  Sesshū does not seek to render every detail of the landscape to achieve representational verisimilitude, to depict an object that would be discernible for a subject. The aim is to give only a suggestion or a trace of trees, mountains, or waters, which appear to negate themselves as objects. Accordingly, Sesshū does not circumscribe forms but offers the impression of poetic immediacy by breaking them down. Extreme abbreviation and abstraction are employed such that any form, if even discernible, is pushed as far as possible from objectivity without disappearing completely into formlessness. As Jullien writes regarding Chinese painters who influenced Sesshū, they paint the “landscape in the tonality of as if, in the mode of appearing-disappearing, at once ‘as if there were’ and ‘as if there were not.’”(Jullien, 2009. 8) The central grouping of trees, the inn blending into their trunks, and the tiny oarsman all appear but feel as though they are about to be lost, maybe already transitioning into a vague memory, only a brushstroke away from dissolving completely. A sensitive viewer does not simply perceive a representation of this event, but can sense the sweeping and spontaneous gestures that gave rise to the ephemerality of the scene. To appreciate this aesthetic feature of the painting invokes Buddhist principles Sesshū would have cultivated as a Zen monk.