Kūkai (空海) or also known posthumously as Kōbō-Daishi (弘法大師), 774-835 CE was a Japanese monk, scholar, poet, and artist, founder of the Shingon or "True Word" school of Buddhism.
Kūkai is famous as a calligrapher (see Shodo), engineer, and is said to have invented kana, the syllabary in which, in combination with Chinese characters (Kanji) the Japanese language is written (although this claim has not been proven). His religious writing, some fifty works, expound the esoteric Shingon doctrine, of which the major ones have been translated into English by Yoshito Hakeda (see references below). Kūkai is also said to have written the iroha, one of the most famous poems in Japanese, which uses every phonetic kana syllable.
