One Hundred Images of Fudō: a printed deity, multiplied

Cleveland 1988.118 prints one hundred identical Fudō Myōō from a single carved block. It is a suributsu, a merit-multiplication devotional print, not a zuzō compendium of variant forms. The repetition is the iconography: one figure, multiplied, the printed equivalent of a recited invocation.

What it is, and what it is not

Cleveland 1988.118 is a Kamakura-period woodblock sheet, dated to the 1200s, printed with one hundred figures of Fudō Myōō and later mounted as a hanging scroll. The print itself measures 44.3 × 28.9 cm; the mount brings it to 131.1 × 42.1 cm. The Cleveland record lists it as CC0, gift of Donald J. Wineman in memory of his wife Susan, acquired 1988.¹

The hundred figures are not a hundred different Fudō. They are the same Fudō, one hundred times. The Cleveland catalog is precise about this: “one hundred identical figures in black ink,” each seated on a tiered platform inside jagged flames, each holding a sword in the right hand and a coiled rope in the left.¹ That single sentence settles the most common way this object is misfiled.

The misreading worth naming up front is a genre error. A sheet titled One Hundred Images of Fudō sounds like a zuzō, an iconographic-reference compendium gathering Fudō’s variant forms (the two-armed standing type, the four-armed, the seated Yellow Fudō of Onjō-ji, the nineteen-aspect contemplation set) onto one surface for a painter or ritualist to consult. That genre exists. bodhi has read one closely: Cleveland 1987.39, a Heian zuzō for the Ninnōkyō mandala, is exactly such a working drawing, and the great zuzō encyclopedias (the Asabashō, the Besson zakki, the Kakuzenshō) are its library context. This sheet is not that. There is no variation across its hundred cells to consult. It is a devotional object whose content is the repetition.

The technique decides the reading

The physical fact does the interpretive work here, and it is verifiable from the image. Run an eye down the grid. The flame outline breaks at the same place in cell after cell, the sword cants at the same angle, the platform tiers carry the same three steps. That sameness is not a workshop copying a model a hundred times by hand. It is one carved matrix, inked and pulled: most economically, a single block into which the hundred cells were cut together and printed in one pass.

Baskett’s Footprints of the Buddha gives the vocabulary. A printed Buddha image made by inking a carved block, laying paper on it, and rubbing the back with a baren is a suributsu, “printed Buddha”; one made by pressing an inked stamp or seal directly onto the sheet is an imbutsu, stamped Buddha (Baskett 1980, p. 18, in the catalog’s introductory definitions).² The Cleveland sheet is the first kind. The grid of a hundred is the device Baskett describes a page later: religious merit accrues by making images, and the more images made, the more blessing returns, so a block carved once with a hundred cells turns a laborious act of devotion into a single pull (Baskett 1980, p. 19).²

This is not a frequent-but-vague claim. Baskett’s catalog reproduces a sheet inscribed at the upper left “twenty-ninth day, nine thousand images” (cat. 9, p. 33), a running tally and the printed equivalent of a counted recitation.² The genre’s deposit context is documented too: a large group of identical or near-identical seated Amida prints was found inside the principal sculpture at Jōruri-ji in the late Meiji period (Baskett 1980, cat. 2, pp. 24–25).² Sheets like these were not made to be studied. They were made to be made, then offered, then sometimes sealed inside a statue where no one would look at them again.

Why Fudō, one hundred times

Fudō Myōō is the figure this device most often multiplies. Baskett notes him as the most frequently printed of the Myōō, the esoteric protective wisdom kings (Baskett 1980, cat. 6, p. 30), and the printed record carries a famous precedent: in 1096 the monk Yuihan is credited with producing ten thousand images of Fudō (Baskett 1980, p. 18).² That figure of ten thousand is worth pausing on. It is the same logic as the Cleveland sheet, scaled to a vow: a quantity of the deity produced as an act, the number itself the offering. A hundred-cell block is the practical instrument that makes such a vow reachable. Yuihan’s ten thousand and Wineman’s Cleveland hundred are the same gesture at two scales, a century apart, and the block is what connects them.

The Cleveland sheet’s iconography is the reduced, legible core that survives multiplication: seated, sword in the right hand, lasso coiled in the left, fire behind. Faure, in The Fluid Pantheon, reads Fudō’s backstory as a domesticated yakṣa raised from acolyte to esoteric centrality, his ambivalent character marked iconographically by the canine teeth and the eyes pointing in opposite directions, one up and one down (Faure 2015, ch. 3).³ Almost none of that survives at this print scale. What survives is the sword and the rope, the two attributes Baskett’s catalog isolates as Fudō’s role-defining pair, “subduer of demons” (Baskett 1980, cat. 10–12, p. 34).² The figure is compressed to what reads when it is small and a hundred of it.

That compression is the point, and it is where the patient reading earns its keep. The popular handling of Fudō is the tattoo-and-warrior register: the fierce face, the flame, the unmoving resolve. The Cleveland sheet refuses to perform any of that. At print scale the fierce face is a few strokes; the figure is almost mild, almost a glyph. The fierceness is not in the depicting. It is in the counting, a hundred invocations stacked into one sheet the way a chanted dhāraṇī stacks repetitions into one rite.

A grid that thinks like an invocation

Stand the scroll up at its full mounted height and the eye does what the maker intended: it stops resolving individual figures within the first two rows and starts reading the field. Ten across, ten down, the grid recedes into texture the way a wall of small standing Senju Kannon does, or the way a hundred-character sutra copy does. The single figure is legible; the hundred is a surface. This is the suributsu logic Baskett describes, repetition as the visual equivalent of recitation (Baskett 1980, pp. 18–19),² and it is why the object resists the museum-label habit of close formal description. There is one figure to describe. The work is what happens when you make it a hundred times.

Sharf’s framing in Living Images sharpens what kind of object this is. Sharf argues that Japanese Buddhist images were treated, by elite monks and unlettered donors alike, as living presences with apotropaic and salvific power, ritually constructed and venerated rather than used primarily as aids to private contemplation (Sharf 2001, introduction).⁴ On that reading the Cleveland sheet is not a hundred pictures of a deity. It is a hundred instances of a presence, generated at once, their efficacy in the making and the offering rather than the looking. The mounting as a hanging scroll is a later, secondary life: an object made to be produced and dedicated, later reframed as something to be displayed on a wall.

This is the museum-versus-genre point, and it is worth stating without hedging. The Cleveland title and catalog get the object exactly right at the level of fact: one hundred identical figures, sword and rope, flames, woodblock, Kamakura.¹ The misreading is not the museum’s. It is the one a browsing reader brings, cued by the word images and the round number, expecting a reference compendium of Fudō’s many forms. The genre boundary is the load-bearing distinction. A zuzō multiplies forms for a maker to consult; a suributsu multiplies one form for a donor to accrue. Bogel’s account of Mikkyō visual culture in With a Single Glance describes the zuzō apparatus Kūkai imported: the iconographic-drawing tradition that maintained canonical fidelity across generations of copying, the “logic of similarity” binding image, ritual, and practitioner (Bogel 2009).⁵ The Cleveland sheet sits on the other side of that line. It uses the same printing technology the reference tradition used, to the opposite end: not fidelity-across-variation for the workshop, but fidelity-across-multiplication for the offering.

Where it sits among surviving printed Fudō

The printed-Fudō record is uneven and lightly cataloged, which makes the Cleveland sheet more useful than its modest condition suggests. The reference frame is Baskett’s 1980 Footprints of the Buddha, the standard English-language survey of the Japanese Buddhist print, assembled from American and Japanese collections; the Cleveland sheet was acquired in 1988 and so postdates that catalog, but it belongs squarely to the genre Baskett’s introduction and early entries define (Baskett 1980, pp. 18–19, cat. 2, 6, 9, 10–12).² Within the genre the closest comparanda are the things Baskett actually reproduces: the Jōruri-ji deposited Amida sheets, identical seated Buddhas in quantity, sealed into a sculpture (cat. 2, pp. 24–25); and the tallied Fudō and Buddha sheets carrying their image-counts in ink (cat. 9, p. 33).² Those are the right neighbors for Cleveland 1988.118: not the painted single-figure Fudō at the Met or the Heian Fudō icons whose fierce faces reward close looking, but the printed, counted, deposited objects whose value was in the quantity produced.

That comparative thinness is itself the historical point. Suributsu were consumable. They were printed in numbers, offered, and very often sealed away or eventually discarded, so the survivors are a small and accidental sample of an enormous lost production. A relatively complete, well-printed hundred-cell Fudō sheet that was instead mounted and kept is a comparatively rare survival of an object class designed not to survive. Read against Yuihan’s lost ten thousand, the Cleveland hundred is one of the few places the practice can still be looked at directly rather than only counted in a record.

How to tell a suributsu from a zuzō in a collection

The practical test, for a reader working through a museum’s prints-and-drawings holdings:

• Count the variation, not the figures. A zuzō compendium varies: different mudras, different attribute counts, different aspects, often captioned in ink with the form’s name and ritual use. A suributsu does not vary; its cells are mechanically identical because they are mechanically the same.
• Read the inscription if there is one. A zuzō carries identifying or instructional text: form names, sutra citations, samaya notes. A suributsu, when inscribed at all, carries a tally, a date and a number of images (Baskett 1980, cat. 9, p. 33).²
• Ask where it was found. Zuzō descend through temple drawing-collections and the great encyclopedias (Asabashō, Besson zakki, Kakuzenshō). Suributsu turn up in deposit caches, sealed inside sculptures, folded into reliquaries, bundled in sutra mounds (Baskett 1980, cat. 2, pp. 24–25).²
• Ask what the technique is for. Both use the woodblock. The zuzō uses it to preserve a form precisely across copies for makers. The suributsu uses it to produce a form rapidly in quantity for donors. Same tool, opposite intention.

By those tests Cleveland 1988.118 is unambiguous. It is a Kamakura suributsu of Fudō Myōō, a single carved deity printed a hundred times for the merit of the making, and the most informative thing about it is the one fact a reference-compendium reading would discard: that all hundred are the same.

Related

• Cleveland 1987.39, what an actual zuzō reference looks like
• Fudō Myōō, the iconographic markers compressed in this print
• A Heian painted Fudō, read at single-figure scale
• The Five Wisdom Kings handscroll, Fudō among the Myōō
• Fudō Myōō (entity)
• Zuzō, the iconographic-reference genre (entity)
• Woodblock printing, suributsu and imbutsu (entity)

Footnotes

1. cma-1988-118 ↩ ↩² ↩³

2. baskett-1980 ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷ ↩⁸ ↩⁹ ↩¹⁰ ↩¹¹

3. faure-2015-fluid ↩

4. sharf-2001 ↩

5. bogel-2009 ↩