Where the Dead Pause, and the Japanese Say Goodbye: A Journey (41 page)

K
yasan is also home to the most famous cemetery in Japan. A walk through the Okunoin cemetery puts you face-to-face with a who’s who of Japan: the great heroes, the villains, the
daimy
(Japan’s feudal rulers), and Japan’s greatest corporations—all have either a monument or an actual mausoleum there. In fact, the number of mausoleums dedicated to samurai and the number of those erected for the employees of corporations are roughly equal, with about a hundred devoted to each category. Were nothing else to remain of Japan but this cemetery, scholars would have a snapshot of twelve hundred years of Japanese history: from emperors, to kamikaze pilots, to Panasonic employees. As of 2013, the newest memorial, commissioned by an anonymous nun, was built of pink marble to pay tribute to the victims of the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake.

Shingon was founded by the great Buddhist teacher K
kai, who, to the Japanese, is an early historical figure of mythic proportions, like Prince Sh
toku. K
kai was born in 774
AD
to an aristocratic family on the remote island of Shikoku, but the history of his early years is not definitively known. His family seems to have tried to educate him to become a bureaucrat, but K
kai was more interested in Buddhism. In 804
AD
, thirty-year-old K
kai went to China in search of a Buddhist text he’d seen in a dream.

In China, K
kai was greeted by the Shingon master Hui-kuo, who said, “How excellent, excellent that we have met today at last! My life is ending soon, and yet I have no more disciples to whom to transmit the Dharma. Prepare without delay.” Three months later, Hui-kuo was dead, and K
kai was his spiritual heir. In 806, K
kai returned to Japan and set about sharing what he learned.

His accomplishments are legendary. It was K
kai who was said to have developed the kana script—the Japanese phonetic alphabet
still in use today. K
kai was a great engineer who also constructed the Manno reservoir, still the largest irrigated reservoir in Japan today. His calligraphy was so beautiful that Ry
nosuke would stare and stare at it in museums, trying to figure out how one person had created such beautiful letters. K
kai was beloved by the emperors he served, who always asked him to help stop droughts and plagues. But it was his Buddhist teachings that most distinguished K
kai and made him so beloved by his followers—and also by nonbelievers—even today. While my cooking teacher, Asano, was not a practitioner of Shingon, she had tremendous respect for K
kai. “He helped establish the roots of Buddhism in Japan,” she said. “It’s impossible not to be in awe of him.”