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 black, applied through forceful baren pressure that leaves the washi surface visibly textured, recalling the look of stone rubbings taken from temple stelae. Working in the 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.