 In the broader sense of mantra, the whole cosmos is a language or text that must be “read” if one is to receive its meaning (the Dharma). Kūkai expresses this in the term shōjijissō. Shōji means “sound-and-sign.” Shō (or: sō), meaning “sound,” is the breath of Dainichi, the vibrations of the five material elements in their mutually non-obstructively colliding interplay that resonate sounds through the air. In the narrower sense, this would be the mantras voiced in ritual. Ji, meaning “sign,” “word,” “letter,” or “character/graph,” is sound in its signifying character as naming or meaning something. As letter, it also provides a material base whereby the sign’s distinction from other signs becomes retained and fixed. For what makes something a sign signifying a specific meaning rather than another is difference (shabetsu). Anything that manifests its distinction from others in virtue of its pattern (mon) – the various combinations of shape, color, and movement among visual objects – then, for Kūkai, is a sign or letter (ji). Marking distinct patterns (mon), such things are “characters” (monji; “pattern-letter”). In the broadest and cosmic sense then, all phenomena of the six senses (i.e., the five physical senses plus the thinking mind) as constituted by the inter-vibrations of the five material elements and via their mutual distinctions (shabetsu), serve as letters of the cosmic (con)text, ultimately signifying the Dharma but in its different aspects. In its narrower significance, however, ji would be the written Sanskrit letters as saturated with that esoteric meaning of the Dharma. Jissō, meaning “reality,” is that which is named, intended, meant, as evoked by sho becoming ji. The ultimate referent or meaning of the world as text is the Dharma in the spontaneous playing of its embodiment, the hosshin. In turn the process of articulation of the Dharma by the hosshin generates everything in the cosmos, including the myriad beings, their various realms, and its various forms of embodiment such as the celestial buddhas and the historical human buddha. It also generates human languages in general which are thus seen as manifestations of this cosmic articulation. The cosmos as such is a text articulating the Dharma within the empty space of the vast limitless and formless body of the hosshin. The cosmos as mantra is hence hosshin seppō.