You’ll find him almost anywhere you look in Shikoku, in deep mountains and dark caves, beside waterfalls and sacred trees, and of course, within the temples of the Shikoku Henro. He cuts a striking figure among the kind smiles of other enlightened beings. His face is contorted in an unforgiving scowl, and he often has fangs protruding from his frowning mouth. His hair is in a thick braid that hangs over his left shoulder. His body, bulky like that of a rugby player, is dark blue or red. He holds a sword tip-up in his right hand and a coil of rope in his left. He sits or stands on a boulder surrounded by an aureole of flame. His name, “Fudō,” simply means “Unmoved.”
Fudō is the leader of the Wisdom Kings (明王 Myō-Ō), a set of fearsome beings said to be the “Wrathful Teaching Forms” of the Buddhas. When the compassion of the Buddhas meets the ignorance of a wayward being, it manifests as wrath in necessary measure. “With the Sword of Great Wisdom,” a sutra says, “[Fudō] destroys greed, hatred, and ignorance. With the rope of his deep meditative absorption, he lassos those who are difficult to bring to heel.”
While his appearance may remind us of the demons and gargoyles that haunt Western art and architecture, Fudō and his cohort adopt these qualities to bring sentient beings toward enlightenment. His hairstyle and clothing are those of an ancient Indian slave, signifying that he will take on even the lowliest position on behalf of other beings. While Buddhas often have luminous skin like the moon, a jewel, or a lotus, Fudō’s skin is blue-black because he is down in the muck of existence, stained with mud and oil. His feet are rooted on a great boulder, bedrock, the deepest foundation of reality.
Amidst all this toughness and grime, though, a lotus blooms from the crown of his head. The lotus, a common motif in Buddhism, grows in the mud but blooms forth unstained. In the same way, Fudō’s form shows we never lose our connection to the world of the Buddhas, our inherent Buddha nature. In fact, the toughness of reality, Buddhism teaches, can be the exact thing that leads to our awakening.
In spite of his stern appearance, Fudō is a beloved figure in Japan because of his reputation as a deity that sticks by those who pray to him. He first became popular in the early 9th Century because of his importance in Shingon, the school brought from China by Kūkai.
Subsequently, he became a patron deity of Onmyō-shi, “Masters of Yin and Yang,” practitioners of Daoist divination who held deep sway at the imperial court. The influence of the philosophy of yin-and-yang is one reason that he is often depicted containing pairs of opposites, such as having one eye open and one closed, or one tooth pointing up and one down. As faith in Fudō spread among normal Japanese, it also melded with indigenous attitudes toward mountains. He is one of the main deities in the mountain religion of Shugendō, where he is an expression of the earth itself, concrete, tough, and constantly offering us opportunities to grow in wisdom through hard training. He remains a fixture of popular faith throughout Japan.
Fudō is most often seen in the form described above, either sitting or standing. Fudō is also occasionally depicted as a sword with a dragon coiled around it, a form known as Kurikara. You may also see him depicted along with two or more of his dōji, child attendants.
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