The Literary Art of Kobo Daishi

Kūkai, revered in Japan as Kōbō Daishi, founded the Shingon school of Buddhism, but he was also a poet, a lexicographer and one of the great calligraphers of East Asia. In 1912 the sinologist Naitō Konan spoke at the Kōbō Daishi birthday festival on this literary side of the saint, and he chose the books that most specialists passed over.

Naitō shows why Kūkai's Bunkyō hifuron, a compendium of Chinese poetics, matters: it quotes, and so preserves, Tang and earlier handbooks of prosody that were lost in China. He argues that the dictionary Tenrei banshō meigi, a faithful abridgment of Gu Yewang's lost Yupian, deserves a proper edition, and he revisits, and partly retracts, what he had said about Kūkai's calligraphy and its Chinese models.

This is a spoken lecture, courteous, digressive and sometimes sharp, and the translation keeps its manner. It is complete and unabridged, with a translator's note, endnotes on persons, books and dates, and source information.