Kūkai  

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Kūkai (774–835, was a Japanese Buddhist monk, civil servant, scholar, poet, and artist who founded the Shingon or "True Word" school of Buddhism.

Kūkai is famous as a calligrapher and engineer. Among the many achievements attributed to him is the invention of the kana, the syllabary with which, in combination with Chinese characters (kanji), the Japanese language is written to this day. Also according to tradition, the Iroha, which uses every phonetic kana syllable just once and is one of the most famous poems in Japanese, is attributed to him but again, this is a popular belief and nowhere attested to. 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).

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Unless indicated otherwise, the text in this article is either based on Wikipedia article "Kūkai" or another language Wikipedia page thereof used under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License; or on research by Jahsonic and friends. See Art and Popular Culture's copyright notice.

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