 Kūkai grew up during the Nara period (710–784CE) when the Nara Buddhist schools flourished and the country was centralized under the rule of the imperial family. And he was active during the beginning of the Heian period (794–1185CE) when institutionalized Nara Buddhism underwent reform due to the influence of newer ideas coming from China, including Kūkai’s own importations. He comes from an aristocratic family, the Saeki, and as a boy, he was educated by his maternal uncle, a Confucian scholar. At the age of seventeen or eighteen, he entered the state university at the then-capital Nagaoka but was soon disillusioned with its Confucian education. He suddenly dropped out of the university and retired into the natural setting of the mountains, where as legend has it, he devoted himself to various forms of esoteric practices. A few years later at the age of 24, he completed the final version of his first treatise, the Sangō shīki (Indications of the Goals of the Three Teachings) that covers and compares the teachings of Confucianism, Taoism, and Buddhism. Herein one can discern Kūkai’s reasons for turning from Confucianism to Buddhism. In the text, Kūkai relates how as a student he met a Buddhist priest who taught him an esoteric meditative practice called the Kokūzōgumonji no ho (“Ākāśagarbha’s method for seeking hearing and retaining”), which involved the recitation of a mantra a million times and was supposed to endow the practitioner with miraculous powers of memory and understanding.