Fudo

This mokuhanga depicts Fudo, a shortened reference to Fudo Myoo (Acala), the wrathful Buddhist wisdom king who guards the dharma. Traditional iconography shows the deity with a flaming sword to sever ignorance, a noose to bind delusion, and a fierce expression set against a halo of flame. Sasajima approached Buddhist subjects with the same archaic gravity he brought to temple architecture, treating the figure as a hieratic icon rather than a narrative scene. The print almost certainly relies on dense [sumi](/glossary/sumi) black, applied through forceful [baren](/glossary/baren) pressure that leaves the [washi](/glossary/washi) surface visibly textured, recalling the look of stone rubbings taken from temple stelae. Working in the [sosaku-hanga](/glossary/sosaku-hanga) discipline he absorbed from his teacher Onchi Koshiro, Sasajima carved and printed every block himself, and his religious subjects share with his architectural studies a fixation on weight, age, and the material trace of devotional craft.