Multitudes of wonders are reported about Kōbō, 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 Kōbō 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. Kōbō is on a seat before a large upright sheet of paper. He holds a brush-pen in his mouth, and one in each of his hands and feet, all moving at once.[15] Favorite portions of the Buddhist scriptures were indeed so rapidly multiplied in Japan in the ninth century, as to suggest the idea, that, even in this early age, block printing had been imported from China, whence also afterward, in all probability, it was exported into Europe before the days of Gutenberg and Coster.[16] The popular imagination, however, was more easily moved on seeing five brushes kept at work and all at once by the muscles in the fingers, toes and mouth of one man. Yet, had his life lasted six hundred years instead of sixty, he could hardly have graven all the images, scaled all the mountain peaks, confounded all the sceptics, wrought all the miracles and performed all the other feats with which he is popularly credited.[17] Kōbō Irenicon.