The primary goal of this article, written upon the occasion of the Rimpa exhibition held in Tokyo this year, is to indicate the deep connection between Rimpa and Muxi. The Rimpa exhibition, held at MOMAT from August 21st through October 3rd, 2004, was meaningful for its emphasis on the spread of Rimpa's realm, including Rimpa's influence on Western Europe. We can indicate, however, that Rimpa operated in an international environment also at the time of its inception. Namely, the Southern Song dynasty painter Muxi exerted an enormously great influence on Japan's early pre-modern painting circles. Sôtatsu, amidst those early pre-modern painting circles, can be seen as the person who most closely approached the true character of Muxi, and his study of Muxi was of a completely different nature from the apparent study of Muxi by Hasegawa Tôhaku and others. The change in aesthetics from Sôtatsu to Kôrin was deeply related to the development of Rimpa. We can call that shift the transformation from a naturalist viewpoint to that of abstraction. This specific acknowledgement of the differences between Sôtatsu's paintings and those of Kôrin, is clearly a major topic for future research on Rimpa, and I believe that it will be essential in such research to confirm the true nature of the connection between Muxi and Sôtatsu. This essay also discusses one possible source for the Rimpa ink puddling technique known as tarashikomi. Further, from its inception the Rimpa aesthetic was closely related to the decorative arts, particularly dyestuffs, and possibly for this reason it was rare for the artists of this genre to take up large-scale natural space (landscape picture) motifs as their topics. In spite of this rarity, Kubota Icchiku (1917-2003) and his challenging the expression of light and space in his shibori dyeing techniques can be seen as an inheritor, albeit paradoxically, of the Rimpa tradition.