  Sesshū’s life and work are exemplary for Japanese aesthetics given that his practice was not aesthetic in a restricted sense, but also encompassed the religious and philosophical principles of Daoist-inspired Zen Buddhism. “Splashed ink landscape” was composed in Sesshū’s 76th year, a time when he claimed that his eyes “were growing misty” and Daoism was increasingly influential for his painting. As a painter-priest, both his meditative as well as his artistic practice would have aimed at self-negation, at achieving “non-self” as per the goal of Zen training. As Yukio Lippit writes, “Splashed Ink Landscape thus showcases a mode of ink painting that projects both cultivated artistic agency and a state of subjectlessness. This condition of the permeable subject would prove pitch-perfect for the Japanese monk painter of the late medieval period” (Lippit 2012, 71). To disclose how this aesthetic-religious goal was approached in painting practice reveals the Daoist roots of Zen Buddhism. 