Tang Vinaya master from Yangzhou who reached Japan on his sixth attempt in 753, blind by then, and founded the Toshodaiji in Nara
Mural guide
Mural of the event “Jianzhen's Eastward Voyages”, which this person took part in.
Japan, driven by the envoys to Tang, was vigorously importing Central Plains culture, but its domestic Buddhist precepts were in extreme confusion. Japanese monks came to Tang and sincerely invited the eminent monk Jianzhen to go to Japan to spread the Vinaya school of Buddhism.
Jianzhen, of the Chunyu family of Jiangyang in Yangzhou, became a monk at the Dayun monastery there at fourteen and was fully ordained at the Shiji monastery in Chang'an, where he studied monastic discipline; back in Yangzhou he lectured on the Vinaya across the Yangzi and Huai region. In 742 the Japanese monks Yoei and Fusho asked him to carry the ordination rites to Japan. Five attempts at the crossing failed; the fifth left him adrift on Hainan, and on the way back north Yoei died and Jianzhen went blind. In 753 he sailed with a returning Japanese embassy, landed in Satsuma, and in 754 reached Nara, where he set up an ordination platform at Todaiji and gave the bodhisattva precepts to the retired emperor Shomu. He built the Toshodaiji in 759 and died there four years later, aged seventy-six. Omi no Mifune's Eastern Journey of the Great Tang Monk tells his story, and his lacquer statue, a Japanese National Treasure, was shown in Yangzhou in 1980.
714Maritime Silk Road FlourishingTook partage 26Establishing maritime customs in Guangzhou, inaugurating the flourishing era of Indian Ocean trade.
743Jianzhen's Eastward VoyagesTook partage 55After five failed crossings, Jianzhen reached Japan, established Buddhist ordination, and transmitted Tang medicine, architecture, and arts at Nara.
Jianzhen Reaches Japan753age 65After five failed crossings, Jianzhen set sail a sixth time in 753, landed at Satsuma in Japan early in 754, and then transmitted Buddhist ordination at Todaiji in the capital.
The Account of the Eastern Expedition of the Great Master of Tang says the Great Master, named Jianzhen, came from Jiangyang county in Yangzhou, with the lay surname Chunyu. At fourteen he followed his father into a temple and asked his father to let him leave home; his father, struck by his resolve, agreed. He left home as a novice under the Chan master Zhiman and was assigned to Dayun Temple, and later took the full precepts on the ordination platform at Shiji Temple in the western capital.
Tang
