Ennin

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Ennin (794–864) was a Japanese Tendai monk, third abbot of the school on Mount Hiei, remembered above all for the diary he kept across nine years of travel in Tang China. He had entered the monastery on Hiei as a boy under Saichō, the founder of Japanese Tendai, and by middle age was a senior figure in a tradition that still lacked much of the ritual apparatus its Chinese parent possessed. In 838 he sailed with an official embassy to seek what was missing.

The journey did not go as planned. Denied the permission he wanted to reach the great Tendai center on Mount Tiantai, Ennin stayed on illegally, made his way instead to the Buddhist mountain of Wutai and then to the capital at Chang’an, and was caught in the empire as the emperor Wuzong turned against Buddhism in the persecution of the 840s — a campaign that closed monasteries and forced clergy back into lay life. His record of those years, the Record of a Pilgrimage to China in Search of the Law, is unusual among Buddhist sources for its plain attention to dates, expenses, officials, and obstacles; historians read it less as devotional writing than as one of the fullest eyewitness accounts of Tang society to survive, the work that earned its modern translator the comparison to Marco Polo.

What Ennin carried home reshaped his school. Tendai in Japan absorbed a large body of esoteric ritual — initiations, mantras, mandalas, the practices of tantric Buddhism — and the form it took on Hiei is conventionally credited in part to what he brought back, a strand later distinguished from the rival esotericism of the Shingon school. He is also associated with introducing a particular practice of nenbutsu, the continuous voiced recollection of the Buddha Amida, which he is said to have learned on Wutai and which on Mount Hiei became a sustained ritual chant. That practice belonged to the wider Pure Land devotion in which calling the Buddha’s name was held to carry the devotee toward rebirth in Amida’s western paradise; through later Hiei-trained teachers it fed the Pure Land movements that became among the most widely held forms of Japanese Buddhism.

Tradition went further than history can follow. Ennin was canonized in 866 as Jikaku Daishi, among the first monks in Japan to receive the title of daishi, great teacher — granted that year alongside Saichō, posthumously honoured as Dengyō Daishi — and around his name gathered foundation legends attaching him to temples across the country, more than the span of one life could support. What the diary documents and what later veneration claims are not the same body of fact, and the scholarship that values the Record as a historical witness is careful to separate the two. The traveler who counted his provisions and noted the price of grain, and the great teacher whose relics drew pilgrims, are held together only by the name.

→ In the library: Beck & Yamabe — Buddhist Psalms (Shinran's Jōdo Wasan, 1921) · Müller et al. — Buddhist Mahâyâna Texts (incl. the Sukhāvatī-vyūha, 1894)