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The Weaving of Mantra: Kukai and the Construction of Esoteric Buddhist Discourse. By RYUICHI ABE. New York: Columbia University Press, 1999. xviii, 593 pp. $40.00 (cloth).
This is a remarkable book about one of the most remarkable figures in the history of Japanese Buddhism: Kukai (774-835), a Nara Buddhist monk who traveled to China from 802 to 804, where he became deeply involved with esoteric rites, symbols, and scriptures and returned to Japan as the founder of the Shingon sect at the beginning of the Heian era. Despite the crucial role he played in the early history of Buddhism in Japan, Kukai has generally been neglected in Western scholarship. The primary exception to this is Yoshito Hakeda's 1972 volume of translations, Kukai: Major Works (New York: Columbia University Press), in addition to a handful of articles by several other noted scholars. Abe's book will certainly emerge and remain the primary examination of Kukai's life and thought for many years to come. It is thus a crucial read for anyone interested in early Japanese religion and intellectual history. Weaving is especially useful for the way it deals with the hermeneutics of historiography by challenging conventional studies of Japanese epochal chronology that segment premodern history into the somewhat...