sondheim@panix.com>
To: Cyb <cybermind@listserv.aol.com>,
"WRYTING-L : Writing and Theory across Disciplines" <WRYTING-L@LISTSERV.UTORONTO.CA>
Subject: Review of Kukai, Ennin, etc., for Boog -
Date: Thu, 18 Dec 2003 13:50:37 -0500 (EST)
Review Alan Sondheim sondheim@panix.com Ryotaro Shiba, Kukai The Universal: Scenes from His Life, trans. Akiko Takemoto from Kukai no Fukei, Muse ICG, 2003: 9th-century Kukai founds esoteric Japanese Buddhist Shingon after traveling to China, the book a brilliant account of physical/body and philosophical transmission, virtual carried on the shoulders of desire and flesh. Saicho, founder of Tendai - both travel together to China, known to each other only later. Later still, Ennin, translated by Reischauer, who also writes a commentary on him, two books: Ennin's Travels in Tang China, and Ennin's Diary: The Record of a Pilgrimage to China, which occurred 838-847. Kukai was deified, more tendrils described in George Tanabe, ed., Religions of Japan in Practice. Accounts are endless, for example Bai Letian (Bai Juyi), Waley's favorite, appears in Shiba for his Chang'an (NW capital of Tang) descriptions - I found his work elsewhere in several transliterated volumes complete w/ the Chinese. There are meanderings back and forth, everyone crossing from Japan to China and back on ill-equipped and poorly-designed boats, many of which never returned. These journeys read like spirit-journeys of skin and soul; Ennin goes in Search of the Law, and his diary records Tang's Wu-Tsung's search for immortality, complete with Taoist tower, as well as his persecution of the Buddhists, almost to extinction. Later Ennin continued Saicho's work; Saicho and Kukai had a problematic relationship, with the former declaring himself a student of the latter - in Shiba, Saicho is presented as hurrying through the Sutras (much as I do), not as therapeutic (in the Freudian sense), but as knowledge; Kukai refused him a loan of some manuscripts, and, rude, the falling-out intensified. Kukai was at Koya, Saicho at Hiei, later destroyed. Of Kukai, later sainthood, legends, including his survival beneath the tomb, eternal meditation, mummification. But then there are accounts of cremation. Kukai wrote The Ten Stages of the Development of Human Mind, 830, described in Shiba, and certainly critical in the rising up and annihilation of world and consciousness; all these agreements and disagreements are a far cry from monotheism with its tired and dogmatic narratives necessitating loyalty, violence, and belief. There is always space, such as the liminality within the sculptural mandala at To-jo, founded by Kukai - who has also been credited, rightly or wrongly, with the hiragana and katakana syllabic characters (that appear related to Sanskrit, a language he knew well). Kukai also founded a university, dammed a reservoir, built on top of Mount Koya, organized and reformulated the Sutras he brought back with him from China. And within his writings and travels - and within those of Saicho, Ennin, and others - one can almost envision the origins of vision, invisibility, the accompaniment of absence, the horizons of enlightenments. Not to return primarily with the relics of Buddha (although these were also carried), but to emphasize the inscription of the world - all those sutras brought from China - as well as the necessity of transcendence. It's the letter and its erasure, a semiotic formation that has never been equaled, I think, anywhere else - and a formation that's neither Chinese nor Japanese, nor of this world, nor of any other. One might move from these books to the sutras themselves - as much as possible, I recommend the translations of Bill Porter / Red Pine, and at least glance at the Chinese and the weights and absences of the characters themselves. _