To us the word garden as the symbol of school is undoubtedly universal. In his own writing, he explained that he used the word garden to refer to his art school and the word mustard seed as a modifier of his very small and insignificant studio, a way of showing his humility. Wang Kai did not know, actually, the parable of the Kingdom of Heaven.

According to a Buddhist sutra, not only our own heaven and earth, but even the three thousand great worlds of the universe, through Buddha's eyes, are all in the size of a mustard seed. just in the way Jesus sometimes communicated his message to the disciples, and the mustard seed which is smaller than any seed in the ground, is also found in one of the most outstanding parables of Jesus' teaching. Things in our own everyday language had been used as a unique literary metaphors: wheat and tares, a light under a bushel, lost sheep, etc. He also very often signed his works with his art name: the gardener of the Mustard Seed Garden. His manual is named after his studio in Nanking: Mustard Seed Garden. But there are places that have never been changed, such as its title page, Wang's original preface, and the introductory notes for each chapter, all of which are preserved in his fine calligraphy form. Some are quite condensed and some are fully equipped with many supplements. Today we may discover several different editions of this manual. Every page of this manual, which originally comprised many volumes, was hand-printed by using the wood-block printing method mostly with black ink. It is a kind of how-to-do-it book of Chinese art. Wang Kai, a Nanking-based painter-teacher of the early Ch'ing dynasty, published around 1679 his first edition of the Mustard Seed Garden, a manual of painting covering most of the ground within which an experienced Chinese artist is expected to be familiar. STAGE Words and Signs (Symbolism in Chinese Art)

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