 We need to acknowledge, however, that Kūkai and Shingon Buddhism in general have not altogether been ignored by contemporary philosophers of Japan. Even within the Kyoto School, its current representative Ueda Shizuteru in a 1993 lecture, Basho to mandara, discusses the significance of mandalas in Shingon Buddhism in relation to the ontological structure of human existence understood in his terms as being-in-the-twofold-world. In his analysis of Kūkai’s mandalas, Ueda approriates contemporary philosophical concepts, such as Nishida’s “place” (basho), Nishitani’s “field” (ba), and Heidegger’s “being-in-the-world” (In-der-Welt-sein), and takes the mandala as indicative of the always assumed semantic space (imi kūkan) belonging to the world (sekai) as the total framework of meanings (imi no waku gumi) wherein we find ourselves. A couple of other graduates of Kyoto University’s philosophy department have entire books on Kūkai. In Kūkai no shisō ni tsuite, Umehara Takeshi discusses Kūkai both as a religious practitioner and as a theorist, who explicates the world’s infinite “treasure” unfolding within the self. And ex-Nishidian turned Marxist, Yanagida Kenjūrō, has a study on Kūkai and his works: Nihon shingon no tetsugaku: Kūkai Hizōhōyaku to Ben’kenmitsu nikyōron.