This Zen art did not flourish long in China, nor in all probability do many specimens of it survive there. But in Japan it was a principal source of inspiration to the great painters of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Sesshū himself is the direct descendant of Mokkei; as in a decadent way are Kanō masters such as Tsunenobu. Zen paintings are of two kinds. (1) Representations of animals, birds and flowers, in which the artist attempted to identify himself with the object depicted, to externise its inner Buddha. These were achieved not by study from the life, as the early Sung nature-pieces have been, but by intense and concentrated visualisation of the subject to be painted. This mental picture was rapidly transferred to paper before the spell of concentration (samādhi) was broken. (2) Illustrations of episodes in the lives of the great Zen teachers. This branch of Zen art was essentially dramatic. It sought to express the characters of the persons involved, subtly to reveal the grandeur of soul that lay hidden behind apparent uncouthness or stupidity. Typical of this kind of painting are the pictures of “Tanka burning the Image.” One night Tanka, a Zen priest, stayed as a guest at an ordinary Buddhist monastery. There was no firewood in his cell. As the night was cold he went into the chapel, seized a wooden statue of Shākyamuni and, chopping it up, made himself a comfortable fire. To him the idol of Buddha was a mere block of wood; his indignant hosts took a different view. The controversy is the same as that which occupies the central place in the Nō play _Sotoba Komachi_. There is another aspect of Zen which had an equally important effect on art. The Buddha-nature is immanent not in Man only, but in everything that exists, animate or inanimate. Stone, river and tree are alike parts of the great hidden Unity. Thus Man, through his Buddha-nature or universalised consciousness, possesses an intimate means of contact with Nature. The songs of birds, the noise of waterfalls, the rolling of thunder, the whispering of wind in the pine-trees--all these are utterances of the Absolute. Hence the connection of Zen with the passionate love of Nature which is so evident in Far Eastern poetry and art. Personally I believe that this passion for Nature worked more favourably on literature than on painting. The typical Zen picture, dashed off in a moment of exaltation--perhaps a moonlit river expressed in three blurs and a flourish--belongs rather to the art of calligraphy than to that of painting. In his more elaborate depictions of nature the Zen artist is led by his love of nature into that common pitfall of lovers--sentimentality. The forms of Nature tend with him to function not as forms but as symbols.