them by surrounding himself with a consecrated
imaginary enclosure into which they were unable to enter against his
will.

We mention these legends only to call the attention to the fact that
they are but copies of those already accepted in China at that time, and
are the logical and natural fruit of the Tantra school at which we have
glanced. In 804, K[=o]b[=o] was appointed to visit the Middle Kingdom as
a government student. By means of his clever pen and calligraphic skill
he won his way into the Chinese capital. He became the favored disciple
of a priest who taught him the mystic doctrines of the Yoga. Having
acquired the whole of the system, and equipped himself with a large
library of Buddhist doctrinal works and still more with every sort of
ecclesiastical furniture and religious goods, he returned to Japan.

Multitudes of wonders are reported about K[=o]b[=o], all of which show
the growth of the Tantra school. It is certain that his erudition was
immense, and that he was probably the most learned man of Japan in that
age, and possibly of any other age. Besides being a Japanese Ezra in
multiplying writings, he is credited with the invention of the
hira-gana, or running script, and if correctly so, he deserves on this
account alone an immortal honor equal to that of Cadmus or Sequoia. The
kana[13] is a syllabary of forty-seven letters, which by diacritical
marks, may be increased to seventy. The kata-kana is the square or print
form, the hira-kana is the round or "grass" character for writing.
Though not as valuable as a true phonetic alphabet, such as the Koreans
and the Cherokees possess, the _i-ro-ha_, or kana script, even though a
syllabary and not an alphabet, was a wonderful aid to popular writing
and instruction.

Evidently the idea of the i-ro-ha, or Japanese ABC, was derived from the
Sanskrit alphabet, or, what some modern Anglo-Indian has called the
Deva-Nagari or the god-alphabet. There is no evidence, however, to show
that K[=o]b[=o] did more than arrange in order forty-seven of the
easiest Chinese signs then used, in such a manner that they conveyed in
a few lines of doggerel the sense of a passage from a sutra in which the
mortality of man and the emptiness of all things are taught, and the
doctrine of Nirvana is suggested.[14] Hokusai, the artist, in a sketch
which embodies the popular idea of this bonze's immense industry,
represents him copying the shastras and sutras. K[=o]b[=o] is on a seat