The Mustard Seed Garden of Painting is the most widely used handbook of painting in China. It is the most thorough and delightful work ever written on the discipline of an art form (in this case, Chinese painting), presented in a very clear and orderly manner. Landscape as a discipline has for a long time lacked discipline. This book, though at first glance about Chinese painting, is really about landscape and its portrayal. As in Europe in the 1600s, painting and landscape in China were intertwined, and the word “landscape” referred first to a painting of a landscape and later to the thing painted. So The Mustard Seed Garden of Painting is a rare and valuable dictionary of landscape forms as well as a detailed portrayal of the discipline dealing with those forms. A priceless observation is: “To be without method is deplorable, but to depend entirely on method is worse. The end of all method is to seem to have no method.”