Fudo Myoo

The third numbered Fudo Myoo print confirms an extended engagement with the subject across Sasajima's career. Variants in such a sequence typically explore different aspects of the deity's iconographic program: a frontal hieratic stance in one, a three-quarter view in another, a closer focus on the head and flame-halo in a third. Sasajima's treatment of religious figures consistently favors monumentality over animation, fixing Fudo Myoo as a static icon rather than a deity in motion. The mokuhanga technique here likely deploys his characteristic heavy [baren](/glossary/baren) pressure to produce dense, matte black areas, with [washi](/glossary/washi) fiber visible at the margins where the pigment thins. As a student of Onchi Koshiro, Sasajima inherited the conviction that the carved block is itself the work; the printed image is a record of that block's surface, and his repeated Fudo Myoo subjects accumulate as variations on a sculptural rather than pictorial problem.