Saichō and Kūkai bring Tendai and Shingon Buddhism from Tang China

Saichō, ordained at Tōdai-ji in 785, had withdrawn to Mount Hiei, north-east of the future Heian-kyō; Kūkai was a younger monk from Sanuki. Both were attached to the embassy of Fujiwara no Kadonomaro. After a failed attempt in 803, the four ships left Tanoura in Hizen on 14 August 804. The ambassador’s ship, with Kūkai aboard, drifted south to Chixian in Fujian, landing on 17 September, and he reached Chang’an at the end of January 805; Saichō’s ship came into Mingzhou (modern Ningbo) on 7 October 804.

Saichō went to Mount Tiantai and studied for some 135 days with Daosui, the seventh patriarch of the Tiantai school, then copied scriptures to take home. He also received esoteric teachings, and soon after his return — his ship reached Tsushima on 4 July 805 — he performed at Takaosan-ji what Enryaku-ji counts as the first esoteric initiation (abhiṣeka) in Japan. On 18 February 806 the court of the ailing Emperor Kanmu granted his Tendai Lotus school two annual ordinands, one for the Tiantai meditation curriculum and one for the esoteric curriculum — the date that Tendai marks as its founding. In Chang’an Kūkai became a disciple of Huiguo of the Qinglong temple in 805 and received a series of initiations between July and September; after Huiguo died on 8 January 806, he cut short a stay that had been meant to last much longer, sailed from Mingzhou in the autumn and on 5 December 806 submitted to the court a catalogue of the scriptures, mandalas and ritual implements he had brought.

Saichō’s plan for a Mahayana ordination platform on Mount Hiei, independent of the platforms controlled by the Nara clergy, was approved on 3 July 822, seven days after his death, and in 823 his monastery received the name Enryaku-ji. Kūkai, who in 812 initiated Saichō himself at Takaosan-ji before relations between the two cooled, was granted Mount Kōya in 816 and the state temple Tō-ji in Heian-kyō in 823. Enryaku-ji and Mount Kōya remain the centres of the two schools, and their founders are known by their posthumous titles, Dengyō Daishi and Kōbō Daishi.