Flaming Jewels, from Ōkyo gafu (Ōkyo Picture Book)

Flaming Jewels is a page from the 1850 edition of the Ōkyo gafu (Ōkyo Picture Book), held by the Cleveland Museum of Art (1985.376.c) and part of the Kelvin Smith Collection. The Ōkyo gafu is an accordion-bound (orihon) woodblock-printed picture book reproducing Ōkyo's brush designs across multiple openings, with each page measuring approximately 11¼ by 7½ inches and printed in ink with selective color on paper. This page renders the iconographic motif of the flaming jewel (hōju, 宝珠) — the wish-granting jewel of Buddhist iconography, traditionally depicted as a rounded sphere surmounted by a flickering halo of flame. Ōkyo's composition arranges three jewels in a pyramid configuration, each topped with serpentine flame lines, with additional accessory forms placed nearby. The flaming jewel is a recurring motif in temple decoration and Buddhist painting, associated particularly with the bodhisattvas Jizō and Kokūzō and with the wish-fulfillment functions of Esoteric Buddhism. Ōkyo's treatment translates the symbolic motif into a study sheet for painting students, isolating the shape against an unprinted ground and exploring its compositional possibilities. The 1850 edition of the Ōkyo gafu was one of the most widely circulated of the nineteenth-century Ōkyo reproduction publications and provided pattern material for both painters and craftsmen working in the Maruyama-Shijō lineage.