Matsubara depicts light emanating from the sun’s golden halo, reaching down the and across the entire screen. The combination of the sun is part of his Kūkai Series. The life of the great Buddhist monk Kūkai (774–835), who, as a young man, retreated to an oceanside cave where he watched the cycles of the sun and the moon as he strove toward spiritual awakening. Kūkai frequently recited the Akasagarbha sutra, a text evoked through the image of Venus, which represents the Bodhisattva Akasagarbha, known in Japanese as Kokūzō. The set was initially commissioned for Jingoji, the Shingon temple in Kyoto, where Kukai resided after returning from China, where he studied esoteric Buddhism. Before he began painting, Matsubara wrote Kūkai’s poem Hizō-hōyaku (Precious Key to the Secret Treasury), an explanation of the tenets of Shingon Buddhism, across the panels. He then coated the panels with an earthy-red bengala oxide to give the black ink and gold of the sky and stars a sense of texture. The crashing waves were painted with an undulating layer of clay-resin paint highlighted with thick lines of mica resin.