  The “splashed ink” technique Sesshū employed is particularly exemplary of the expanded frame of Japanese aesthetics. “Splashed Ink” (hatsuboku) was one of several “broken ink” (haboku) spontaneous techniques originating in China, which Sesshū learned while travelling to study with painters and conduct religious practice at its monasteries. The techniques ranged from spontaneous washes and splashes to actual ink-flinging and dripping. While these methods sound reckless and were associated with an “aesthetics of inebriation” and “aesthetics of accident,” the splashed ink idiom is in fact the most demanding style, regarded as the highest form of expression and the supreme test of the artist’s skill. Likewise, it was thought to test the observer’s sensitivity like no other genre.  The style originated with the “literati” artists of the Southern Song School of Chinese landscape painting who favored yūgen-style abbreviated poetic suggestion, rather than the detailed and descriptive “academic” approach of the Northern School. Thus, following this tradition, painters such as Sesshū did not aim to develop virtuoso skill to create a fully formed art image, but in negating the self and becoming continuous with the motions of nature, they follow the Daoist precept that “the great image has no form”.