A Song for One Or Two: Music and the Concept of Art in Early China

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THE UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN CENTER FOR CHINESE STUDIES

MICHIGAN PAPERS IN CHINESE STUDIES NO. 42 (

A SONG FOR ONE OR TWO Music and the Concept of Art in Early China

by

Kenneth J. DeWoskin

Ann Arbor Center for Chinese Studies The University of Michigan

1982

C opyright © 1982 by C enter fo r Chinese Studies The U n ive rsity o f Michigan

L ib ra ry o f Congress Cataloging in P ublication D ata DeWoskin, Kenneth J. A song fo r one or tw o. (Michigan papers in Chinese studies; 42) Bibliography: p. Includes index. 1. Music—China—H isto ry and c ritic is m . 2. Music Philosophy and aesthetics. I. T itle . II. Series. ML336.2.D48 781.731 81-19519 ISBN 0-89264-042-1 f AACR2

The illu s tra tio n on the cover is a d e ta il from a s ilk painting th a t dates to the Western Han dynasty. The painting was excavated from Chin-ch'ueh Mountain tom b no. 9, L in -y i County, Shantung. Wenwu, no. 11 (1977), p. 30.

Printed in the United States o f Am erica

For Judith

CONTENTS

Preface ,(i. I. II.

The Study o f Music

ix 3

An Early Performance

19

III.

Music, Hearing, and the Mind

29

IV.

Classical and Han Theory

43

V.

Mythology and Cosmology

55

The "Book o f Music"

85

VI. VII. VIII. IX .

舯

The c m n and Its Way

101

C ritic a l Term inology, N otation, and Ideology

125

The Concept o f A rt

155

C ritic a l Term inology and Value C orrelation and S ig n ifica tio n Music and R itu a l A r t and Cosmos

158 166 174 177

Select Bibliography

187

Index

197

PREFACE

Work on this book was begun w ith a paper e n title d Music and the Ch'in: A Song fo r One o r Two, prepared fo r presentation to the Conference on Theories o f the A rts in China, sponsored by the Am erican Council o f Learned Societies, held in York, Maine, in June o f 1978. I owe a debt o f gratitude to the Council fo r the opportunity to p a rticip a te in the confer­ ence, surely one o f the best o f its type in recent years, and to the p a rtic i­ pants fo r th e ir patient and th o u g h tfu l criticism s o f my paper. Even though this book only makes reference to an e a rlie r a rtic le on music and aesthetic term inology th a t is to be included in the conference volume, the editors o f th a t volume, Susan Bush and C hristian Murck, worked through the entire body o f the conference paper and made innumerable corrections, sugges­ tions, and observations. Donald Munro, discussant at the conference, has been a continuing source o f inspiration and suggestions in the revision o f the work. I have benefited from the c ritic is m s and suggestions o f Rulan Chao Pian, Judith Becker, and A rnold Perris, musicologists who p a tie n tly taught me the essentials o f th e ir fie ld , in to which I had ventured w ith a vast amount to learn. Over the years I have been occupied w ith early Chinese music theory and lore, I have gained immeasurably from the knowledge and insights o f many others, including A . L. Becker, Jonathon Chaves, James Crump, Stephen Addiss, and Leonard Pack. Anne BehnkeTs readings and research in early m usic-theory texts helped bring numerous im p o rta n t ideas in to my fie ld o f reference. I want to express my appreciation to Barbara Congelosi. The care and e ffo rt she put in to the e diting and composition o f this book were so fa r beyond any reasonable expectation th a t I lost tra c k o f what was indeed reasonable to expect. It is a pleasure to share in the excellence th a t she has brought to the publications program o f the Center fo r Chinese Studies. Professor Luo Rongqu was kind enough to take tim e from his own busy schedule to do the calligraphy fo r the book.

In c la rity and brightness, i t is the image o f heaven ；in breadth and scope, the image o f earth. Having movement in tim e , i t is the image o f the fo u r seasons. The fiv e colors, fitte d in ordered pattern , do not clash. The eight winds, channeled through pitchpipes, create no discord. The hundred measures achieve re g u la rity and are [re lia b ly] constant. A ll together, the short and long pipes bring com pletion and in each are engendered beginnings and endings. Melody and harmony, high tones and low, alternate to weave the thread. Therefore, when music goes fo rth : O rderly relations are clear. The ears are sharp, the eyes b rig h t, Hsueh is in harmony, and the chri is balanced. Transform ing ways and re fin in g customs, Music brings peace to a ll in the world.

Yiieh ch i," pp. 13a-b.

The Study o f Music

There was a great w ealth o f musical a c tiv ity and ideas about music in early China. Voluminous m aterials fo r the study o f early Chinese music are preserved in the received te x tu a l tra d itio n .^ New m aterials ，differing* in nature and q uality, are becoming available each year w ith the accelerating pace o f archaeological fie ld w ork and steady im provem ent o f archaeologi­ cal methodology and reporting in China. I have fram ed this inquiry in to music and aesthetics broadly, hoping to provide readers w ith a sense o f the d ive rsity o f musical a c tiv itie s and ideas th a t were im p o rta n t in China from the classical period to the early Six Dynasties and to describe the patterns o f evolution. A ncient music has long been a popular subject fo r study, w ith the p a rticu la r interests o f scholars s h iftin g ofte n . Early scholarship focused on classical views o f music as a social in s titu tio n and the cataloguing o f musical instrum ents. More re ce n tly, there has been analysis o f and conjec­ ture about the role o f music in archaic ritu a l and the musical dimension o f archaic poetry. Most re ce n tly, research has been published about early theories o f music in the con te xt o f cosmology, aesthetics, and acoustical physics. In the last tw o decades, the study o f pre-Han instrum ents recov­ ered from the earth has revealed fascinating details about the instrum ents themselves, especially stone and m etal percussion instrum ents, the tech­ nology o f instrum ent m anufacture, and the p itch systems. This has, in turn, helped to re fin e our understanding o f musical performance in early ritu a l 1

The received te xtu a l tra d itio n refers to the canon o f w ritte n m aterials th a t has been continuously tra n sm itte d , known to the scholarly world in China since the tim e the m aterials took shape. Outside the received te xtu a l tra d itio n , there are m aterials rediscovered in archaeological finds and in Japanese and Korean archives th a t were not continuously available in China.

and the relationship between theories o f sound and music and the actual use and investigation o f sound and music. The main point o f a broad and in te rp re ta tiv e inquiry is to embrace music fo r discussion in a way th a t m irrors its discussion by early Chinese thinkers. A germ inal utterance, fir s t recorded in the H sim -tzu 萄 子 and repeated freq uently th e re a fte r, was "music unites" (yiieh-Vung 續 同 ） • Experiments, theories, and speculations about music and sound were central to a v a rie ty o f the interests evidenced in early h is to ric a l and philosophical texts, and performances o f music and dance were ce n tra l to much early ritu a l and public a c tiv ity . Sound as a natural phenomenon was perceived to be ce n tra l to many natural processes, especially those th a t involved rem ote in te ra ctio n or influence between e n titie s. A ccurate aural perception was o f paramount im portance in man's perception o f the w orld around him. The a b ility to distinguish and analyze sound was tantam ount to the a b ility to distinguish and analyze a ll th a t was re cu rre n t and in te llig ib le in nature. In speculation and argument about man and nature, propositions and assertions about sound and music were o fte n p rim ary. Understanding sound and music was the key to understanding numerous other aspects o f man and nature. Most o f the im p o rta n t te xts, te x tu a l fragm ents, and other kinds o f evidence th a t I w ill consider have been studied fr u itfu lly in th e ir own rig h t. But, by and large, the d ive rsity o f these m aterials and th e ir inherent d iffic u lty have irre s is tib ly drawn scholars' a tte n tio n toward and in to them as isolated texts and objects. This has been at the expense o f a tte n tio n paid to the same evidence as i t bears on the hub o f archaic theory and practice, the ce n tra l and norm al theory and p ra ctice against which the individual bits o f evidence need to be measured. Hence, we are lik e ly to know th a t M o-tzu 墨子 fa u lts music before we c le a rly understand what "m usic" meant to him . S im ila rly, we know th a t H siin-tzu sees in music a com m unicative lin k between man and external influences before we know what "m usic" meant to him. And we know th a t Tung Chung-shu sees the pitches as a tangible and demonstrable re a liza tio n o f his cosmic numerology before we know what "pitches" meant to him . To understand what the cen tral ideas were is to build a pictu re o f the whole wheel, the hub, the spokes, and the spaces th a t are described by the c irc le o f texts, bronze bells, carvings and paintings, and other evidence from early China, Building such a picture would have been impossible w ith o u t the sub­ s ta n tia l research e ffo rts o f many modern scholars o f music over the last several decades. Nearly fifte e n hundred publications are liste d in Fredric

LiebermaiVs bibliography o f studi^s^ on Chinese music in Western lan­ guages. The m a jo rity o f the works listed eith e r are b rie f notices or focus on contem porary perform ance. S till, Lieberman's lis t contains numerous publications th a t made m ajor contributions to our understanding o f early music. Among these are several w ritings each by Robinson, Picken, K u ttn e r, van Gulik, Kishibe, and Levis, as w e ll as signal works by Granet, o Courant, Needham, and Pian. In non-Western sources, there have been im portant works by Mizuhara Iko, Chu C hlen-chih, Jao Tsung-i, Tung-fang Ming, Yang Y in -liu , and Wang Kuang-chri. Since the publication o f Lieberman's bibliography, W alter Kaufmann has published a co lle ctio n o f selected translations on music from the better-know n classics, including the "Book o f Music" ("Yiieh chi"). Kaufmann's work is a th o u g h tfu l and well-organized co llection th a t consolidates much o f the im portant classical 3 and Han m aterials in convenient form . Reading and explanation o f the source m a te ria l by these scholars have natura lly follow ed the d ictates o f th e ir disciplines—history o f science, ethnomusicology, and history o f cu ltu re —w ith the result th a t the wholeness o f the early w ritte n record has not been w ell represented. With the excep­ tion o f van G ulik!s study o f the chfin 系 ，no a tte m p t has been made to assemble inform ation on music from m u ltip le perspectives in to an investi­ gation o f aesthetics. L. Laloy's La Musique Chinoise remains an interesting study o f music ideology, theory, and lore but neglects an examination o f the technical aspects th a t relate his claims about c u ltu ra l context to performance. Given th a t the impulse to integrate various fields o f knowledge was im portant in early discussions o f music, the segmentation o f our work in to recognized academic disciplines w ill n a tu ra lly leave much ,Tunfoundn between the findings o f specialists.^ It should be recognized th a t

o

Lieberman, Chinese Music, 3 Kaufmann, Musical References in the Chinese Classics. A review o f this work by Judith M. B oltz is in the Journal o f the A m erican O riental S ociety 100, no. 1 (January-March 1980): 95. 4 C onfronting much the same problem in her investigation o f aesthetics, Langer w rote: "Here we run in to a d iffic u lty in the scholarship o f our tim es—the obstacle o f too much knowledge, which forces us to accept the so-called 'findings' o f specialists in other fields, 'findings’ th a t are not made w ith reference to our searchings, and ofte n leave the things th a t would be most im portant to us, unfound.,! Philosophy in a New Key, p. 218.

even translations re fle c t the specialized interests o f the tra n sla to r, through the selection o f texts, emphasis o f documentation and explication, and the shaping o f sem antic "equivalence." Much o f value remains to be discovered in texts on social philosophy, ritu a l, and natural science, p a rtic u la rly as they re la te to each other. My acquaintance w ith the bibliography o f this fie ld was guided by tw o interests: the relationship between early lite ra ry theory and theories o f other arts on the one hand；and, on the other, the nature and evolution o f early science and technology, especially as re fle c te d in theories re la tin g man to his physical surroundings. These are tw o d is tin c t areas o f inquiry fo r contem porary sinologists, and the a rtic u la tio n o f recent research on these subjects re fle c ts th a t fa c t. I w ill argue, however, th a t these areas o f inquiry were closely related in the minds o f early Chinese thinkers, and our u ltim a te success in understanding e ith e r one w ill depend on our recognizing1 the essential homology o f early aesthetic and cosmological theory. It is possible to fo rm ulate a general and te n ta tiv e d e fin itio n o f aesthetics from early discussions, especially those about music. For the early Chinese, aesthetics was a fie ld o f in q u iry in to issues bearing on the mind o f man and its modes o f response to order and pa tte rn in the world outside. The converse issues, outward expressions o f order in trin s ic to the mind, are given less a tte n tio n in the pre-Six Dynasties period. The body o f this monograph aims to re fin e th a t d e fin itio n and demonstrate the c o n tin u ity in both theory and style o f argument from aesthetic to cosmologic subjects. The main sources o f in fo rm a tio n u tiliz e d here are te xts which record discussions and describe experim ental explorations o f music and sound in early China. These sources include myths about the instrum ents, the pitches and tones, and the powers o f music ；th e o re tic a l discussions about the physics o f music's constituent parts; and exhortations about the proper role o f music in the a rt o f governance. W ith some exceptions, they do not describe the perform ance o f music, nor is there anything e xta n t in the way o f scores. I have studied music p rim a rily as an in te lle c tu a l and speculative tra d itio n and secondarily as an experim ental and technological area o f exploration. Much o f what early thinkers had to say about the arts is found in such discussions o f music, and many o f th e ir speculations on natural processes derive from experiments in acoustics and related m athem atical com putations. In fa c t, u n til the Six Dynasties (A.D. 220-589)，e x p lic it evaluative discussion o f the arts was largely confined to music. This is not to say th a t other arts were not o f equal im portance in p ra ctice or th a t

th e ir presence was ignored by early thinkers. The diverse te xts from the pre-Han and Han periods are fille d w ith m aterials th a t have im portant im plications fo r a ll o f the arts, lite ra ry , musical, and visual; and the discus­ sions in those texts demonstrate a highly developed sense o f the a rtfu l dimensions o f contemporaneous Chinese c iv iliz a tio n , including form alized rite s, m a rtia l skills, c o u rtly social intercourse, and eloquent speech.^ But o f the arts narrowly defined, including lite ra tu re , painting and sculpture, and music, only music is subjected to individual and sustained discussion by the classical philosophers and accorded its own chapters in the Han philo­ sophical and h isto rica l collections. Why is music the preem inent a rt in the investigation o f aesthetics? Some explanations are specific to Chinese culture, e.g., the special im por­ tance attached to hearing as the ce n tra l lin k between the mind and the outside world and the e xp lo itatio n o f hearing and aural se n s itiv ity as a metaphor fo r perspicacity in general. The ce n tra l im portance o f sound in cosmological speculation w ill be discussed below. But in Western culture as w ell, discussions o f music have been ce n tra l to discussions o f aesthetics from the earliest tim es. Music is at one and the same tim e an area o f great appeal to and consummate d iffic u lty fo r philosophers o f aesthetics. In W alter Pater's celebrated rem ark, " A ll a rt constantly aspires to the condition o f music," there is the clear promise th a t to the e xtent we can understand and discuss the "condition o f music," we can understand and discuss the condition o f a ll a rt. Plato, A ris to tle , and Horace dealt w ith music fre q u e n tly and at length as an educational and cu ltu ra l force. Close parallels to th e ir ideas

There were a number o f form ulations o f the "Six A rts " (L iu -i in early China. Among the most common was one pertaining to the six attainm ents o f the cu ltiva te d gentleman. As preserved in the Programs o f Chou (Chou-li 萬瘦 )， these include both in te lle c tu a l and physical disciplines: the rite s, history, com putation, lite ra tu re , riding, and arch­ ery. In the Han they are narrowed to genres o f classical learning, includ­ ing the Book o f Changes (I-ching 系經 )，the Book o f Odes (S hih-chirxg-^ 锻 ），the Book o f Documents (Shu-ching iS ) , the Programs o f Chou, the Spring and A utum n Annals (C ^u n -ch 'iu 各秋 )，and Music (Y iieh 綠 ） (H istory o f the Han [Harx-shu 議意 ] ，"Records o f Texts" ["I-w e n -ch ih 11- ^ * 欠成、 ] )• Music was included among the six genres o f classical learning but was unique in th a t no classic o f music was received by the Han. Pater, The Renaissancef p. 135.

are found in classical Chinese thought. More re ce n tly, aestheticians in the West, a t least since Schopenhauer, have addressed music from a wider v a rie ty o f perspectives. Schopenhauer's metaphysical speculations about music are not w ith o u t parallels in early Chinese thought, and the same can be said about L e ib n itz and his m athem atical analysis. Susanne K. Langer ， in her exam ination o f the psychology o f the arts and o f aesthetic response, has focused on music as one o f the ce n tra l subjects fo r study. In fa c t, she adopted i t as the metaphor fo r her fir s t m ajor pro je ct on aesthetics, Philosophy in a New Key. In her work, as w ell, we can fin d notions w ith parallels in early Chinese thought. The d iffic u ltie s in discussing music obje ctively are form idable. By nature, i t is the most transient fa ce t o f early culture. As an event, music is perform ed and then gone. It lacks the d u ra b ility o f a w ork o f w ritte n lite ra tu re , which can in substance, i f not m a te ria l fo rm , be preserved through the ages. And i t lacks the d u ra b ility o f painting and sculpture, which can be preserved m a te ria lly , documented secondarily in descriptive lite ra tu re , or preserved through serial re p lica tio n . Music as a body o f value and technique is tran sm itte d from master to student, but the true c o n tin u ity o f the specifics o f value and technique are impossible to v e rify fo r periods before the technology fo r recording and thereby preserving sound existed. Thus, as we explore the histo ry o f Chinese cu ltu re , much o f what we are able to say about musical perform ance and the musical dimension o f mixed arts is destined to be conjectural, even when such arts are s till practiced in the modern era. There are classically trained Chinese scholars who chant the Tso Com m entary (Tso-chuan and liv in g tra d itio n s o f theater th a t derive from the opera o f the Yiian dynasty (A.D . 1279-1368). But the current practices, the prom pt books, the lib r e tti, scripts, and musical scores notw ithstanding, most scholars w ill safely demur when asked about the music o f the Book o f Odes，Han Music Bureau songs (yiieh-fa 来有） ，Sung dynasty (A.D . 979-1279) songs (Sung t f u 宋 詞 ） ，or Yuan drama I f any component o f the ritu a ls and entertainm ents o f an ancient c iv iliz a tio n is to be recovered only p a rtly and w ith the greatest expense o f e ffo rt, i t is the m usical.7

Elaborate studies have been done on the periphery o f musical issues, fo r example, Dale R. Johnson, Yuarn Music Dramas ：Studies in Prosody and S tructure and. a Complete Catalogue o f N orthern A rias in the D ram atic Style, M ichigan Papers in Chinese Studies no. 40 (Ann A rbor: The

responsive to verbal description, analysis, and record. Even the known music o f our tim e is in tra cta b le i f we ask, "What does i t say?'1or "How does i t work?" While the inadequacy o f a verbal description o f a musical event is m anifest, descriptive term inology th a t has its origins in discussions o f music has, nonetheless, found wide use fo r c ritic a l description in other fields. We describe colors as "loud" and "m uted,n relations as "harmonious11 or "discordant,Ir and events as "w e ll orchestrated." In the Poetics, A ris to tle argues th a t the in stin ct fo r "harmony1* and "rh yth m " is one o f tw o funda­ mental causes o f poetry. Music is regarded as a more essential and valua­ ble form o f "im ita tio n " than painting and sculpture, because music, lik e the Q a c tiv itie s o f the human mind, takes place in tim e . In early China, the term fo r music its e lf, yiieh 療 , was widely used as a pun w ith its homograph lo 藥 njo y M or "enjoym ent"; and such musical term s as "harmony" f h o ^ ； , 9 "resonance11 (ying 龜.)，and "g ra v ity " (pei 龜' ) became central to the c ritic a l term inology o f other a rts .1^

，

The problem o f verbal description o f music is a problem in the nature o f meaning, and detailed consideration o f i t is beyond the scope o f this work and beyond my competence. S till, some comments on meaning and a ffe c t in music bear mention because they are especially illu m in a tin g fo r

U niversity o f Michigan Center fo r Chinese Studies, 1980). These focus on questions o f rhyme pattern, musical mode, and tempo but generally do not a tte m p t to describe the music per se, th a t is, the melodic and rhythm ic components o f the performance. The useful exceptions to this demand s k illfu l research, subtle in te rp re ta tio n , and often some degree o f dependence on liv in g tra d itio n s o f perform ance. See, fo r example, Liang, Chinese Ch'in; Pian, Sonq Dynasty Musical Sources; and Picken, nShi Jing Song-texts and Their Musical Im plications,n pp. 85-109. Some o f Picken's hypotheses are discussed in the follow ing chapter. W alter J. Bate, ed., C ritic is m ：The M ajor Texts (New York: H arcourt, Brace, and World, Inc., 1952)， introduction, pp. 4-5. In the synonymic equations o f the Erh-ya 靖雅 ，ho is used as the defin­ ing term fo r fiv e monomes th a t are not descriptive o f sound and tw o binomes th a t are (Erh-ya IB .8). Some highlights in the development o f term inology are reviewed below. For a more extended tre a tm e n t, see my a rtic le nEarly Chinese Music."

V

the m ajor Chinese notions. A cornerstone observation in many theories o f music is a com parative one to those arts in which a "m edium " like language, stone, paint, or m etal is used. The medium stands between the fo rm a l system o f the a rt and the phenomena outside the a rt its e lf th a t is represented. Music is w ith o u t a medium in this sense because i t does not make reference to something outside its e lf. There are, o f course, theories o f music as a language, a sem antic system w ith some content separable from its musical embodiment, translatable into other semantic systems.11 Schopenhauer described music as the language o f the irra tio n a l mind. C ertain musical sounds, called "sound e ffe c ts ,n are id e n tifie d through convention as references to something in the m a te ria l w orld, e.g., cannons, hoof beats, thunder, and church bells. Just such e ffe cts are from tim e to tim e in the fo re fro n t o f serious musical cu ltu re , fo r example, the sound painting o f the rom antic symphony. But the object value provided program music is always contrived; the re fe re n t is usually explained in the t itle and requires the addition o f composer's notes or some other explanation to inform the listener. The music alone cannot inform the listener o f its object value. Music is fundam entally nonrepresentative, e xhibiting pure form not as an em bellishment, but as its very e s s e n c e . I n Susanne Langer s phrase, music places "p ra c tic a lly nothing but tonal structures before us: no scene, no object, no fa c t.n"*'^ Zuekerkandl argues th a t tones, in contrast to ordinary language, are not re fe re n tia l. "What tones mean m usically is com pletely one w ith them, can only be represented through them , exists only in Program music is the easiest kind o f music to discuss because what i t allegedly represents can be described.

11 For a recent comparison o f music and language, see Zuckerkandl, Sound and Symbol, pp. 66-71. An extrem e example o f program music, e.g., Leroy Anderson's "Typew rite r Song," m ight be raised as a counterexample. It is, however, not only a very rare kind o f music, but, lik e many fo rce d ly representative pieces o f music, i t uses the object o f representation its e lf to make its own sounds. A ty p e w rite r, lik e the cowbells, cannons, and church bells o f Strauss and Mahler, is quite d is tin c t from the essential in stru m entation th a t characterizes symphonic performance. Langer, Philosophy in a New Key, p. 209. Zuckerkandl, Sound and Symbolf p. 67.

It is more than sheer in te lle c tu a l challenge th a t draws discussions o f aesthetics toward music. A t least since Pater, the e ffo rt to d iffe re n tia te that which is aesthetic from th a t which is not has focused on form and stru cture rather than on the "s tu ff11 o f a rt. ,fS tu ffn in the case o f music means modal or rh ythm ic resources. As Picken w rites, " It must be empha­ sized th a t the fundam ental and most d istin ctive characteristics o f music are neither modal nor rhythm ic (on a sm all tim e-seale) but fo rm a l."15 In the lite ra tu re , one finds the expressions "aesthetic fo rm ， " "expressive fo rm ," and "sig n ifica n t form " offered as the prim ary and d e fin itiv e re ­ quirem ent o f a rt. In Benedetto Croce's words, "The aesthetic fa c t, there­ fore, is fo rm , and nothing but fo rm ."16 It is music's manl££& t„purity o f form , or to ta l absorption o f m a tte r into fo rm , That makes itjLIie^object o f co n te r^IM T o rT p a r excellence fo r the philosopher o f aesthetics.17 The claim th a t form is the d e fin itiv e element in a rt is w idely accepted as a premise in contem porary inquiries in to aesthetics. The key to meaning in music is sought, therefore, through an examination o f its stru ctu re , and what may be extended from music to other arts is in the realm o f stru c­ tu ra l analogies. Zuckerkandl, in his study o f the psychology o f human response to music, refers always to the tem poral and system atic character o f musical a rt, using terms lik e "system o f tone," "dynamic symbol,n "tonal m otion," "tim e images," and "flo w in g space.1' In his argument, what is a esthetically significant in music resides not in the individual tones, but in the relationship between one tone and another. Though Zuckerkandl re­ veals no knowledge o f Chinese theories o f the arts, many o f his notions find close parallels in the discussions throughout this book. O ther contem porary discussions o f music explore the s tru c tu ra l features in a semasiological context. Leonard Meyer has investigated the nature o f musical meaning by exploring parallels between musical structure

Picken, "Shi Jing Song-texts and T heir Musical Im plications," p. 109. ^ The observation is part o f a consideration o f three positions on the "aesthetic fa c t， " th a t is, th a t which is aesthetic about something regar­ ded as aesthetic: the content, the re la tio n o f the content to the fo rm , or the form . Croce, A esthetic, chap. 2: "In tu itio n and A r t," esp. pp. 25-26 The history o f a tte n tio n to sig n ifica n t form and the notion o f a rt as sig nifica nt are reviewed by Langer，Philosophy in a New Key, chap. 8: "On Significance in Music,11pp. 204-45.

12 and other systems o f significance th a t have been analyzed w ith the re 1o sources o f in fo rm a tio n t h e o r y /0 Hence, Meyer*s premises include the claim o f a triang ula r relationship between signifying and signified elements in musical significance. Meyer allows music a degree o f re fe re n tia l mean­ ing through processes o f association but is u ltim a te ly concerned w ith the unfolding o f p a ttern in the tem poral span o f perform ance.^9 O ther recent discussions o f music have become highly fo rm a lis t, w ith one argument advancing a se t-th e o re tic a l analysis, rem iniscent o f m athem atical linguis­ tic s theory, which compares structure at m u ltip le levels and analyzes nr\ p ro b a b ility o f pattern o c c u rre n c e /0 F ollow ing his declaration o f music as the p e rfe ct a rt, there are tw o points th a t Pater elaborated. W ithin its e lf, music is unique in th a t form and m a tte r are inseparable, whereas in other arts they are separable to varying degrees. In contrast to the poet and landscape painter, the powers o f the musician are unfettered by m a tte r and objects. In his la te r w ritings, Pater moved to an extrem e position where he argued th a t music is the only discipline in which the a rtis t is w holly fre e to modulate form w ithout any object c o n flic t whatsoever. Outside its e lf, music is the a rt th a t links together the in fin ite ly diverse impulses o f the cosmos, what Pater calls the "perpetual flu x ." In what is essentially a Pythagorean argument, he sees a world, in flu x, w ith in which is the u n ity o f a reasonable order. The underlying principles are discovered in a search fo r !,an antiphonal rhythm , 8 1 9 1

Meyer, Music, the A rts t and Ideas. "M usical meaning arrives when an antecedent situation, requiring an estim ate o f the probable modes o f pattern continuation, produces uncertain ty about the tem poral and tonal nature o f the expected conse­ quent." Ibid., p. 11. 20 In this lite ra tu re , there is concern about either problems o f stru ctu re or problems o f ontology. The central ontological problem is the re la tio n ­ ship o f the work (which is unique) and performances (which can be m ultiple). For a review o f the lite ra tu re , see Randall D ip e rt and R. M. Whelden, "S et-T heoretical Musical Analysis,11 Journal o f A esthetics and A r t C riticism 35, no. 1 (F a ll 1976): 15-22; and a counterthesis in the same journal, vol. 35，no. 4 (Summer 1977)：471-73. Meyer presents a general critiq u e o f "fo rm a lism ,” expressed in s ta tis tic a l theories o f music and analogies to m athem atical models, in the section e n title d "Form alism in Music: Queries and Reservations,n pp. 235-316 in his Music, the A rts , and Ideas.

or logic, which proceeding u n ifo rm ly from movement to movement, as in some in tric a te musical theme, m ight lin k together in one those contending, in fin ite ly diverse impulses." What is involved in the movement is a ll creation, and i t is beyond ordinary comprehension; hence, the fo rm , or structure, o f th a t movement is pursued by the inquiring mind. The points Pater made are w orth review ing because he invokes many ko f the same elements invoked by early Chinese investigators, who were involved w ith s c ie n tific thinking and technological a c tiv itie s . Pater extolled the natural science o f his day, observing th a t "those sciences reveal types o f life evanescing in to each other by inexpressible refinem ents o f change. These things pass in to th e ir opposites by accum ulation o f unde finable q u a n t i t i e s . P o n d e r i n g s im ila r theories o f transform ation, early Chinese thinkers sought to specify the exact transform ation, from what to what and under what conditions o f tim e and space. The conception o f such transform ations was by no means lim ite d to m erely the transform ation o f one thing in to another. For example, foodstuffs are transform ed in to p a rticu la r biological qualities: Eaters o f grain are in te llig e n t and refined. Eaters o f grass are pow erful, but stupid. Eaters o f m ulberry make s ilk and become moths. Eaters o f meat are brave, but audacious. Eaters o f earth have no hearts and do not breathe. Eaters o f ch'i are s p iritu a l and long-lived. Those who do not eat a t a ll are im m o rta l and divine. A prom inent example stresses the seasonal rhythm o f transform ations in the "M onthly Ordinances" ("Y iie h -lin g '1) chapter o f the Book o f R ites. In the "M onthly Ordinances， " fo r instance, the transform ation o f "hawks to pigeons" is related to the middle o f spring, the opening o f peach blossoms,

91

W alter Pater, Plato and Platonism (1893; lib ra ry ed., London and New Y ork ：M acm illan and Co., 1910), pp. 17-18. 22 W alter Pater, A ppreciations (1889 ；lib ra ry ed., London and New York: M acm illan and Co.， 1910)， p. 66. 幻 This w idely quoted passage is found in the e xtant tw e n ty-ch a p te r ver­ sion o f Kan Paors ^ In Search o f the Supernatural (Sou-shen-chi 棟 神 iD l2 _ 3 0 0 , Shih-chieh $hu-ch(i ed., p. 89), but i t was probably inserted into th a t te x t from other Kan Pao w ritings by Ming dynasty redactors. This statem ent, which goes on fo r several hundred words to catalogue various transform ations in nature, and s im ila r discussions are known as "Discourses on Transform ation'1 ("Pien-hua lun1' 變 -ib "^4)').

14

，

and an e ntire system o f correlates more or less synchronous in nature's clocked p r o c e s s e s Transform ations o f one thing in to another were o f a predictable nature and occurred w ith in a predictable tim e fram e. A norm al avenue o f s c ie n tific inquiry, then, was the determ ination and refinem ent o f those specifics, the development o f a complex taxonom ic classification th a t follow ed the tro p ic a l year and branched throughout the phenomenal w orld. A t the same tim e , a desire fo r parsimony, evident in the enunciation o f principles, m otivated the search fo r comprehensive and uniform principles encompassing* the m yriad transform ations. Human processes being p a rt o f cosmic processes, the principles applied u n ifo rm ly to human and nonhuman phenomena. Pater understood a rt as an intensely human enterprise, but he, too, saw in music a fundam ental order common to both the human mind and other ordered processes o f nature. Early Chinese speculative thinkers seemed especially com m itted to the id e n tific a tio n o f a fundam ental order in music and the pitches th a t could be applied u n ifo rm ly and comprehen­ sively to a ll the processes o f nature th a t took place in tim e . From the more narrow ly focused standpoint o f aesthetics, Pater a ttrib u te s music's su p e rio rity to other arts to its tem poral dimension. Human feelings, he argues, transform in tim e , and, o f a ll the arts, music is most capable o f im ita tin g th a t process o f transform ation. This argument is, in essence, an elaboration o f A risto tle 's claims fo r music and must be addressed in any comprehensive tre a tm e n t o f aesthetic problem s.25 The tem poral dimension o f music was im p o rta n t fo r the cosmos-music-mind correspondences th a t early Chinese thinkers sought to define. But i t creates fo r the aesthetician the same problem transform ation theories create fo r the natural scie n tist. The obvious path fo r inquiry is to deter­ mine and re fin e the sp e cific relations between music and feeling. In China, classical and Han thinkers labored over ju s t such systems o f "co rre la tio n ." But the simple experience o f music, especially in te rc u ltu ra lly , has always confounded attem pts to associate a p a rtic u la r piece, a genre o f

nYueh-ling,n pp. 7b, 11a. See, fo r example, "C onfigurations in Space and Tim e N ot Based on Q ualitative R elatio n s/' chap. 3 in Stanislaw Ossowski，The Foundations o f Aesthetics, trans. Jarina and W itold Rodzinski (Warsaw: Polish S cie n tific Publications, 1978)，esp. pp. 26-29，where Ossowski discusses rhythm .

music, a key or mode, or a chord w ith p a rtic u la r feelings on a one-to-one basis. A sensitive connoisseur o f a baroque mass m ight not re a ct a t a ll to a passionately s tirrin g moment in Japanese nagauta. Langer subscribes to the essential d e fin itio n o f music as o rd e rly change in tim e , but she refines the notion o f the connection between music and human feeling by arguing that music represents the morphology o f feelings. A determined one-toone correspondence between a p a rtic u la r musical moment and a p a rtic u la r feeling cannot be re lia b ly established. But the stru ctu re o f feeling and the processes o f change can be represented. That is to say, music te lls us "how feelings go.1^ Music is a rtic u la tio n , and the ce n tra l a ct o f music, and o f 97 a ll a rt in tim e , is the creation o f syntax, o f meaningful arrangement. This is essentially the premise o f Zuckerkandl when he argues th a t the relation between tone and emotion is dynamic in process, e ith e r moving toward or moving away from something. The problem o f the un ive rsa lity o f musical experience was confronted by philosophers in the classical period. As early as Confucius, there are extensive comments on the differences between regional musics; and o f a ll the arts w ith a heritage o f orthodoxy, music seems to have been the most conspicuously vulnerable to outside influence. Instruments, tunings, and songs from the border areas are known to have enriched the performance practices in the co urt. In contrast to the lite ra ry arts, o ffic ia l machinery fo r music was established to introduce musical innovations and to oversee the tra in in g o f perform ers a t least since the Han dynasty Music Bureau. The exposure to a va rie ty o f musical tra d itio n s must have impeded e ffo rts to establish music : feeling correlates in the same way th a t i t taxed e ffo rts to m aintain the discipline o f tra d itio n a l orthodox form s. Though there were strong claims fo r the predictable correspondence between music, feeling, and numerous other correlates, some skepticism is evident in classical texts, and the same problems th a t Langer has considered were dealt w ith e x p lic itly by no la te r than the th ird century A.D. Hsi K'ang 子治尿（ A .D . 223-62)，fo r example, denied th a t a p a rtic u la r note or piece o f music had the same e ffe c t on a ll listeners and yet acknowledged the ca­ p acity o f music to evoke strong feelings.

^

Quoted from a b rie f, but provocative discussion o f Langer by Donald Davie in his A rtic u la te Energy ， p. 7. Langer, Philosophy in a New Key, pp. 204-45. Zuckerkandl, Sound and Symbol, pp. 60-62.

The discussion o f a rt its e lf, eith e r generally or in reference to a p a rticu la r culture, is no more tra cta b le than th a t o f music. The study o f Chinese aesthetics in the West has developed very gradually and is only now beginning to accelerate. Key prim ary te xts in lite ra ry theory and painting* theory have been known fo r some tim e , though they were la rg e ly read through the translations and adaptations o f pioneering translators. Because o f the extraordinary demands they make on language skills, the early poems and essays in which ideas about aesthetics are explored are usually very d iffic u lt to translate. With the luxury o f more te x t-w o rth y scholars than the fie ld has known before, we now see more and closer contact w ith im portant works on the theory o f a rt spawning a new in te re st in aesthetics and a higher order o f confidence in addressing the broader issues. What work has been done has dealt p rim a rily w ith lite ra tu re , using both lite ra ry and e ritie a l-th e o re tie a l sources, and secondarily w ith visual arts, using the object, descriptive w ritings, and th e o re tic a l w ritings. There has been almost nothing about musie and aesthetics, in spite o f the im portance o f music in native philosophies o f a rt in both China and the West. 9 Reasons fo r this can be suggested. F irs t, o f the Six A rts (as fields o f learning), only music does not have an e xtant classical te x t. Whatever slings and arrows o f m isfortune we m ight imagine assaulted the existence o f archaic manu­ scripts, the absence o f a classic o f music is c u ltu ra lly s ig n ific a n t. A t the very least, i t indicates th a t no known te x t was fe lt to be an exhaustive statem ent on the subject, w orthy o f canonization. This state o f a ffa irs leaves sinologists w ith o u t even a disreputable te x t, lik e the Book o f Documents or the Programs o f Chou, w ith which to begin. We are in much the same situation as the Han redactors and compilers o f the 11Book o f Music," having to reconstruct a canon from the bits and pieces o f a ll known texts, ea rlier and la te r，and try in g to sort consistent from contending1views in order to position everything m eaningfully on the c irc u it o f prevailing theories. Even the "Book o f Music" is burdened w ith te x tu a l flaw s and variants th a t have not been fu lly scrutinized by scholars, and the dating o f the work is the subject o f w idely varying opinions. f ^

N ot being a m usicologist, I ju s tify this essay on music by regarding it as an opportunity to investigate theories o f aesthetics ； th a t is, an opportun ity to investigate the relationship among theories o f music, aesthetics, 29

. .. An exception to this is a pioneering comparison o f Chinese and Western music theories by Munro, O rie n ta l Aesthetics, pp. 21-23.

and cosmology in early China. This approach w ill s im p lify the discussion o f aesthetic theory because i t derives a u n ity o f analysis from the strong u n ity o f perspective on a rt and existence exhibited by the early Chinese. To the extent th a t highly specialized discussions o f philosophy o f a rt lose sight o f th a t unity, they risk losing in te llig ib ility fo r many readers. Theories o f a rt u ltim a te ly re tu rn to theories o f creation and existence. Wallace Stevens expressed i t succinctly in "Three Academic Pieces11: The accuracy o f accurate le tte rs is an accuracy w ith respect to the stru ctu re o f re a lity . ' Thus, i f we desire to form ulate an accurate theory o f poetry, we find i t necessary to examine the structure o f re a lity , because re a lity is the ce n tra l reference fo r p o e try .如 The u n ity o f perspective apparent in^the aesthetic and cosm ological^ theories in early China is m anifest in the u n ity o f term inology. A broad discussion on aesthetics w ill necessarily focus on the nWay,r (Tao 道 ） ，just as would a broad essay on the nature o f the cosmos. Other words, e.g., "configured energy*' (chri 氣 and "representation" (hsiang 界 ） ， would likew ise appear in both discussions. This unjty^Qf is re fle c te d in recent inte rp retations o f early China, fo r example, James J. Y . L iu Ts chapter "M etaphysical Theories11 in Chinese Theories o f L ite ra tu re and Frederick Mote's chapter "The Beginnings o f a World View,T in The In te lle c tu a l Foundations o f China. The problem w ill always rem ain to define and explain the key term s in the ancient texts, because they are in fa c t the only keys to understanding the theories. Because music had an experim ental tra d itio n associated w ith it , i t can co ntribute to our under­ standing o f key term s from a perspective as y e t unexplored by modern sinology. The prim ary te x tu a l sources fo r the study o f early music divide in to two types o f m ateria l: analytic-discursive (argument) and illu s tra tiv e n arrative (lore). The influence o f theory is evident in both argument and lore. Discursive texts and narratives are found in a ll periods. T yp ica lly, they are attuned to d iffe re n t concerns, w ith the discourses o f one age laboring over the narratives o f a form er age and the narratives o f one age adumbrating the discussions o f a fu tu re age. The influence o f several th e o re tica l positions is present in each age, and th a t makes a chronological

30 Stevens, "Three Academic Pieces," in The Necessary Angel, p. 71.

presentation o f the m a te ria l uninform ative. S im ila rly, dividing the m aterials generically reveals more about the development o f w ritin g than i t does about music. I w ill divide the subsequent discussion in to a number o f substantive areas th a t re fle c t, but do not fo llo w precisely, chronological and generic distinctions: (1) archaeological and te x tu a l records o f the earliest known perform ances ; ⑵ early music theory and legend; (3) la rger contexts o f music theory and the application o f music theory; (4) idealized concepts o f perform ance, especially w ith the chHn z ith e r; and (5) general discussion o f music and aesthetics in early China.

An Early Performance

U n til the era o f TsTao P'i 看 3? (A.D. 187-226) and his contributions to lite ra ry theory, texts about a rt were deeply involved w ith music and sound and discussed them in d is tin c t ways. Some focused on the Book o f Odes, addressing the musical and lite ra ry components o f its contents w ith ­ out d iffe re n tia tio n . Some spoke generally o f sound and acoustics, consider­ ing the sources o f sound, ways o f classifying the qualities o f sound, the origins o f p itch standards, the "piping" o f the heavens, and the power or v irtu e o f sound. S till others spoke e x p lic itly o f yiieh, w hich-in its early meaning encompassed a range o f perform ed music, including dance, mime, and other ritu a l and fe s tiv a l a c tiv itie s .1 Dancing (wu ^ ) and singing (ko-$^l) appear w ith some re g u la rity in early oraele-bone and bronze inscriptions, demonstrating th a t they played a recognized role in ritu a l and o ffic ia l fu n c tio n s . A t least since Hsiin-tzu's tim e , when yileh was discussed a t length it was construed as a complement to li, ,!ritu a l.n As such, i t was seen largely in m oral term s, promoted as the most e ffic ie n t means o f transform ing the people and the most accurate means o f gauging the m o ra lity and morale o f society. But on balance, the character fo r yiieh is in frequently used in classical China p rio r to the "Book o f Music." With the exception o f sec­ tions in the Hsun-tzu and the Chuang-tzu 技予，yiieh is less prevalent and less im portant than its homograph lo, njo y ,! or "enjoym ent."

1 More w ill be said about yiieh and its etym ology below. In term s o f prac­ tic e , Kenneth Robinson argues th a t yiieh meant "ch e e rfu l noise" in clas­ sical tim es and included a range o f percussion sounds, dancing, and gestures. See his "New Thoughts on Ancient Chinese Music," p. 31. 2 Chow Tse-tsung, "The Early H istory o f tllg 一 SMPg激 驰 h in Wen-lin ：Studies in the Chinese HumanitieSf ed. C h o w T se -tsu ng (Madison: U niversity o f Wisconsin Press, 1968)， p. 152.

In the "Canons o f Shun" ("S h u n -tie n " 命破 ）o f the Book o f Documentst Shun appoints K'uei 誓 to be his music master and then makes the follow ing pronouncement: "P oetry expresses ip la n t. —-Singing- extends speech, and sound^ follow s th a t extension. The pitches make the sound harmonious. When the eight instrum ental tim bres are in accord, one does not encroach upon the place o f another. Thus sp irits and men are also in accord.ri This b rie f excerpt places music in a superior position to poetry in terms o f expressive p o te n tia l, an idea th a t was expanded and recited in most m ajor works on poetry or music u n til the T'ang dynasty. The bestknown elaboration o f i t is the "G reat P reface" ("T a -h s U " 太务 ）o f the Mao edition o f the Odes. This work, probably w ritte n by Wei H u n g ^ ( f i r s t century A.D.), is o fte n c ite d as the locus classicus o f the idea: Poetry is where the in te n tio n goes. W ithin the mind, i t is inten­ tio n; issued fo rth in words, i t is poetry. Feelings are stirre d w ith in . Their external form is in words. When words are not enough, feelings are expressed w ith exclam ations. When exclamations are not enough, feelings are extended in song. When extending them in song is not enough, feelings are expressed unconsciously w ith waving [ l i t ” ndancingM] hands and bouncing fe e t.^ This paragraph assembles the four a c tiv itie s in a group w ith a common Ursprung, then puts poetry, exclam ation, song, and dance in a series o f increasing expressiveness. Not only is this p a rtic u la r series quoted tim e and again, but the idea o f placing genres, subgenres, instrum ents, poets, painters, and a rtists in a lis t according to th e ir expressive p o te n tia l, signi­ ficance, a rtis try , and so fo rth , becomes a common strategy in lite ra tu re on the arts.

3 There are three sections about K'uei the music master and about music in general early in the Shu-ching. These are variously included in eith e r the f,Shun-tienM or the "Kao-yao m o " 暴 陶 锋 . I have generally followed K arlgren!s arrangement o f the te x t and use his translations below. Karlgren, Book o f DocumentSt pp. 6-7, 11-12. For another set o f transla4 tions ， see Kaufmann, Chinese Classics ，pp. 22-24. For a discussion o f the authorship o f this passage and another translation, see Chow, 'Shih (P o e try)/' pp. 157-58. A provocative analysis o f the "poetry'* and "in te n t" relationship is found in Peter A. Boodberg，"On the Semasiology o f Chinese Poetry and T hought/' one o f Boodberg's "Cedules from a Berkeley Workshop in A sia tic P hilology," reprinted in the TsingHua Journal o f Chinese Studies, n.s. 7， no. 2 (August 1969)：34-35.

In spite o f widespread comments in early te xts about the im portance o f music, textualjagflcd&^aLeady. performances_acfiJ ： are,.....Furtherm ore, the notew orthy ones we do have are not objective descriptions th a t would provide fo r reconstruction o f the music. R ather, they give us fle e tin g hints about the music and s lig h tly more d e ta il about the context o f the p e rfo r­ mance. The main fun ction o f the narratives is to use the music and the perform ance event to illu m in a te in a m oral lig h t th e ir p a rtic u la r h isto rica l moment and the h isto rica l figures involved. This is consistent w ith the function o f classical narratives generally. The te xts o f the Odes, the Tso Commentary, and the A nalects provide clues to the nature o f Odes music and the manner and significance o f its perform ance. The Book o f Odes is the e arliest received te x t in which there is any m a te ria l o f spe cific musieological value: Hammering the bells—jin g le , jin g le , Strum ming the chfin z ith e r, strum m ing th e se ， The reed flu te and stone chimes—a ll blend in tone. P erform ing the Ya and playing the Nan, Even the short flu te holds its own.^ The Tso C om m entary records a v is it by Duke Cha 今 轧 ，fo u rth son o f the king o f Wu, to Duke Hsiang 襄公 o f Lu. Lu, being the most "e o rre c tn state o f the tim e , was regarded as the p ro te cto r o f orthodox music, and the passage is a unique record o f a musical perform ance o f the Odes. The cerem onial v is it o f Duke Cha took place in 543 B.C. (Duke Hsiang, tw e n ty-n in th year, par. 12). A fte r w hat is described as an enjoyable v is it w ith Shu-sun M u-tzu 4 幻棄越子，Duke Cha requests th a t they liste n to a perform ance o f various musics. The te x t describes the singing o f the airs o f the states, the "K uo-feng!T @| section o f the Odes, and then the singing o f the rem aining sections, the nHsiao-yaM 小 推 , nT a - y a " 吹 雅 , and "Sung" ^ . The tra d itio n a l praise o f Duke Cha's statesmanship notes th a t c

Shih-ching, Mao ed ition, no. 208. The tra n sla tio n is my own and d iffe rs somewhat from those o f Waley and Kaufmann. I take ku~chung 鐘 as a verb-object, "ham m ering the bells,11 ra th e r than as tw o nouns, "drums and bells," to make the syntax consistently p a rallel in the stanza. See Waley, Book o f Songs，p. 140; and Kaufmann, Chinese Classics, pp. 2430. A se ^ is a larger z ith e r than the ch'in. The reference to Ya and Nan has been taken as a reference to sections o f the Shih-chi• 叩its e lf, in which case this poem is a description o f selections from the Shih-ching being sung w ith musical accompaniment.

by listening to the music he learned o f t h e ^ o ra l clim a te Jn al] n f states. R eflecting on this passage, Picken comments th a t a t the moderate rate o f ninety words/beats per minute, a complete perform ance o f the Odes would require ten to fifte e n hours, and he expresses skepticism th a t the perform ance ever re a lly occurred.6 Nothing in the te x t precludes the possibility th a t only selections were sung from each section, which would have made a more feasible perform ance. On the other hand, the Tso Commentary account goes on to lis t a continuation o f the performance w ith the cerem onial musics o f the sage-rulers. The fu ll section deserves translation because i t is expressive o f the m id-C h'un-ch'iu com parative perspective on both musical and m oral qualities o f the airs o f the various states. The request was made th a t they listen to Chou music. So Shu-sun M u-tzu had the perform ers sing the Chou-nan airs 声] 向 and the Shao-nan airs : 雨 • Cha said, "B e a u tifu l! It is the sta rtin g o f a foundation s till le ft incom plete. Y et the music is encouraging and not a t a ll re se n tfu l." They sang the airs o f P'ei t t p ，Yung 廣(5 , and Wei ^ fo r him. Cha said, "B e au tifu l! Very profound. It is somber, but not depress­ e s * 1 have heard th a t the virtues o f K fang-shu 康柄 o f Wei and Duke Wu 成 JA may be linked to these airs o f Wei." They sang the airs o f Wang "Thoughtful, yet not timorous. east."

玉

fo r him. "B eautiful!'* Cha said. This was the Chou having moved

They sang the airs o f Cheng 鄭 fo r him . "B e a u tifu l!" Cha said. ” In in tric a c y they have gone too fa r. The people w ill not be able to endure, so Cheng w ill be the fir s t sta te to vanish.1' Then they sang fo r him the airs o f Ch'i 濟 . Cha said, "B eautifu l!’ These have the sweep o f great airs. It was th e ir great ru le r who won d istin ctio n by the eastern sea. This state is beyond measure.11 Then they sang fo r him the songs o f Pin 幽 • Cha said, "B eautifu l! Their expansive qualities are enjoyable, but they are given to abandon. This, too, was the Chou having moved east.11 fu l!

Then they sang fo r him the airs o f Ch'in 秦 . Cha said, "B eautiThis is the sound o f a glorious establishm ent. Being thus

Picken, uShi Jing Song-texts and Their Musical Im p lica tio n s," p. 90.

gloriously established, they grew and grew to great size. Is i t not the old place o f Chou?n Then they sang fo r him the airs o f Wei 趙 . "B e a u tifu l!11said Cha. "F u ll-flo w in g sound, vast yet graceful. It is dram atic, y e t i t moves w ith fa c ility . W ith the aid o f th e ir v irtu e , the lords o f Wei w ill be b rig h t.1' Then they sang the airs o f T'ang 食 fo r him . Cha said, "Deeply thoughtful! Are not these people what remains o f the lines o f T'ao 淘 and T'ang? Were i t not so, could the feeling o f concern extend so far? What people could have achieved this w ithout the legacy o f T'ao's and T'ang's virtue ? " Then they sang fo r him the airs o f Ch!en 蜂 ■ Cha said, ,!When a state lacks a ru le r, can i t survive fo r long?" From the music o f Kuei 部 to the end o f the airs, he offe re d no c ritiq u e . Then they sang the ,,Hsiao-yaM fo r him. "B e a u tifu l!" Cha said. "They are thoughtful, but not complaining; aggrieved, but keeping th e ir peace. Is there decline in the v irtu e o f Chou? These are s till the people who have come down from the form er kings." Then they sang the ” Ta-ya ,丨 fo r him. Cha s a id , 丨 丨 Vast! Glorious! The songs wind about, yet [the thrust o f] th e ir composition is s tra ig htforw a rd . This is the v irtu e o f King Wen 文 . " Then they sang the ” Sung'，fo r him. Cha said, "The u ltim a te ! ' These songs are straig h tfo rw a rd , but not overbearing. They wind about but do not bend over. When pressing near, they do not crowd; when moving a far, they do not d r ift away. They move, but w ith in bounds; they repeat but do not bring on boredom. They make one be a tte n tiv e but do not make one worrisome. They are enjoyable, but not in an uncontrolled fashion. They are useful, but not consuming; they are vast, but not shouting; giving, but not wasting. They are taking w itho ut hoarding, managing w ithout smothering, forthcom ing, but not dissipating. The fiv e sounds harmonize and the eight winds I are in balance.? The rhythm is measured in a disciplined and orderly I way. It is in fu ll accord w ith v irtu e a t the height o f its bloom .'， J

n

The "eigh t winds" may be eith e r a reference to the eight "tim b re s /1 or instrum ental voices, discussed below or a reference to the influence o f the "airs" o f surrounding areas.

A fte r th a t, Cha watched dances accompanied by iv o ry pipes and southern-style short flu te s, and he said, "B e a u tifu l! Y e t, s till i t is re g re tta b le ." When he watched them perform the Grand Dance o f King Wu, he said, "B e a u tifu l! Chou a t its very zenith was like this." When he watched them perform the Shao-hu dance the 1 Y in king T'ang 育 d ，he said, "This displays the greatness o f the sage. Y e t i t is shameful th a t his very v irtu e is what made d iffic u ltie s fo r the sage.'1 . When he watched the Ta-hsia dance l [ o f Y ii 為 ] ，he said, "B e au tifu l! Laboring- away w ith o u t assuming m e rit—who but Yu was capable o f such refinem ent?11 Then he watched them perform the Shao-hsi dance 4 S ^ [o f Shun . Cha said, "This is v irtu e a t its very extrem e! Just as there is nothing beyond heaven’s canopy and nothing reaching beyond the support o f earth's surface, a v irtu e o f whatever height could not add a b it to this. This is a ll a person need witness. I f there be other music, I would not dare ask to hear it." ^ The o riginal Spring and A utum n te x t only mentioned the v is it o f Duke Cha to Lu. The com m entary is the only documentation o f this kind o f performance o f the Odes in the sixth century B.C. It reveals the regional (and hence generic) preferences o f the com m entator fo r the Ya musie o f Lu over the music o f Cheng, in p a rtic u la r. It shows the high degree o f sp ecific correspondence seen between types o f music and public m o ra lity and mo­ rale, and it shows the im m ediate apprehension o f m o ra lity and morale by someone sensitive to the music. It names the h is to ric a l musical genres credited to the sage-rulers o f high a n tiq u ity , and, fin a lly , the passage re ­ veals something o f p a rtic u la r aesthetic qualities th a t were held in esteem. Toward this la st end, i t introduces over tw o dozen descriptive term s that were used to c ritic iz e the works or the perform ance. A ll o f these were areas o f interest to classical and Han historians and theorists. In an e ffo rt to reconstruct features o f the music in such a p e rfo r­ mance, Picken makes a number o f assumptions based on his fa m ilia rity w ith the Odes, la te r Chinese music, and litu rg ic a l music in other tra d itio n s. He views the verbal te x t as "indissolubly wedded to rpusical lines1!: music is not

For a somewhat d iffe re n t translation, see Legge, The Chinese Classics, 5:549-50.

seen as an attachm ent to or accessory o f ly ric s w ith an independent exis­ tence. He envisions a music sung in s tr ic t and evenly measured tim e , w ith one syllable (and therefore one graph) a llo tte d one beat, and w ith a predom inantly four-beat lin e suggested bv the preponderance o f fo u rsyllable lines in the Book o f Odes texts. With a series o f s ta tis tic a l analyses, he compares the te xts o f the airs o f the various states, infers the extent o f the v a rie ty and irre g u la rity in the accompanying melody, and o ffe rs a te n ta tive explanation o f what "in tric a c y " (hsi 诚 ) meant, the single most negative term in Duke Cha's lexicon o f c ritic a l term inology w ith which he described the airs o f Cheng. Picken w rite s, nIn the degree o f irre g u la rity exhibited bv the songs, Cheng . . . is characterized by a high degree o f irre g u la rity ."11 Picken sketches a vague, ye t in trig u in g picture o f how a performance o f the Odes might have sounded. Our a b ility to f i l l in the details o f such a p ictu re has improved unex­ pectedly w ith several im portant archaeological discoveries in recent years. In March 1978 a large cache o f musical instrum ents was excavated from the tom b o f a Marquis Y i o f Tseng , located in Hupei's Sui County. The sealing o f the tom b has been convincingly set a t 433 B.C. by archaeologists on the basis o f dates engraved on excavated item s and epigraphic analysis o f the inscribed te x ts .12 The region is the area o f ancient Chfu，the rem ote southern state to which Ch'ii Yiian was exiled and where he collected his Songs o f the South (C h 'a -tz ^ W ithin the tomb were one hundred tw e n ty - fo ^ n u s ic a l instrum ents, including drums, flutes, mouth organs, zithers, a th irty -tw o -e h im e lith o phone，and a sixty-fo u r-p ie ce b ell set. The bell set is the largest and most Complex discovered to date, and the instrum ents are, on the whole, in rem arkably good condition. The find is evidence o f the v a rie ty o f instru­ ments in circu la tio n only one century a fte r the Tso Com m entary report o f Duke ChaTs trip . The in tric a te e a s t-re lie f on the grand hanging b e ll set, the Q P ic k e n ,， Shi Jing Song-texts and T heir Musical Im plications," pp. 89-90. 1U Ibid., p. 87. 11 Ibid., p. 103. 12 For general background on the tom b, see ChTiu Hsi-kuei, "Tseng Hou-i mu t i wen-tzu tz u -lia o ," p. 25. On the basis o f h isto rica l records, the state o f Tseng was not known p rior to the excavation, but the location o f the tomb and the inscriptions on the largest bell make clear th a t i t was in or adjacent to the te r rito ry annexed by Ch'u.

slender and elegant dragon fe e t at the base o f the m eter-high chime stand, and the ornately carved and glossy lacquer body o f the fiv e -fo o t long se zith e r help conjure up an image o f the orchestra before which Shu-sun Mutzu and Duke Cha m ight have s a t.1^ In each fa m ily o f instrum ents there is a v a rie ty o f pieces. There are a number o f d iffe re n t drums covering a range o f sizes and playing tech­ niques. The zithers range from fiv e to tw e n ty -fiv e strings, and they vary considerably in degree o f sophistication, craftsm anship, and technical m a tu rity . The v a rie ty in each fa m ily is suggestive o f s ig n ific a n t regional differences in instrum ents and instrum ent-m aking technology. It is quite possible th a t as Duke Cha listened to the airs o f d iffe re n t states, special instrum ents appropriate to each region were added fo r th e ir respective selections. Inscriptions on the bells and chimes to ta l more than four thousand characters. These have provided in fo rm a tio n on the musical theory and no­ m enclature o f tw e n ty -fo u r hundred years ago, which had a ll but been lost u n til the excavation. O f great interest are the com parative data fo r the p itch systems o f various regions. D iffe re n t term inology is used fo r the p itch gamuts o f Ch'u, Chin, ChU, and Chou, which attests to a degree o f regional independence in the musical development o f these ancient states. vals, and the octave levels in this great span o f bells, prom pting a reas­ sessment o f the sophistication o f archaic music theory. F in a lly, due to the number o f bells in the set and the rem arkable dual-pitch capabilities o f the bells, musicologists have been obliged to reconsider th e ir assessment o f the com plexity o f modal resources in archaic Chinese music and the extent to which bells could p a rtic ip a te in melodic performances. The scales

For illu stra tio n s o f a number o f the most im p o rta n t instrum ents recov­ ered from the Marquis o f Tseng's tom b, see L e i-ku -tu n fa -ch iie h -tui, "Tseng Hou-i mu fa-chiieh chien-pao," pp. 1-24. O f p a rticu la r interest are the se z ith e r (insert pi. 8.3) and the lithophone (pi. 21). The stand o f the lithophone is o riginal, but the stones themselves had disintegrated and have been reconstructed. Exquisite photographs o f a selection o f treasures from the tomb are found in Out o f China's E arth ： A rcheological Discoveries in the People's Republic o f China, ed. Qian Hao, Chen, H eyi，and Ru Suichu (Peking: China P ic to ria l; New York: Henry N. Abrams, Inc., 1981), pp. 45-55,

themselves d iffe r from the orthodox system described by la te Chou and early Han theorists, suggesting again a considerable va ria tio n o f standards from area to area. Study o f the dedicatory in scription has made clear that the bells were a fo rm a l g ift presented by the king o f Ch!u, and they were to find "ete rna l" use as ritu a l implem ents. There has not been any discussion as yet about what the repe rto ire m ight have been fo r the musicians who performed w ith these instrum ents. Although the Sui County tom b site is fa r removed from the ancient sta te o f Lu, i t is possible th a t many o f the instrum ents resembled what would have been found a t the Lu co u rt o f Duke Hsiang. The c ritic a l term inology used by Duke Cha is d iffic u lt to in te rp re t because its usage is not corroborated in s im ila r contexts elsewhere in the Tso Com m entary or in other archaic texts. Because they are o fte n used in pairs, the term s have clear positive or negative senses. One term names a virtuous quality, the other the same q u a lity taken to excess. I t is good to be "stra ig h tfo rw a rd " fchih 直 ） ，but not good to be "overbearing11Cchit 掩 ); "th o ughtful" (ssu 思 )f but not "tim orous11 (chii | 霍） ；and "w inding about" (chfil 曲 ) , but not "bending over" (ch'u 屈 )• Embellishment is praised, but wildness or abandon is c ritic iz e d . Enjoyment is allowed, but only when kept w ith in proper bounds. From the en tire series o f comments there emerges a preference fo r s im p lic ity o f surface, fo r balance and equality in measure, and fo r sym m etry. No distin ctio n is drawn between the music and the lyrics in Duke Cha's critiques; ^ g ^ a e s t h e t i d itv ^ lJ L b e -j^ o E m a ja G a J s — preserved and judged as a whole.. The expression o f c ritic a l term s in pairs or largJiF "^ itS *T ? S B l^ F "T "^ f:I ^ ra c te ris tic o f la te r theory and c ritic is m . Virtues o f the a rtis tic act or object are seen in balance w ith th e ir p a rticu ­ la r failures, usually excesses o f the same qualities.

Music, Hearing, and the Mind

The in te ra ctio n between music and public s p irit th a t so occupied Duke Cha became the m ajor concern o f Confucian thinkers in th e ir discus­ sions o f music. The relationship between music and the people had many facets. The music perform ed under the auspices o f the ru le r—fo r both ritu a l and entertainm ent purposes—had a m oral influence on his popu­ lation. The theme o f music as■"n--* an--•instrum ent fi nm• often ,i_ 11 i-, i ■..... i-fii i iiom ».oral ， educationvWas P •55» ,mI.Ill---■^iiKiiiinrmm„ mentioned by Confucius, according to both the A nalects and the Book o f Rites. It was firs t developed a t length in sustained discourses by Hsiin-tzu and H a n -fe i-tzu 4 萃 呼 and subsequently canonized during the early Han in the "Book o f Music" chapter o f the Book o f R ites and the "Treatise on Music” ("Y u e h -c h ih " 專 成 、）in the Records o f the Grand H istorian (Shih-

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chi). The p e r c e g ^ 11 o f music as a spontaneous expression o f public sentiment o r ( ^ r o m e ^ p \ ) f the s p iritu a rc ^ a rT io rt^ f^ n fe ' p^bpTe^irpervasrveT _ Confucius 讲在Ih e Odes,"~and"it was subse­ quently used as the rationale fo r establishing o ffic ia l bureaus commissioned to c o lle c t songs outside o f co u rt and introduce them into c o u rtly enter­ tainm ents. In the very degenerate states, music c le a rly re fle c ts th a t degeneracy, though a highly a rticu la te d explanation o f the details is not extant. By and large, the use o f sound and music fo r diagnostic purposes is a m atte r o f esoteric knowledge, whether i t be a revelation o f public s p irit, en a measure o f the strength o f an approaching arm y, or a p ot rte nt t o f the destiny o f a ru le r and his state. In the middle and la te Chou texts, discussion o f music centered around questions o f m o ra lity and morale. By the Han, the inquiry in to the in te ra ctive nature o f music was broadened to include acoustical theories in the context o f natural philosophy. Han thought re fle c te d an element o f em pirical a c tiv ity as w ell. The ce n tra l concepts o f music bore on theories o f cosmology and aesthetics from tw o d iffe re n t perspectives, the m oral and the acoustical-num erological, They are m utually illum inaHng^areas o f

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concern in the ea rlie r texts. In many ways, the investigation o f acoustics was a natural result o f the desire to improve musical instrum ents. But the thinking about acoustics, m ostly in the context o f num erological systems, was mandated by th e ^ o s m ic ^ g n ific a n e e J ja E U te d to souncL现 ^ffica^Y^unpu4ed^to^m usic. M oral and acoustical theory are never closer than in the M yriad Dewdrop Com m entary on the Spring and A utum n Annals (Ch'un-chHu fa n -lu ) o f Tung Chung-shu, a te x t th a t strove to synthesize as much o f the m oral and acoustical knowledge inherited by the early Han as possible. The tw o perspectives tended to separate a fte r the early Han, w ith acousflcal physics occupying the more v ita lin te n e c ts . 〜 A pparently, music a ttra c te d broad in te re st because i t could be used to demonstrate in te ra c tio n between physically separate e n titie s. By anal-■-»■»lrw«W NW cw^nM i am.nnump** ■ ■■ . ...... " 1111n»i ■■'1' mn.n.m. , — . ogy, the p o te n tia l fo r rem ote in te ra c tio n was imputed to other situations. The music o f both co u rt and stre e t linked the lord and his people. The music o f the sa crifice linked g ra te fu l descendants to the s p irits o f th e ir ancestors. The music o f the ritu a ls linked the ru le r w ith the powers o f heaven. I t was music th a t bound together the most in tim a te o f friends. In the absence o f anyone else, music provided fo r the lone wanderer an in ­ tense communion w ith nature. I t was an instrum ent by which the techni­ cians and mediums exerted co n tro l over ghosts and demons, and birds and other bearers o f fu tu re knowledge com m unicated w ith diviners and sages. M oral theories defined in general term s the nature o f music and its in flu ­ ence, seeking h isto ric a l pro o f fo r the transform ing influences o f music and discussing its h isto ric a l and regional varieties, recommending some things and proscribing others. Theories o f acoustics took a more a n a lytical look a t the foundations o f music, the tones and the pitches, and the exact rules governing1the interactions and eventually contributed to precise theories o f cosmos and history. Given the range o f possible uses o f musical theory, few in flu e n tia l classical thinkers fa ile d to give i t some, i f not always substantial, discus­ sion. Most spoke o f i t favorably; there is no general condemnation o f music in the classical canon. The A nalects contains over tw o dozen references praising* music fo r its p o te n tia l m oral and educative influence. Mencius emphasized the in flu e n tia l ra th e r than the diagnostic role o f music, making th a t fa c e t o f i t the cornerstone o f orthodox Confucian thought on the subject. Lao-tzu 生 子 and Chuang-tzu explored the mysteries o f natural and human sounds and, w ith sustained metaphors o f piping, voice, and music, penetrated somewhat deeper than Confueian thinkers in to the

mysteries o f the mind, music, and nature. M o-tzu is unique in his apparent antagonism tow ard music, but his antagonism is directed sp e cifica lly against the opulence o f a risto c ra tic entertainm ents and rite s, not music per se. In fa c t, he observes a t one point, "Now i f musical instrum ents were fo r the benefit o f the people, I w ouldn't venture to condemn th e m ."1 In both m oral and physical theory, the discussion o f music had become quite ela b -—, orate by the Han, and i t was in fa c t recognized as the fre e ly m o d u la tin g ]^ system, th a t revealed principles o f order in diverse events,」to borrow Pater’s notion. Music understandably appealed to early Han thinkers, who were devoted to the pursuit o f in te llig ib le patterns in the "perpetual flu x .11 Music, the u nite r, would become a kind o f in te lle c tu a l "philosopher's stone11 fo r them . The early Han scholar was burdened by a great mass o f learning and argument from pre-Han tim es but was torm ented by the fear th a t the wholeness o f th a t learning was lo st in the Ch'in bibliocaust and th a t the significance o f the most germ inal classical utterances had been corrupted by the passage o f centuries. The Han scholar was a t the same tim e inno­ cent o f any notion o f in te lle c tu a l specialization and sought some key to bring in to wholeness the sum o f human knowledge w ith which he fe lt compelled to d e a l ( ^ _ e ^ J ^ ^ j j « a t e c s 減 the best vantage point fro irf which to look eith e r forw ard or backward. In the discussions th a t follow , texts from the early and la te Han are interspersed w ith ea rlie r texts because th e ir compilers were engaged in the reconstruc­ tio n and analysis o f ideas v i^ h roots7n~aringuTty• 〜 « Before turning to the technical details o f tone and p itch systems, tw o underlying issues must be addressed. F irs t, there are m etaphoric elabora­ tions pertaining to the mind o f the sage scattered throughout early w r it­ ings. These are im portant in understanding the role o f sound and music. Second，there are particula rize d meanings o f the term ch'i as i t was used in discussions o f sound and pitches. E ffo rts to describe man's s p iritu a l and in te lle c tu a l achievements resort to term inology and metaphors th a t pertain to more readily describable sensory capabilities and sensible re a lity •_ Sense o r^ans^^e, taken, synecdociies fo r th見 whole mind, in much the same way th a t neurologists explore general neurological fu n ctio n by examining accessible and easily stim ulated re tin a l cells. In the West, in fa c t, fa vo ritism fo r the eye as the metaphoric window to the mind is an ancient strategy. We speak o f ’'men

1 Watson, Mo~tzUj p. 111.

o f vision" and are fa m ilia r w ith the irony o f the "blind seer." I can th in k o f no examples o f "men o f hearing" or "deaf listeners.1' We describe people^ as "b rig h t11 or "enlightened," ideas as "cle a r" or "visionary， " and the lack o f \ learning as being "in the dark," much as Plato compared understanding to a cave fir e or the sun. In the Timaeus, Plato w rote, The sight in my opinion is the source o f the greatest b e n e fit to us, fo r had we never seen the stars, and the sun, and the heaven, none o f the words w hich we have spoken about the universe would even have been uttered. But now the sight o f day and night, and the months and the revolutions o f the years, have created number, and have given us a conception o f tim e , and the powef o f enquiring about the nature o f the universe; and from this source we have derived philosophy, than which no greater good ever was or w ill be given by the gods to m ortal m anJ The English word "vision" is etym o lo g ica lly related to nw it,M "wisdom ,M and "w ise," dem onstrating the lin g u is tic underpinnings o f the fa m ily o f eye metaphors fo r the mind. In China, a d iffe re n t situ a tio n prevailed. In Pan Kufs Comprehensive Discussions o f V irtue in the White T iger H all (Pai-hu-Vung te-Zun)，w ritte n circa A .D . 80, his discussion o f the sage (sheng-fen 聖 人 ）begins w ith the follo w ing paragraph: What is meant by the term sheng in sheng-jeril Sheng : sage is what connects things; i t is the Tao; i t is sheng : sound. There is nothing to which his Tao does not connect and nothing on which his illu m in a tio n does not shine. sQunds^be. knows the ^nature^o f th in g s ^ — The connection described by Pan Ku was made no la te r than the la te classi­ cal period. In describing the sage, the Spring and A utum n Annals o f Mr. L ii (Lil-shih cWun-ch'iu) says, "[The sage] listens to the sound and understands the 'winds.' I t credits the sage w ith the a b ility to hear tbeJJsQundless "The sage hears the soundless.1'5 The H uai-nan-tzu likens the

2 B. Jow ett, trans” The Dialogues o f Plato, 2 vols. (New York: House, 1937), 2:27-28. 3 Pahhu-Vung te-lun 2.15. 4 L ii-shih ch'un-ch'iu 6.6b, 5 Ibid., 18.6a.

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in te ra ctio n o f the people and th e ir sage-ruler ?o a sound and its echo: "The empire follow s the rule o f a sage lik e an echo follow s its sound."® Hsii SheiVs 慎 etym ological dictio n ary Explaining the Gmphs and. E xplicating Their Combinations (Shuo-werx chieh-tzu 辦 字 ）defines "sage11 as , Vung 通 : to pipe, conn Q H ~ e a n a X is g ‘i - And Ying Shao's co llection o f ^ssays^P enetrating Popular Ways (Feng-su Vung-i), provides a functional explanation o f the lin k between the sage and sound: "Sheng : sage is sherxg : sound. It bespeaks the fa c t th a t the sage heai^s一 and un£e^„ stands f things.1 ._!i.,丨 1lA^-尤1^ 、 i i "the 11 " nature o ---n The logic o f Pan Ku’s paragraph and these other arguments depends p a rtly on the appearance o f the ear radical (erh J f , no. 128) in both sheng : sage and sheng 勢 ： sound. The same radical is found in t^u n g 鹏 , a word th a t evolved in to the contem porary term fo r perspicacity from the Q o riginal sense o f good hearing or an acute ear. The p ro x im ity o f archaic pronunciations o f several graphs th a t incor­ porate the ear radical suggests th a t the radical was phonetic as w ell as etym onic in sheng : sage, sheng : sound, and t^u n g ： perspicacious. A philological study o f this group, employing new in fo rm a tio n from the Laotz u te x t recently discovered in the M a-wang-tui tombs, makes a convincing argument fQi>arrHkernate pronunciation o f the ear radical th a t would have i t as arfiorfion\m xJor "sage" and associate i t w ith other words w ith the ear radical, including Ving 聰 , "hear." On the basis o f the p hilological mate­ ria l and a re lie w o f im porta n t early te x tu a l contexts, a suggested, etym olo g ica lly transparent rendering o f sheng : sage was naudient," or "a u r^ Iy DerceDtive.n* Other im portant words .deriyg^, froni^musiQ and sound etymons. For example, i 意 : in te n t, con­ structed by placing yin 省 ：tone over hsin 16 、 ：mind, is defined by Hsii

H uai-nan-tzu 9.2b. This rem ark is a ttrib u te d to the Feng-su Vung-i but is not in the extant version. See Feng-su t'u n g -i ^ung-chien 乱保■ 激義、通 益 (Peking: C entre Franco-Chinois d丨 Etudes Sinologique, 1943), p. 94. nThe acute ear o f the music master K'uang, w ith o u t the pitchpipes, could not determ ine c o rre c tly the fiv e tones." Mencius, chap. 4: "L i-lo u " )離意， V. 1. W illiam G. B oltz, "C om parative Notes on the P e llio t and M a-wang-tui Manuscripts o f the L a o -tz u 11 (Paper presented to the T h irtie th Annual Meeting o f the Association fo r Asian Studies, Chicago, 1978).

Shen: nI is in te n t; i t comes from 'tone' and 'm ind.' outw ardly] are examined to know [inner] in te n t•”

Words [expressed

The consummately refined sensory s k ill o f the sage was his hearing; i t was perhaps the most im p o rta n t means by which his sagacity was made apparent to the tones, d is tin ja tia lU h £ .lin e s t in te rya k a a q ju d g e .to e point is n icely re fle c te d in the "H siao-chih1；^ ^ [W histling p o in te rs ]:

^ w f

In ancient tim es, there were thoser^wKo^^oamed about the Su-men M o u n ta in s .^ Sometimes they would hear the sound o f the phoenix. The phoenix tones were the very sound o f beauty and breadth, no d iffe re n t from the phoenix its e lf. There are those who cannot hear the tone o f the phoenix. How were the wanderers o f Su-men capable o f g e ttin g to know the phoenix's voice? Whoever would seek its sound should hereafter know th a t i t is precisely the im m ortal's long w h istle .11

Long, pendant ears were _an e x to n a l^ ig x u o f the sage. A ccording to an apocryphal com m entary on the Spring and A utum n Annals, ” The ears are signs o f the m ind.11^^ Ko Hung discusses the vision o f Lao-tzu conjured up in the m editations o f the im m o rta lity seeker and notes th a t Lao-tzu had ears some seven inches long.^^ L a o -tzu Ts ears were a frequent issue o f speculation, and other te xts c re d it him w ith "ears o f three p o rta ls ."14

10 A mountain range in Honan. 11 "H siao-chih,,f in Vu-shu ch i-ch feng

% [Polity

国 書 建 灰 ，"C h in g -ch i-h u i" 經 齋

section], "Yiieh-lu tien" 為 婦 灰 [Canon of music and

p itc h e s ], 76.45b. For a d iffe re n t translation, see Edwards, "P rinciples o f Whistling,^ p. 226. 12 Quoted from the apocryphal te x t Ch^un-ch'iu yiian-m ing pao [P rim al destinies in the spring and autumn annals】, in the V a ip'ing yu-lan, p. 1812. T h e ^fu ll e x t ^ it te x t is reproduced in the Hart-

hsueh-Vang ts fimg-shu

P a o ^a -tz u 才

讓

弯

[Han Studies Hall collectanea] •

•弓 [Master embracing simplicity]，Ssu-pa pei-yao ed.,

nei-p'ien, 15.6b. Translated in James R. Ware, Alchem y, M edicine, and R eligion in the China o f A .D . 320: The Nei PTien o f Ko Hung (Pao-p'utzu) (Cambridge: M. I. T. Press, 1966)， p. 256. The Lai-hsiang-chi 6 [Records o f L a i-h sia n g ]，quoted in the V ai-p,ing yUrlan, p. 1812. Lai-hsiang is a village noted fo r an im portant shrine to Lao-tzu. See Chi>i-shu，p. 2469. The fu ll te x t o f the L a i-

hsiang-chi is in the Han Tang ti-li~shu chfao

J% ii*

o f the geographical works from the Han to the T!a n g ].

理

[Copies

Among the most ancieriLsages associated w ith music and the playing o f the chfin was Wu K u a n g rf^ described in his biography as a "Hsia dynasty man, w ith ears some seven inches long."^^ Large dangling ears were recog­ nized by physiognomists as a sign o f sagacity and n o b ility . The association was so w ell known th a t i t was the subject o f humor by the T'ang. The emperor said [to Li Chung-chfen] : "S ir，you have large ears, a sign o f n o b ility ." Chung-ch'en replied, " I have heard th a t an ass has large ears and a dragon tin y ones. Though I have large ears, they are but the ears o f an ass!" v ■ jo The emperor was amused. For metaphors in this vein, hearing plays a role in early China anal­ ogous to th a t o f vision in the Western tra d itio n . It is not th a t e ith e r is an exclusive metaphor fo r m ental atta in m e n t or superiority. Vision and v ision-related concepts, especially ming s月: illu m in a tio n , are found .widely in classical discourse. B u t ^ t h e - ^ a c s ^ a n d - ^ o u f l d o t * e dominant ^role^ii^ eacl^G faiftese.discourse, and there developed a fa m ily o f related _ te r m s ^ h a t are im portant in discussions o f sound, music, and sagacity. Sheng : sound, sheng : sage, ts'ung : perspicacious, and t ring : hear are com­ parable to "vision," "w ise," "wisdom,,f and nw it.,T We m ight expect the concepts o f harmony and discord to serve a comparable m etaphoric func­ tio n to brightness and darkness, and the idea o f supernal p itch and piping to th a t o f divine illu m ina tion . Examples in which the pervasiveness o f this metaphoric re fe re n t is illu stra te d are recurrent through much o f the classical texts. Perhaps the best-known is Confucius' description o f the stages o f his own sp iritu a l development. The master said, " A t fifte e n I established my w ill to learn. A t th irty I stood [on firm gro u n d ]. A t fo r ty I lost a ll doubts and a t f if t y knew the mandate o f heaven. 4 t s ix ty my ear was attuned. And at 如

4

吸

15 From the biography o f Wu Kuang in the Lieh-hsien-chunrx 歹 、 ) [Biographies o f im m o rta ls ]. For a translation, see Lionel Giles, A G allery o f Chinese Im m ortals (London: John Murray, 1948), pp. 18-19. 16 L i Chung-ch'en 專 决 、 臣 lived during the reign o f Te-tsung (A.D. 779805). Chiu Vang-shUf p. 3942.

seventy, to be decorous was to obey the dictates o f my heart. I could never breach the rules."^^ We m ight expect the master to say th a t a t s ix ty his vision was clear, and the reference to his ears would indeed be puzzling w ith o u t an appreciation o f the metaphoric im portance o f hearing. Sound achievers are sages. In Chuang-tzujs "Discussion on Making A ll Things Equal" (t,Chti-w u -lu n ,f Yen Ch'eng Tzu-yu asks T zu-ch'i what preoccupies his a tte n tio n ,

* yf

Tzu-ch*i said, "You do w e ll to ask the question, Yen. Now I have lo st m yself. Do you understand that? You hear the piping o f men, but you havenTt heard the piping o f earth. Or i f you've heard the piping o f earth, you haven't heard the piping o f heaven." Tzu-yu said, "May I venture to ask what this means?" Tzu-ch!i said, nThe great clod belches out breath and its name is wind. So long as i t doesn!t come fo rth , nothing happens. But when i t does，the ten thousand hollows begin crying w ild ly . Can't you hear them, long drawn out? In the mountain forests th a t lash and sway, there are huge trees a hundred spans around w ith hollows and open、 ings like noses, lik e mouths, lik e ears, lik e jugs, lik e cups, lik e m or* \ tars, lik e r ifts , lik e ruts. They roar lik e waves, w histle lik e arrows, screech, gasp, cry, w ail, moan，and howl, those in the lead ca lling out 、 yeee/,* those behind calling out yuuu! In a gentle breeze they answer fa in tly , but in a fu ll gale the chorus is gigantic. And when the fie rce wind has passed on, then a ll the hollows are em pty again. Have you ever seen the tossing and trem bling th a t goes on?M Tzu-yu said, "By piping o f the earth, then, you mean sim ply [the sound o f] these hollows, and by the piping o f man [ the sound o f ] flutes and w histles. But may I ask about the piping o f Heaven?11 Tzu-ch!i said, "Blowing on ten thousand things in a d iffe re n t way, so th a t each can be its e lf—a ll take what they want fo r themselves, but who does the sounding?11-*-^

U Analects, chap. 2 ：uW ei-cheng" 泰 :£xinj^nce was a pow erful a ct o f just a u th o rity th a t had precedents in the mythology o f hiech a n tiq u ity. C ontrol over the moment and p itch a t which the music began waFcoitTrol over the en tire perform ance. In practice, the playing o f any fix e d -p itc h instrum ent tuned to the tw elve pitches in more than a single mode-key was p roblem atic. The tw elve pitches were calculated in precise ju st intonation. The p itc h o f the highest note was considerably sharper than a p e rfe c t octave achieved by halving a string, and the intervals between adjacent tones were uneven. As a result, only the in itia liz in g p itc h could be sounded harmoniously in any given mode-key. Only fo r the mode-key created by in itia liz in g kung a t the ye llo w -b e ll p itch would the other fo u r o f the fiv e tones f i t the gam ut. In no other case would there be p e rfe c t correspondence between the fiv e tones and available pitches in the gamut. Hence, no other mode-key could be played p e rfe c tly on the gamut. Any o f the tw elve pitches could in itia liz e any o f the fiv e tones to make a d istin ctive mode-key. Thus, s ix ty mode-keys were possible w ith fundamentals w ith in the octave defined by the tw elve pitches. This cycle

13

I have adopted the term "m ode-key" to describe the perform ance sys­ tems, fo llow ing Robinson and Needham. The use o f the term s nmoden and "key" require q u a lific a tio n . As used here, "m ode-key" describes the s ix ty systems o f tones possible w ith a ll arrangements o f the fiv e tones and the tw elve pitches. For fu rth e r explanation, see the excellent a rtic le by Powers, nM ode， n pp. 376-450, esp. p. 442. There is greater d e ta il in Pian, Sonq Dynasty Musical Sources，tables 2-4 (pp. 46-49, 5253)， pp. 4 3 ff. Kuo-yii, "C h o u - y u " 周 ■£§ [Tales o f C h o u ], 3.12a; cite d in Needham, Science and C ivilisa tio n in China, vol. 4, p t. 1, p. 169.

of sixty possible mode-kevs was^recognized no later than the early Han,^ when it was discussed in the Huai-nan-tzu. ^ The mode-keys were identi­ fied by combining a name from the five-tone series, e.g., kungt with a name from the twelve-pitch series, e.g., huang(-chung) : yellow bell, to make

kung-huang 言部' . This was analogous to the^sexag,gjaary~f^]镇 & ) ，in Wen-hsiian9 p. 232； and Chang Heng, Rhyme-prose

about Meditations on the Mystery (Ssu-hsihn fu 思 令

職 )，in Hou Han-

shUj chUan 59: "Chang Heng chuan" •{寺 [Biography o f Chang Heng], p. 1933. Su-nii $ 士 was a goddess associated w ith musie, firs t mentioned in the Songs o f the South and subsequently id e n tifie d as a woman o f magical powers who lived during the tim e o f the Yellow Emperor. See David Hawkes, trans., C h 'u - tz ^ The Songs o f the South (London: Oxford U niversity Press, 1959), pp. 144-45.

equivalent o f the chHri makes the fo llo w in g observation: A fte r hearing a b e a u tifu l performance, musicians—and non-musi­ cians—may speak o f the b e a u tifu l after-tones rather than the beauti­ fu l melody. S im ilar concepts exist in other Korean arts. Yeobaek (yeo = rem aining, baek = vacant space) or unpainted parts are highly valued in tra d itio n a l O riental painting. A fte r seeing a fin e picture, a viewer is more apt to speak o f its b e a u tifu l yeobaek than o f its beau­ tifu l mountains or trees, since the la tte r may be taken fo r granted in a good painting; but where the design is such th a t even the unpainted parts add beauty and significance, the work is more highly esteemed .奶 Nonsounding is the most dram atic, but not the only, reductionist theme in ch!in lore. One o f three components o f the ordinary perform ance, the sound, the perform er him self, or his audience may be removed from the scene to exem plify the classical theory and illu s tra te aesthetic ideals. In the many graphic portrayals o f the M in or a p a rticu la r chfin master, ordi­ nary performance was not the prim ary them e. For example, in the draw­ ings o f Sun Teng (fig . 6), as in many portrayals o f chrm sages, Sun is pic­ tured holding the chHn loosely on his lap. In other pictures, the ch'in sage clutches the instrum ent to his bosom. P erform ing on the chfin a ctu a lly requires a steady table adjusted to a convenient height before the player because both hands require freedom fo r the careful m anipulation o f the strings. L ittle , i f anything, can be done w ith the instrum ent held to the bosom or rested across the lap. To the cognoscente, the pose w ith ch'in in lap is suggestive not o f serious playing o f the instrum ent, but sim ply o f its presence. Without the touch o f the perform er's fingers, the is e ith e r a silent com forter or le ft to resonate on its own to the sounds around. The instrum ent mediates w ith the outside w orld not only in the expressive or em otive act, from w ith in to w ith o u t, but in the receptive act or responsive act, from w ithout to w ith in . As Po Ya demonstrated in his smashing o f the

chfin upon Chung Tzu-ch'i's death, the instrument belonged as much to Chung Tzu-ch'i, the genius liste n e r, as i t did to Po Ya, the genius player. Simply put, the sage hears as w e ll as communicates w ith the ch'in.

oc

From the San~tsfai Vu-hui 笑 分 會 [Assembled illustrations of the three realms].

The extreme statements on nonsounding instruments are in stories of instruments without the means to sound. Five-string chfin were revived periodically even after the seven-string chrin had become standardized, oc apparently an effort at meaningful reduction of the chin's voice. Sun Teng, a sage intimately associated with the ch^n, refuses to speak with or even acknowledge the presence o f a young aspirant who comes to study the Way w ith him. Sun's biography notes th a t he ,rloved to read the Changes

and play the one-string chfinn and would only play the one-string chfin as his guest looked on.37 In his portraits, the single string of the chfin is carefully illustrated. The best-known example of a sage who played a nonsounding ch'in is T'ao Yiian-m ing, who is reported to have said, "Knowing ^hg_signifi-

cance of what is in' the M in , why labor to bring _SQund--upp£rom~4t$ strings?" of his biography among the collected biographies of recluses in the History of the [Liu] Sung (Sung-shu ^ •令 ） ，T'ao is de: scribed as "owning one very plain ch'in, without any strings at all, which he would hold and stroke to express his feelings whenever he became OO drunk." The stringless ch!irx (wu-hsien-ch!in 廉 Srt 奪J became coined as

一

a symbol o f the ideal o f silence in ch'in performance.

The ch'in is by nature a quiet instrum ent, and we have seen in its

ancestry tT1e^b©ile4-^trlTig; zither orTf^-'Sncesir'al sacrifice. While it is emphasized that listeners be capable, that is, ^tone-wise,1' listeners are very often not to be found in portrayals and discussion of chfin perfor­ mances. As early as Ts'ai Yung, discussion of the harmonies in music included a concern for the audience. The excellence of music depends on the quality of the reception, and the chftn player is warned not to perform before the barbaric or the vulgar. The sto ry o f Yang Ping uted to Ts'ai Yung, illu stra te s this point:

構

, a ttrib ­

Yang Ping played the ch,i_n. A monk would often come to listen to him play. Once, Ping suddenly, and obviously with intent, broke his

% Van Gulik, Lore of the Chinese Lute, p. 150，no. 2. Shen-hsien-chuarx 神 沖 傳 [Biographies of spirit immortals], Lung~wei pi-shu ed,, 6.7b. A similar account is found in his biography in the Chinshu, p. 2426. ( 3， The biography was written by Shen Yo ;尤 約 . Reprinted in Tao Yilan^ — ming yen-chiu tzu-liao hai~pien 阅 划 印 年 完 $ 料 索 蜗 [Collected materials for the study of T'ao Yiian-ming] (Taipei: Ming-lun Publishers, 1972), p. 4.

>

i

strings in order to make a point. If there is no one around who really understands the tones, he would rather play to the clear winds, shining moon, dark pines, and aging boulders.

It is impossible to ascertain when this story was written, but it was probab­ ly about the same time that the Po Ya and Chung Tzu-ch'i story was popu­ lar. Yang Ping!s reaction to the loss of a tone-wise listener differed from Po Ya's. Lacking a friend with whom he could establish a close bond of sympathy, he turned to nature. By the T'ang, the idea of playing to nature is a stock image —-in the -- - chftn -- — • lite • - ra—tu re 、:

一’

*

T

"

Sitting alone in the dense bamboo groves, I strum my ch'in and accompany w ith long whistles;

No one to see this deep in the trees, Only the bright moon appears to shine. Along w ith the chHri, w histling is explored as a theme o f communion be­ tween man and nature in the Six Dynasties and T'ang, a point to which we will return later. The chHn is often embraced as one’s only friend and is

often an emblem of a lonely life, if not an intentionally antisocial one. By the tim e o f Hsi K !ang, the ch'in and■jausic^.bad^gone through a period SCh

humanization in which emDhasis from ..communication with superior ................ ! - ， 削* ~shifted - ■■......

沁J ^ ta iififia ^ O Q iE ^ L s jt fJ ie a y e iv J t ^ c o m r n u n ic a tio n o f a m ore_jnuj]daae^octy-w ith people. But during the early^SjT dynasties, lis ­ teners lost the im portance they had enjoyed during the la te Han. The ch!in

and its music were often considered a harmonizing influence between the individual, cultivating his inner nature, and the outside natural world in which he circulated. Accordingly, the aesthetics of the ch,fn came to be discussed increasingly in the context o f the natural ordeFTSIKiiinfRSJr'fire social, m oral, or ritu a l order, as was the case in classical Confucian 丨 thought. M in im a lizatio n o f real perform ance features fa c ilita te d the |

elaboration of the playing from and playing to nature themes. The ch,in was viewed as the ultimate instrument for man to commune with nature because its material parts were so carefully drawn from the natural world. Only whistling was a headier musical pursuit for the

T'ai-ku i-yin, p. 35. 40 Wang Wei 王 _ ，nChu-li kuan,? [Hut among bamboos], in C^iian T'ang-shih [Complete poetry of the T'ang] f 12 vols. (Peking: Chung-hua shu-chii, 1961), 2:1301.

aesthete, due to the fact that it involved no materials at all. Being fashioned into a chfin is the destiny of the most suitable materials. In keeping his ch'in with him on the mountain top, by the side of the gentle rill, or in the cool shadow of the bamboo grove, the sage avoids disruptive removal of the instrument from the nexus of relations in which it was born, nurtured, and selected. In the mythologies, Fu Hsi makes the first cM n of T'ung wood, and, seeing a phoenix resting atop the tree, he shapes the instrument to resemble the phoenix. The voice of the T'ung never changes because the ch^n speaks in the pitches that Ling Lun modeled on the phoenix calls. In an apocryphal story explaining the etymology of chfin anatomical nomenclature, a piece of wood literally "calls" to Ts'ai Yung, telling him it is to be made into a ch'in. Ts’ai Yung, slandered at court, has escaped south to the Wu regions: f ' When he arrived in Wu，he found the people there burned T'ung wood [= Wu-t'ung ifk :梓] ，Chinese Parasol Tree] to cook their food. When Yung heard a piece crackling in the fire, he said, "That's a piece of good stock!" He asked for it and carved it into a cMn, It had, in fact, a beautiful tone, but its tail was scorched, so it was called the "Scorched Tail C h 'in .^ The left extremity of the ch'in was traditionally referred to as the ”scorched the term explained in this story. Almost one-third of Hsi K'angT s Rhyme-prose on the Chfin describes the materials for the M in , where they grow, the special features of the climate and the landscape, their spiritual potency, and the ecstacy of gathering them. There is a distinct "ch^n-ness" to the trees waiting to be recognized, gathered, and shaped into zithers.

Kan Pao, Soa-shen-chi 13.338，Shih-chieh shu-chii ed., p. 100. The following story in the collection tells of Ts'ai Yungjs discovering a fine piece of bamboo from which he fashioned a flute. 42 Van Gulik, Lore o f the Chinese Lute, pp. 99-100. In reviewing names of chfin parts, including "dragon pond， " "phoenix pool,11 "phoenix tongue," and "phoenix wings," van Gulik explains their connection with ch,i.n lore. He argues that fabulous animals occupy a central position in Chinese music generally, a point that has recently been confirmed by the animal motifs on the instruments excavated from the Marquis Yi of Tseng tomb and other sites.

The attention to the material aspects of the ch'in is part of the effort to explain its potency, an effort which illustrates traditional principles of magic. The metaphoric relation to nature is manifest in the imitation of the phoenix's voice, the instruments structural parallels to heaven and earth, and the correlative nature of the pitches and tones. A further potent relation is the metonymic one, manifest in the use of special mate­ rials in the ch'int materials that are the very stuff with which nature and heaven s o u n d . T h e efficacy of the alchemist's furnace derived from a balance of metaphoric and metonymic connections to the cosmic processes it sought to reenact. Its proportions were those of the cosmos, and its placement, temperatures, and times of processing* were calculated accord­ ingly. nThe adept was not directly concerned with exploring chemical reactions, but with designing laboratory (or psychophysiological) models of cosmic process,11^^ Its materials were the actual materials with which the crucible of past eons made the same product the alchemist sought to achieve. Similarly, if sounds are to be sympathetic to nature, there must be both correspondence of pattern and congeniality of material. Chfin manuals often contain pictures of what are alleged to be antique instru­ ments in which the idea of physical imitation is taken to its logical, if musically impractical, extreme. Stringless ch'in, voiceless chfin, and moon-shaped chfin are extreme examples of a musical instrument's domination by an ideology that grew around it, an ideology composed of extra musical considerations in the performance sense, but gepiiane^Q^tlig concepT^ot^arESuch ideological considerations bear on the development o fth ? 1c h ^ tratJition in much the

43 Sir James George Frazer, The Golden Bough, abridged ed. (New Y o rk ： Macmillan, 1950)，chap. 1： "Principles of Magic,n pp. 12-52. Frazer’s influential formulation divides the associative principles of magic into the principles o f s im ila rity and the principles o f contagion.

I have

followed Roman Jakobsonfs reformulation of this division according to the more generalized semiotic principles of metaphor and metonomy, elaborated in "The Metaphoric and Metonymic Poles," in Fundamentals

料

o f Language, w ith Morris Halle (The Hague ；Mouton, 1956), pp. 77-82. Sivin describes one metaphoric re la tio n perceived in alchem ical

procedures as a "telescoped scale of time/1 in which one year of alchemical process is equivalent to 4320 cosmic years. The underlying idea in connection with alchemy is reviewed in Sivin and Nakayama, Chinese Science, pp. x x i-x x ii.

same way they bore on be ll-tu n in g during the Han. The enthusiasm w ith which the chfirt was embraced as an emblem o f a p a rticu la r life -s ty le and the su btlety w ith which its tra d itio n s were expanded and enriched are part o f the emerging consciousness o f fine a rt during the Six Dynasties. A t the foundation o f ch'in ideology is a concept o f life in which aesthetic^ co rP straints substituted fo r what were tra d•itio n a lly . social, p o litic l, and — are 丨 .一 ............... .............. ............ — _ ------- - — ■ 一 一 L a丨 m oral constraints. Whatever一th e ir ostensible medium, a rtis ts take th e ir own lives as the subject o f expression, and eventually th e ir d a ily behavior its e lf becomes a medium o f a rt. Ideals o f conduct are the aesthetic ideals o f the ch^tn lore. Hsi K!ang, Juan Chi, and Liu Ling, as portrayed in A New A ccount o f Tales o f the World, fo llo w tzu~jan : self-so-ness in th e ir choices and actions. This is best understood not as "spontaneity," as i t is commonly translated, but as sym pathetic resonance, an analogy to the process by which Music Master ChiianTs ch'in sounds on the banks o f the P'u R iver. There is no apparent reason and no plausible explanation fo r a ction which does not follow in an orderly and comprehensible sequence. R ather, i t is ''self-so," apparently beyond the co n tro l o f the person and th erefore describable only as a momentary action in an isolated moment o f tim e . Wang H ui-chih was liv in g in Shan-yin. One night he awoke in the m idst o f a heavy snow fall. He threw the windows open and ordered wine to be poured while he looked around at the gleaming brightness th a t surrounded him. Wang got up and ambled about the room, re c it­ ing Tso Ssu?s poem, nA C a ll to Recluses," when the memory o f his friend Tai A n-tao came to mind. A t th a t tim e , Tai was living* some distance away in Shan. Wang im m ediately set o ff in the night, riding a sm all boat tow ard Tai's place. He traveled the whole night before arrivin g. Just as he approached the door, he stopped, then returned home. Someone asked him why he had done this. Wang replied, "I orig­ in a lly set o ff aboard an impulse o f the moment, and when th a t im ­ pulse passed, I returned. What necessity was there to [follow through] and v is it T a i ?n45

Shih-shuo hsin-yii ，Shih-chieh shu-chii ed., chtian 23，no. 47. I have translated this passage to m aintain the consistency o f my term inology. For M ather’s version, see New A ccount o f Tales o f the World, p. 389.

Wang's behavior seems fa r less bizarre i f one thinks o f the story as the program fo r a chfin piece, a series o f vignettes not necessarily obligated to the exposition o f a linear melody. The coming and going o f impulses is beyond Wang’s control. I f he seeks accord w ith nature, he responds sym pathetically to the piping about him. The rem oval^of a sense o f purpose from his action is analogous to the rem oval o f strings from the ch'in. N a tu ra l "patterning provides a d e te rm in istic element in behavior and in a rt in the same way th a t co rre la tive thinking provided a de te rm in istic element in the re fe re n tia l aspects o f a rtis tic media. In the native tra d i­ tions, however, i t is recognized not as a re s tric tiv e element, but rather as a source o f value in a rt and a source o f value in life . Whether one sees tra ditions, conventions, correlative schemes, or any other established constraints on a rt and life as a source o f fru s tra tio n or a source o f in d iv i­ dual freedom is apparently a m a tte r o f emphasis and choice. Increasingly, scholars o f in te lle c tu a l and c u ltu ra l history can discuss tra d itio n s and constraints as a precondition fo r individual expression and freedom.^® For the Six Dynasties aesthete, submission to the world around him , expressed in self-so behavior, was the source o f sa tisfa ctio n and jo y, an escape from the fe tte rs o f conventional ways o f liv in g inherited from the lo st Han world. The new consciousness o f a rt and the new self-consciousness o f aes­ th e tic lif e th a t developed during the Six Dynasties period are inseparable from the profound tensions and co n flic ts th a t gripped the best minds from the fa ll o f the Han to the Chin. In philosophy, the c o n flic t was expressed in complex debates between "School o f Names" advocates (ming-chiao and advocates o f nself-so-ness." In life , the debate was expressed in the choice between being p o litic a lly involved—and ostensibly conventional—and being nom inally independent—and eccentric and natural. Pure Conversa­ tion m e n ta lity u ltim a te ly saw id e n tity in both positions, as it saw id e n tity in a ll p e rfe c t opposites. The point is a rtfu lly made in a d e lica tely ambigu­ ous conversation, variously a ttrib u te d to Juan Chan 踩 and Wang Jung When Juan Chan saw M inister o f the In te rio r Wang Jung, the la tte r asked him, "The Sage [Confucius] valued morals and

46 For example, see Edward Shils, "T ra d itio n and L ib e rty ：Antim ony and Interdependence," Ethics 68 (A p ril 1958): 153-65.

institution s (ming~chiao )9 whereas Lao-tzu and Chuang-tzu threw lig h t on the natural (tzu~jan). Are they the same or d iffe re n t in th e ir underlying meaning?" To which question the re p ly was made, "Can they be w itho u t s im ila rity ? n^^ We have already noted th a t the pra ctice o f Pure Conversation was in ti­ m ately related to the bureaucratic pra ctice o f Pure C ritiq u e . Chfen Y in k'o and others have argued th a t even the Pure C onversationalists were u ltim a te ly more o f the Confucian persuasion than the Taoist one. In fa c t, he w rites, the name "Seven Sages o f the Bamboo Grove" was o rig in a lly sim ply "Seven Sages," and the name was selected from the A nalectsf very much in the s p irit o f Han numerology .48 The debate between ming-chiao and tzu-jan was cast in comparisons between Confucius on the one hand and Lao-tzu and Chuang-tzu on the other. Though the early Six D /nasties is routinely characterized as a period o f Neo-Taoism, Wang Pi him self placed Confucius above Lao-tzu and Chuang-tzu, arguing th a t he understood the subtle points o f nonbeing so thoroughly th a t he did not even have to men­ tion them ， In the philosophical discourse, an accommodation was reached between c o n flic tin g positions th a t was not so easily realized in life , one result o f which were the extrem e statements on a rt and emphasis on e c c e n tric ity in life th a t we have witnessed. Holzman has re ce n tly demonstrated the great com plexity o f Juan Chi's p o litic a l and a n tip o litic a l life and po e try .50 Ch'en Y in-k'o has made a sim ila r point about the lives o f Hsi K'ang and T!ao Yiian-m ing. A ll three of these figures are exemplars in the lore o f self-so-ness and naturalness. The" po te n tia l fo r resolution o f the tension in th e ir lives came, according to Ch'en, in advocating the underlying u n ity o f the tw o philosophical positions, and th a t advocacy im plied an obligation both to serve th e ir society and to pursue a life o f self-so-ness.^^ But it is a philosophical n ice ty to embrace diverse philosophical posi­ tions and declare th e ir underlying unity. The v o la tile p o litic a l atmosphere o f the Seven Sages era and the following* decades forced choices basic to

47

Fung, Chinese Philosophyt 2:170. Ch'en Y in-k'o, "T a o Yiian-m ing ssu-hsiang," p. 1012. Fung, Chinese Philosophy, 2:170-71. ^ Holzman, P oetry and P olitics. 1 Ch'en Y in -kTo, "T'ao YUan-ming ssu-hsiang,n pp. 1013-20. ^

survival—choices th a t meant accepting or re je ctin g o ffic ia l posts, alliances, marriages, and other p o litic a l involvements. The appearajrice o f ch'in ideojogy.and-^€s4he4^cisin could only have occurred d u rm f a period o f intense p o litic a l uncertainty, in te lle c tu a l co m p le xity， , and personal insecu­ rity".~~The in s is t e r ig e ^ n - ^ T ^ l^ r iT v in g , m ental composure, and personal co m fo rt in the natural world had roots in a real life o f opposite qualities. The e x tre m ity o f the life described in ch!in ideology balanced w ell the e xtre m ity o f life experienced in the post-Han world. The intense concen­ tra tio n o f "a rt" in the ch'in and its ideology is a m ixture o f escapism and a ffe c ta tio n . With a chlm in hand, the aesthetic life w ith its attendant com forts and joys could be worn as an emblem even i f i t were never to be fu lly realized inside or out. P o litic a l involvem ent was tainted by its sheer com plexity, s tirrin g an appetite fo r s im p lic ity and w ithdraw al. P o litic a l involvem ent was recognized fo r its danger and impermanence. Involvement w ith the arts id e n tifie d one, fo r others and oneself as w ell, as part o f the enduring order and motion o f nature and created at least the semblance o f shelter from the hazards and transience o f p o litic a l life . The lite ra tu s, enmeshed in w orldly a ffa irs o f the court, could take hold o f his chfin and in i t find mom entary reclusion. Just as in the ideal o f chfin music the inner discipline, and not the external m anifestation, was the essence, so, too, in the ideal o f the aesthetic life o f the early Six Dynasties did the inner aspect become divorced from the outer. I build my humble shelter here in the world o f men, But liv e w ithou t the racket o f th e ir horses and th e ir carts. How is i t possible that this be so? When the mind's put at a distance, the place becomes rem ote. The larger context in which music is discussed changed d ra m a tica lly from the early Han to the Six Dynasties. Onee considered the u ltim a te means o f social influence and control—"For influencing airs and changing ways, nothing is b e tte r than music"—i t had become fo r the Six Dynasties ch;in master the u ltim a te means o f rem oving him self from_a snoial in­ volvem ent th a t was a t once both painful and precarious. *

T'ao Yiian-m ing, "Y in -c h iu -s h ih " 攸 濟 [On drinking w in e ], in Tao Yuan-ming shih-wen hui-p'ing 间 游 i 叫 1 争 文 [C ollected commentaries on the poems o f T*ao Y iian-m ing] (Taipei: Ming-lun Publishers, 1976), p. 151， no. 5.

I play the lute and sing ： As the north wind hurries on, the battlem ents freeze. They tow er over the plain, where there are neither roads nor fie ld paths. For a thousand years and a myriad generations, I shall watch you to the end in silence.

Pao C h a o 、 貌 92 , "The Ruined C ity ," in Poems o f Solitude, trans. Jerome Ch'en and Michael Bullock (London: Abelard and Schuman, I960), p. 42.

The Concept o f A r t

A survey o f the history o f theories and legend about music indicates striking elements o f contin u ity and s trik in g elements o f change. Classics are treated by commentaries to re in te rp re ta tio n and renewal, a cu ltu ra l habit th a t was the re v ita liz in g force in the longevity o f the classics. Though music lacked a le g itim a te classic, as a tra d itio n its te xtu a l embodiments were nevertheless treated in the same way. Bits and pieces o f texts were quoted, studied, and explained, again and again, according to the interests and in te lle c tu a l styles o f whatever period one examines. This essay has produced a de facto periodization o f the subject into four d is tin c t eras—classical, early Han, la te Han, and early Six Dynasties. Drawing on what the subsequent native scholarship determined to be the most s ig n ificant philosophical works o f preceding periods, one can a rtic u la te a history o f views on music th a t takes the form o f theme and variation. The themes are the legacy o f the classical age, the w ritings o f which established the range o f discourse and the underlying metaphors th a t would be studied, contem plated, and addressed by thinkers in la te r ages. The variations are sig nifica nt selections o f m aterials from the classics, treated in the d is tin c t styles o f the various periods. Major trends in Chinese lite r a ti thinking can be outlined w ith re fe rence to the thought on music and a rt. For comparisons a t a very general level, four issues m ight be considered, involving the selection o f subjects th a t interested thinkers and the nature o f the tre a tm e n t accorded those subjects. Expressed as four questions, they are ： (1) What are the m ajor realms or m atters o f inquiry? (2) What are the s tru c tu ra l features o f the texts in which ideas were argued? (3) What are the features o f the logic o f the arguments? (4) To what tests o f v a lid ity are the objects, the data, and the examples used in argument subject? In the early Han, the expressed subject o f philosophical inquiry was cosmology as m oral and p o litic a l philosophy and science. Scholars explored

cosmic processes at every le ve l w ith the goal o f le g itim iz in g and perpetuating rule. O f p a rtic u la r in te re st was the place o f mankind in the o ve ra ll cosmic scheme, especially as exem plified in the h is to ric a l record. The texts were anecdotal or taxonom ic: c o rre la tive fo r nature and society, bibliographic fo r the w ritte n records. Many o f the m ajor texts purported to be sequels or commentaries to the classics. They were p rim a rily what K arlgren described as "system atizing te x ts ."1 Discussions in the cosmologieal texts were numerological, establishing p arallel and ordered sets o f tw o, three ，five , eight, ten, and tw elve members, the completeness o f which sustained the putative significance o f the correlations between one set and another. M aterial fo r discussion came from classical texts, contem pora­ neous observation and experim entation, and m athem atical manipulation. By the late Han, the expressed subject was the d eficiency o f early thought on almost every issue—in a word, skepticism . Scholars explored the claims o f e arlie r thinkers, especially those claims considered to be under the influence o f popular cu ltu re . The structure o f texts was aphoris­ tic , w ith b rie f examinations o f e a rlie r te xts and o ra lly tra n sm itte d m aterials follow ed by b rie f disclaimers and rejoinders. Ideas were presented as debatable, lore as ahistorical, and musical instrum ents as palpable things. Discussions were methodological, arguing point-counterpoint in an e ffo rt to sort valid from invalid arguments and claim s. Objects were measured, weighed, and described, h isto rica l sources were assessed fo r re lia b ility , and tales and ideas were tested fo r p la u sib ility. By the early Six Dynasties, the expressed subject was aestheticism and m ysticism . Scholars explored the nature o f a rt, approaches to evaluatio n ，the psychology o f human response and expression, and the nature o f the ineffable, the "M yste ry." Discussions were b e lle tris tie , employing sym bological references to nature and allusive references to ancient sages, classical m ystic texts, and h isto ric exemplars o f spontaneity and e e ce n tric ity . Tenets o f v a lid ity were lite ra ry and aesthetic, derived from the c re d ib ility o f accepted te xtu a l precedents and accord w ith respected ideals, e.g., a rtis try , self-so-ness, genius, e c c e n tric ity , and so fo rth .

1 K arlgren, "Legends and Cults in Ancient China,!I pp. 201ff.

The foregoing paragraphs describe at a very general level the'varia­ tion in the intellectual background to discussions of sound and music. The co ntinuity was substantial because in a ll the periods comm entary w ritin g remained a favored mode o f argum entation. Commentaries were w ritte n on the classics, e.g., the Spring and Autum n Annals or the Chuang-tzu, and on previous commentaries as w ell, e.g., the Tso Commentary. Selection varied, depending on the interests and tastes o f the period. The early Han showed a preference fo r chronicles and fo r schematic texts. Commentaries and apocryphal texts were w ritte n most often on the Spring and A utum n Annals and Book o f Changes. By the la te Han and early Six Dynasties, the Chuang-tzu had become a work o f major in te re st. The Book o f Changes continued to be a popular te x t fo r commentators, but approaches to the m aterials changed dram atically. W ithin each period and each m ajor te x t th a t discusses music is a theory o f music and a theory o f a rt. But the theories o f the early Six Dynasties are most readily recognizable as "aesthetic theories '1 to us. I have taken the early Six Dynasties as the term inus in the discussion o f both theories and term inology. My reasons fo r doing so have p rim a rily to do w ith the nature o f Six Dynasties thought and our own expectations o f theories o f the arts. In the classical and Han periods, very lit tle , i f any, o f the discussion o f sound and music is com pletely divorced from concern w ith aesthetic value. However, u n til the Six Dynasties, aesthetic values them­ selves were not fundam ental to thinking. Moral, cosmic, and p o litic a l values were the co lla te ra l fo r aesthetic ones. The discussions o f the Six Dynasties appear to be more genuine, more sophisticated, or more compel­ lin g as theories o f a rt to contem porary readers. That is not because "aes­ th e tics" did not previously exist ；rather, i t is due to the fa c t th a t in clas­ sical and Han thought, discussions o f aesthetic values referred to other values o f underlying concern. During the Six Dynasties, discussions o f a rt were earnest, urgent, and im m ediate. They had become consciously dis­ tanced from p o litic a l and moral issues because the pursuit o f a rt offe re d escape from p o litic a l and moral problems in life . Throughout the Six Dynasties, theories o f a rt and aesthetic te rm in o l­ ogy sought to sustain and explain the a rt o f the past and also to shape the a rt o f the fu tu re . What were once p rim a rily musical theories and term s were broadened to include a ll arts w orthy o f discussion. A sense emerges th a t a rt is something more than the sum o f the various recognized genres, but also something less than a ll the achievements o f c iv iliz a tio n . A rt

requires d e fin itio n as a rt fo r the fir s t tim e and, w ith th a t d e fin itio n , a new context and new ju s tific a tio n s . The superior men o f classical tim es were masters o f the Six A rts 一the rite s, music, archery, riding, w ritin g , and com putation. The aesthetes o f the early Six Dynasties were masters o f the ch,fn ， poets, painters, calligraphers, and conversationalists. C ritic a l Term inology and Value During the Six Dynasties, term inology once closely tie d to experim enta tio n and experience was elevated to a le ve l o f abstraction. "R esonance/ "harm ony， " "re s tra in t， ” '丨 g ra v ity ， " and T,a rtfu l appeal1* formed only one set o f term s among many. Others in common use included ch'i, "w ind 11 (feng jSLj，'bones11 (ku 臂 )9 and ” blood” (Tisiieh Js- )，terms th a t became the coin o f descriptive and c ritic a l discussions o f the arts and nature. The abstractio n is in p a rt related to the le ve l o f generalization required o f m usical and other genre-specific terms before they can speak to other arts. G eneralization o f term inology required detachm ent from the p a rtic u la r concrete source. The idea o f "resonance” as applied to poetry was detached from the dem onstration o f resonance in music. ftHarmonyn as applied to poetry is detached from the experience o f harmony in music. The generalization o f term s like nharmony,n "resonance， " "g ra v ity ," "re s tra in t," and " a rtfu l appeal" does not im p ly a comparison o f surface features among music, poetry, and painting. They are, in th e ir surface features, incomparable. But they rela te to the specifics o f each form w ith in the m a trix o f its own possibilities, th a t is, to the relationships o f fo rm a l elements. Thus, in

music，harmony is the agreeable relationship between different sounds, in contrast to resonance, the relationship between id e n tical sounds. But in poetry, harmony is the agreeable relationship between d iffe re n t sounds, contrasted to rhyme, the relationship between id e n tic a l sounds.^ In English, no im m ediate comparison o f surface features is im plied in the use o f loudness" fo r music and "loudness" fo r color, or "discordance 11 fo r music and "discordance1' fo r poetic composition. The m ultigeneric uses o f such term s re la te , through th e ir fo rm a l referents, to the possibilities o f a rt and u ltim a te ly to the apprehension o f a rt; th a t is, they re la te to the feelings, the emotions, the movements o f the mind th a t are the inner correspondents o f m anifest a rt.

2

. Jao, "L ite ra ry C ritic is m and M usic," p. 4.

Before looking more closely at questions o f music, a rt ，mind, and nature, i t w ill be useful to consider the fo rm a l features o f term inology used to discuss and evaluate a rt. In summ arizing the evaluative comments o f Duke Cha, Lu Chi, and others, I have noted th a t the term inology and its usage adhere to a d istin ct pattern. Every positive value in a rt has a corres­ ponding fa ilu re or defect, sometimes expressed w ith a single term , as w ith yen : a rtfu l appeal and yen : lack o f re s tra in t, and sometimes expressed in paired term s, as in chih : stra ig h tfo rw a rd , but not chu ：overbearing. In fa c t，w ith in the m aterials surveyed in this study, i t is d iffic u lt to id e n tify an e x p lic itly desirable quality o f a rt—a v irtu e o f a rt—fo r which more is always b e tte r. D efects in a rt are excesses o f virtues. The fo rm a l stru c­ ture o f the c ritic a l term inology and the systems o f value i t expresses are either du a listic，a balanced and dynamic in te ra c tio n o f two parts (e.g., cWing ；clear and cho : turgid), or phasic, a c y c lic a l and se lf-re g u la tin g sequence o f parts (e.g., the fiv e qualities discussed above). The u ltim a te excellence o f any a rt is discussed, therefore, w ith a m e ta e ritie a l vocab­ ulary th a t addresses the relationship among basic c ritic a l values. The basic c ritic a l values, "g ra v ity " and the lik e , must themselves be in "balance" (p'ing 手 ) and must among* themselves m anifest "harm ony /1 As is the case w ith the basic c ritic a l terms, m e ta c ritic a l term s had discernible roots in experience and experim entation. Ho : harmony may have o rig in a lly referre d to an in te rv a l o f a fo u rth , one o f the fir s t harmonic expansions o f the basic fiv e tones. The blending and balancing o f the desirable qualities o f music and a rt were likened to the blending and bal­ ancing o f spices. Spices are virtuous additions to the " s t u f f o f food; they are not the food its e lf, but they are indispensable to it. The excellence of spices resides in th e ir apportionm ent. The blending o f spices was an an­ cient metaphor fo r harmony and cosmic balance ： Sing praise to fe rve n t ancestors; This benefaction, orderly and complete, Extends offerings to them , w ithout bounds, That th e ir presence may grace this place. We bring clear s a c rific ia l wine, That th e ir thoughts o f fa vo r toward us may bear fr u it. We have as w ell a soup o f harmony, W ith fla vo r both restrained and w e ll balanced .3

Shih-ching, Mao edition, no. 302. Compare this to no. 301, in which the virtues o f harmony and balance are praised in the s a c rific ia l music.

Balance in a rt, lik e balance in human feelings, is a m a tte r o f re stra in t and m inim alization. The s a c rific ia l soup is a thin soup; ritu a l music is restrained. Low volume in music is treasured because i t m inim izes stim u la tio n and is conducive to quietness o f mind. In the ritu a l z ith e r, the strings are boiled to make them s o ft and quiet. Slowness in tempo is valued fo r the same reasons. The ty p ic a l tempo o f a ch'in piece is slow to q uickening to slow again .4 P ra ctica l c ritic is m o f la te r ages re fle c ts the same inclinations, employing term s lik e "flatness” (p^ng), ” blandnessn (tan )， and "quietness" (chmg ^ ). These aesthetic qualities are re fle c te d in the ideals o f perform ance. In performance, emphasizing the e ffo rt more than the outcome, the "mere going through the motions， " is an u ltim a te achievement. Zithers w ithout strings and soundless music are most highly venerated. As the mind ad­ vances, aural s k ill improves. The mind is more responsive to subtle stim u li, which, lik e those th a t dislodge the ash from the cosmic ch'i tubes, may be inaudible. Lore emphasizing m inim alization o f performance features illu stra te s th a t s e lf-c u ltiv a tio n or social regulation attained through the effort of the performance rivals in importance the quality of the musie and its influence. Early m ythology associates rhythm w ith social regulation and the ritu a l dance w ith the movement o f individuals w ith in the constraints o f social organization. Music unites socially in the same way th a t the drums assure concord among the moving dancers. R itu a l dance music is an image comparable to the da rtin g o f minnows or the precision fo rm a tio n o f fly in g geese fo r discussions o f the individual in an orderly society .5 When the rules are fu lly internalized，a ll parties move in accord, requiring no visible re stra in ts, demarcations, or sign-posts. In the ideal society, a ll members have the aural perspicacity to be aware always o f the regulating drums. I t is in this regard th a t the chrin was associated paronom astically w ith chin : re stra in t. Numerous comments describe the salutary e ffe c ts o f quietude and peace o f mind attained through ch'in practice, through the exercise o f re stra in t. The atta in m e n t o f social, sp iritu a l, or em otional tra n q u ility is often expressed as an end o f music in discussions of

Liang, Chinese Chfin 9 p. 229. Minnows are invoked as an image o f effo rtle ss societal harmony by Chuang-tzu in his conversation w ith H ui-tzu while the tw o philosophers stood over the Hao R iver and mused about the pleasures o f the fish. See Watson, Chuang-tzu, pp. 188-89.

performance discipline and a ffe c tiv e power, but the prescription to bring about this result varies from culture to culture and is not always through a process o f re stra in t. In his essay "S tyle, Grace, and In fo rm a tio n in P rim itiv e A r t ,11 Bateson describes a rt as "c o rre c tiv e 11 in nature, noting th a t i t "has a positive func­ tio n in m aintaining what I c a ll 'wisdom,' i.e., in co rre cting a too-purposive view o f life and making the view more system ic.11® The description o f an ideal performance is a statem ent on the dynamics o f this co rre ctive pro­ cess. W ithout notable exception in early China, the dynamics o f the cor­ re ctive process are seen as d ire c t and a ctive , not co n tra ry and re a ctive . That is，an integrated state o f mind is achieved by communion w ith an integrated and tranq u ilizin g a rt, rather than by exposure to e xcita tio n and catharsis. No premium is attached to the experience o f r,fear and p ity '1; there is no view o f a rt as a surrogate fo r the p ainful experiences o f life . Whereas h isto rica l narrative does include the record o f the cruel, unjust, and im m oral as contrary examples, there is nothing to be gained from listening to the music o f Cheng, which in in tric a c y had gone "to o fa r," and listening to the "M ulberry Grove1' could bring on im m ediate disaster. This is not to argue th a t, in practice, music is not varied and does not command a fu ll range o f emotions and responses. But in theory, the ideal state o f mind is achieved by inducing its a c tiv ity le ve l below norm al or ambient levels, not by excitin g i t to higher levels o f a c tiv ity and then p e rm ittin g i t to return to the norm al or ambient a fte r a perform ance "clim a x." The voice o f the chfin is lite ra lly below ambient sound levels; one must be unusually quiet and a tte n tiv e to hear i t and engage in appreciation o f its music. The history o f keyboard instrum ents in the West is one o f technical advances tow ard greater volume, from the panteleon and clavichord to the "fo rte -p ia n o ” o f Mozart's day to the e le c tric piano o f today. In the history o f the ch'in, the opposite seems to have occurred, w ith large, m u ltip le s trin g instrum ents evolving tow ard an ideal o f sm all，sparsely stringed, and even stringless ones. Byongki Hwang has noted th a t although both plucked and bowed strin g instrum ents exist in the West and in East Asia, they are accorded opposite status. He argues th a t the preference fo r bowed strings in the West is related to the desire to control the length and volume o f tone and achieve a larger voice. About plucked strings, he w rites:

Bateson, A n Ecology o f Mind, p. 147.

7 See pp. 22，88, 93，137-38.

In a plucked s trin g instrum ent, on the other hand, only the o riginal production o f tone is determ ined by the player, a fte r which the tone exists re la tiv e ly independent o f the perform er (much as a child, who, a t b irth , achieves an existence independent o f its mother). The tone gradually becomes so fte r, and the perform er cannot extend i t or co ntrol its rate o f dim inution except by modern electronic devices. There is no d e fin ite perceptible boundary between the end o f sound and the beginning o f silence—in essence, the tone becomes silence, and those w ith keen ears, situated close to the sound and in otherwise quiet surroundings, can fo llo w this process longer than those w ith average or d u ll ears or who are in less favorable circumstances fo r listening.^ Hwang!s comparison o f s trin g instrum ent preferences and his remarks on the skills o f listening provide a contem porary context fo r the Po Ya and Chung Tzu-ch'i theme. S k illfu l listening involves fo llo w in g a tone from a u d ib ility to in a u d ib ility , and the most c ritic a l moment, the c lim a c tic moment, is th a t point in tim e which hangs between sound and silence. Ideally, the listener's mind (and the liste n e r may be both the perform er and the audience) is brought to tra n q u ility at th a t point. Skills fo r liste n in g are no less essential than skills fo r perform ing. The act o f listening has as great—perhaps greater—a p o te n tia l fo r genius as does perform ing. Music masters Chiian and K'uang are heroes o f tales in which they only liste n . A comparable notion was adapted fo r other theories o f a rt. W riting early in the sixth century, Liu Hsieh composed a section on "tone-w orthiness" as the penultim ate chapter in The L ite ra ry Mind and the Carving o f Dragons (chap. 48). Liu Hsieh alludes to the Po Ya and Chung Tzu-ch'i sto ry in arguing th a t the person w orthy o f appreciating a rt is rare, th a t the appre­ cia tio n o f a rt is d iffic u lt, and th a t the v irtu e o f a rt is realized only in its appreciation. ,TFor i t is said th a t the orchid, which is the most fra g ra n t thing in the country, w ill give fo rth its fu ll scent only when worn."^ Early Chinese lore about w histling illu stra te s the great power o f m inim al music and the p o te n tia l e ffe c ts o f the subtlest e ffo r t .10 W histling o Byongki Hwang, "Instrum ents and A esthetics in Korean and Western Musie， " in "Notes to Music from Korea, Vol. 1：The Kayakeum 11 (Honolulu ：East-West Center Press, 1965)， p. 7. Wen-hsin tiao-lung, p. 373. For re flections on w histling and a review o f the etym ology o f the word, see Holzman, P o e try and P o litic s , pp. 150-52. An exact translation fo r

is a m inim al performance act. It requires no instrum ent. It involves no words or thoughts; i t does not use the larynx. Thus, i t is ch'ing : clear/un­ voiced, not cho : turgid/voiced. It is chHng : high, not cho : low. The earliest sustained discussion o f w histling, Chin w rite r Ch!eng-kung Suifs 成 公 ^ "Rhyme-prose on W histling '1 (nH siao-fun 破） ，says: [W histling] harmonizes kung and the ye llo w -b e ll p itch in the Clear Chiao mode.11 It elaborates the shang and y ii tones w ith the flo w in g chih tone. It blows the wandering clouds about the clear heavens and assembles sustaining winds fo r a distance o f ten thousand li. Even when the song is over and the echoes have died away, lingering tones continue th e ir play. This is tru ly the u ltim a te in self-so-ness. N ot in im ita tio n o f the s ilk strings or the bamboo pipes, the sounds o f whis­ tlin g are not substitutes fo r other things and they employ no m a te ria l 1o aids. They come d ire c tly from the body, near at hand. Relying on 1^ the mind, riding upon the ch,f, the lips themselves become a round, and from the mouth, the tones issue fo rth . Things are touched and moved according to th e ir class.

whi'stKng has been a problem fo r translators, in part because the word was used rather broadly in tra d itio n a l China and in p a rt because i t is d iffic u lt to imagine exemplary Chinese aesthetes, e.g., Su Tung-p'o, expressing th e ir profound appreciation fo r nature by standing on a h ill and w histling. According to the ,,Hsiao-chih， ,| the word hsiao refers to any highly a rticu la te d , but unvoiced human sound. This d e fin itio n would not exclude what we ca ll "w hispering," but there is no indication th a t whispering was included in the Chinese sense. 11 The Clear Chiao is a tone and a mode. According to H a n -fe i-tzu , Music Master K*uang declared i t to be the u ltim a te mode in g ra v ity o f feeling (see Watson, H art-fei-tzu, p. 55; Watson translates i t as "pure chueh11). L ie h -tzu reiterates this association w ith Music Master K!uang (,TTTangwenn M 間 ) . I t is described in the H uai-nan-tzu as the "sound o f w hite snow" (2,4a, 6.1a)，and the nL u -li-c h ih n o f the Chin-shu describes i t as a perform ance system w ith kung a t the ku-hsi p itch . The nC lear Chiao" is also a name given to the ch'in o f the Y ellow Emperor. 12

A reference to Fu Hsi， s discovery of the hexagrams, reported in the I-

ching, "Ta-chuan," chiian 2， v. 2. See p_ 53. 13 In descriptions o f w histling, the pun between chfii and chfu 曲 : song is widespread. 14 Tfu-shu c h i-c^e n g j "H siao-fu,n 73.46a.

细

: winding/round

A more extensive range o f whistling* lore is collected in the ,TH siao-chih,n a manual assembled during the T'ang by Sun Kuang 衫 ■ In the preface, Sun w rites: When chfi stirs in the th ro a t and is voiced, we ca ll i t "speech." When i t stirs about the tongue, and is unvoiced, we c a ll i t "w histlin g ." The voiced act o f speech is appropriate fo r human a ffa irs and can reach our nature and feelings. The unvoiced act o f whistling- can move ghosts, reach sp irits , and is undying. Speech issued fo rth s k ill­ fu lly w ill have response fo r one thousand li. W histling issued fo rth s k illfu lly w ill marshal the a tte n tio n o f the ten thousand s p irits .15 W histling lore resembles chfin lore in its particulars. The technique is described and the pieces notated by reference to the movements o f the th ro a t and mouth, not the sounds per se.^^ There are tw elve such move­ ments, related, n aturally, to the tw elve pitches. There are fiv e ,fg re a tnesses,1' Vai 米 , synonymous w ith the fiv e tones and related to the five virtues. The tunes themselves are e n title d as nature vignettes: MF le e ting Cloud," "T iger in a Deep Ravine， ” "Cicada on a T a ll W illow ， ” ” N ight Demon in a Lonely Wood,'1 "Dragon D roning,M and so fo rth .18 The images include the audible and the soundless, and the verbal descriptions th a t form the bulk o f the notation make reference to movements in nature suggested by the piece. The power o f whistled music derives d ire c tly from natural powers. An earthquake song attests to the p o te n tia l fo r te rre s tria l movement. It does not necessarily cause the earth to move, but i t embodies the ch'i of

15

The ,rHsiao-chihn is found in the same chijan (73) o f the Vu-shu ch i-

chreng as the ” H siao-fu•丨 1 The quotation is p. 45a; fo r another translation, see Edwards, "P rinciples o f W histling," p. 218. The "Hsiao-chih" defines a set o f d is tin c t a rtic u la to ry means fo r producing w histling sounds in a s tra ig h tfo rw a rd and reproducible manner. These include apico-palatal, apieo-alveolar, apico-dental, and both rounded and advanced b ila b ia l postures. Combinations are also in -

cluded, e.g., apico-palatal and advanced bilabial for the production of an intensely "sw irlin g ” sound. The fiv e "greatnesses ,11 also called the fiv e "colorings /1 wu-se 支含j ，are contrasted to the fiv e "slightnesses," shao 少 , the fo rm e r having yang a ttrib u te s, the la tte r y in . nHsiao-chih,!I p. 46a. Edwards, ” Principles o f W histling," pp. 222-25.

the earth and congeals the yin, the very events that occur during the natu­ ral process.1-^ Apropos of this congruence, the "Hsiao-chih11takes note of the importance of inner cultivation: Confucius "transmitted and did not create."^^ That is to say, the immortal transmits the music of Kuang Ch'eng[-tzu] 像 六 子 and 91 Wu Kuang“ in order to refine his nature and spirit and to expand upon the Way. It is not to achieve some standard in the producing of sounds and tones! For effectiveness in the movement and response of the myriad things, each according to its own, nothing approaches the musical tones. As for the tones, [with whistling] the sages have achieved the ultimate. Be it flying or running, the birds or the beasts, whistling is the final need. 22 Juan Chi was renowned for his whistling as well as his chfin playing. The l,Hsiao-chihn relates the details of a widely known story about him. Juan Chi was a skilled whistler and heard about the immortal of Su-men Mountain. Thinking himself of comparable skill to the im­ mortal, Juan Chi went off for a visit to the mountain. The immortal just sat quietly, with dishevelled hair tossed about his shoulders, while Juan Chi bowed repeatedly and made polite inquiries about the immortalrs well-being. He repeated his salutations again, and repeated them again. The immortal’s expression remained completely un­ changed, and he made no response to Juan Chi at all. So Juan Chi whistled several dozen long notes and departed. Guessing when Chi had not traveled too far off, the immortal began to whistle in the Clear Chiao mode. He issued four or five tones. Chi only sensed that all of the trees and plants of the forests and moun­ tains had a different sound about them. But in a very short while, powerful winds blew up and a fierce thunderstorm burst forth. When this ended, phoenixes and peacocks flew forth from every direction in greater numbers than could be counted. Chi was at first frightened； Edwards, "Principles of Whistling/1p_ 225; and "Hsiao-chih,11p. 45b.

別 Analects, chap. 7: nShu-erhn 迷 而 , v. 1. Two figures from high antiquity who are ranked among the great whis­ tlers of all times. Wu Kuang was noted above for having extraordinary ears (p. 35). 22 "Hsiao-chih," p. 45b.

^

then he was delighted. A fte r he returned, he trie d to w rite i t down, managing to get perhaps tw o o f ten parts. In the w histling lore, the sage perform s the m inim al music by w histling. His w histling issues no sound, but by i t he conducts the sounds o f nature, the musical powers o f nature. I t exem plifies the principle o f nonpurposeful action, by which a ll things can be done. #

C o rrela tion and S ignification The extent to which systems and theories o f correlation were involved in discussions o f a rt profoundly influenced the nature o f aesthetic theory. To what degree i t influenced a rt and music its e lf is a complex, yet im po rtant question. The contributions o f c o rre la tive thinking to aesthetic theory were most e x p lic it in the classical and early Han periods. The c o rre la tive schemes were thought to be comprehensive. In th e ir tem poral configurations, they correlated to cosmogonic, h isto rica l, and calendric processes, past，present, and fu tu re . In th e ir spatial configurations, they correlated to the center and a ll directions, the three tie rs o f heaven, earth, and man, the near a t hand and the grand u ltim a te . Hence, to a ll synchronic and diachronic lim its , the correlations sought to explain natural phenomena; human in stitu tio n s ；individual fates, emotions, and sensual experience; and purely in te lle c tu a l renderings o f cosmic stru ctu re , i.e., the numbers, graphs, phases, counters, and so fo rth . C orrelations o f sensual experiences were highly a rticulated and included the fiv e tones, colors, flavors, smells, and shapes, and the sense organs, the ears, eyes, mouth, and nose. The proposed re la tio n between cosmic and mundane e n titie s gave rise to an idea of cosm ically sanctioned value in mundane en titie s. That in turn gave rise to an idea o f cosmic absolutes. In the case o f sound, there were absolutely true pitches and intervals and absolute significances a ttrib u te d to them. Unchanging elements were combined w ith ever-changing elements, insuring both co n tin u ity and constant change. The harmony o f music depended com pletely on achievement o f the absolute pitches.

23

. . "H siao-chih， n pp. 45b-46a. The same passage is translated in Edwards, "P rinciples o f W histling,n p. 226. A sim ila r sto ry is translated in M ather ，New A ccount o f Tales o f the World, pp. 331-32; and Holzman, P o e try and P o litics, pp. 150-51.

The correlative themes constrained human action, which in a c tu a lity was guided by particulars o f the systems. E ffo rt was consumed in testing and ve rify in g correspondences on the one hand and in the exp lo itatio n o f correlations fo r p a rticu la r purposes on the other. Choices which we m ight otherwise regard as individual in a rt, a musical mode, a poetic theme, or the subject o f a painting or sculpture were p o te n tia lly constrained by im m ediate and rem ote corre la tive concerns. A ritu a l musical performance around the w inte r solstice would employ modes positioned at the y e llo w bell p itch in order to fa c ilita te the passage from yin to yang and in itia te a new cycle o f life .2 4 The various arts had, in e ffe c t, extensive external conventions governing content. C o rrelative thinking p o te n tia lly exerted a more subtle influence on s ig n ifica tio n and the perception o f the nature o f sig n ific a tio n . The co rre la tiv e schemes encompassed both the media o f arts and a ll possible external referents. A p a rticu la r pitch had associated w ith i t a length, numbers, volume, a season and hour, a dire ctio n , a fla v o r, a color, sm ell, shape, and feel, a sensory system, an in te rn a l physiological system，a star—in short, one o f the fiv e phases and a ll its correspondents. By v irtu e o f the co rre la tions, the a ffe c tiv e value o f a pitch was in stantiated in several broad areas, most o f which were not obviously related to music. Kung was the m inister; the yellow bell represented New Yearfs tim e ; yellow was the color o f the earth. R itu a l music was program music. Its content was highly constrained by e x p lic it rules and its re fe re n tia l significance was apparent to a ll parties to the perform ance. Modes at the ye llo w -b e ll meant the New Year; pre­ sumably, when played out o f season they recalled the New Year. Between arts, the correlations established e x p lic it synaesthetic pairs. The shang tone was the color w hite，yu the color black, and chih the color red. These associations would have been internalized by those who subscribed in te lle c tu a lly to the c o rre la tive schemes. The extent to which such correlates can be perceived as s tru c tu ra l bases fo r works o f a rt has been demonstrated; fo r example, studies o f the Dream o f the Red Chamber have described the stru cture o f the novel in term s o f the fiv e phases and

Derk Bodde, Festivals o f Classical China (Hong Kong: Chinese U niversity o f Hong Kong and Princeton U n ive rsity Press, 1975)， p. 178.

yin and y a n g .^

C ertain chfin tunes reveal a sim ila r in fo rm in g presence of

correlations. N ot only did c o rre la tive thinking define the p a rticu la r re la ta in various systems, but what was believed to be the basis fo r c o rre la tiv e relationships served as w ell to explain the basis fo r aesthetic response. By* recourse to experim entation in sym pathetic resonance and the lik e , subscri­ bers to correla tive thinking sought to explain how the media o f the arts related to natural and human phenomena and acted upon them . These explorations o f the re fe re n tia l and in flu e n tia l relationship between a rt and life involved personal feeling, social order, ritu a l events, and cosmic pheno­ mena. The conception o f a demonstrable connection between a rt and life , expressed in metaphors about ying : correspondence, canalisation^ o£ ch'i, and congruence o f m ental and cosmic order, inclined the conception o f a rt its e lf toward one o f an invariably program m atic nature. Contemporary discussions o f aesthetic experience speak o f i t as a process of emergence, a coming in to focus, the apprehension o f resem­ blance and order discovered from apparent d is s im ila rity and disorder. In definitions o f a rt based on consideration o f fo rm a l c rite ria , both the crea­ tiv e act and the act o f appreciation involve apprehension o f p a tte rn and order. The object its e lf is patterned; its coherence derives from a le ve l o f redundancy. Irrespective o f what vocabulary is used to describe the in te r­ action o f the object and the mind, be i t "in sp ira tio n ," "in sig h t," "discovery， " or "revelation," theories in the psychology o f a rt address the process by which the pattern or redundancy is apprehended. The claim fo r "em er­ gence" is predicated on a b e lie f th a t apprehension in the aesthetic act is，in part, an apprehension o f the p o te n tia l fo r resemblance, pa tte rn , and or­ der. As crucia l as what is known is what is unknown. The p o te n tia l fo r aesthetic e ffe c t exists when there is something as ye t unrealized or un­ known, Borges stated this observation concisely: Music, states o f happiness, mythology, faces belabored by tim e ， ce rta in tw ilig h ts and ce rta in places tr y to te ll us something, or have

25 See Andrew Plaks, Archetype and A lle g o ry in Dream o f the Red Chamber (Princeton: Princeton U n ive rsity Press, 1976). Plaks coins the

terms "multiple periodicity" and ”bipolar complementarity" to describe the fiv e phases and yin and yang when generalized as s tru c tu ra l ele­ ments in the novel.

said something we should not have missed, or are about to say some­ thing; this imminence o f a revelation which does not occur is, per­ haps, the aesthetic p h e n o m e n o n

• 沉

E xploring the concept o f a rt in early China, the question arises as to the nature o f the aesthetic act when, in theory, resemblances between a ll things in the world, be they apparent or not, and the overall order into which they f i t are e x p lic itly revealed in a comprehensive scheme o f corres­ pondences th a t is p rio r to and independent o f the aesthetic a ct. For a concrete example, consider Wallace Stevens's description o f the aesthetic process in his "Anecdote o f the Jar": I placed a ja r in Tennessee, And round i t was, upon a h ill. It made the slovenly wilderness Surround th a t h ill. The wilderness rose up to it, 27 And sprawled around, no longer w ild. The ja r, the h ill, the view, and whatever is ,!aroundTI are revealed to have a common q u a lity o f "roundness" and "aroundness.n The poetry is the dis­ covery o f th a t resemblance, th a t orderliness, and the pleasure o f th a t disOQ covery. What alte ra tio n of that poetic process would be caused i f both the poet and the reader had w ith in th e ir minds a chart o f ,froundnessn correlates including jars, hills, and views? There are a number o f extra ­ ordinary examples o f highly c o rre la tive lite ra ry works in early China. For example, Chang Heng’s Hhyme-prose about M editations on the M ystery makes use o f images th a t correlate to the hexagrams and commentaries o f the Book o f Changes; and i t requires reference to the Book o f Changes fo r explication not only o f the images themselves, but o f the sequence of images in the poems as w ell. That is, the poetic syntax correlates to the 9ft

Quoted from a b rie f note on the Ch!in emperor Shih-huangTs w all, enti­ tled MThe Wall and the Books,'1 in I/ai)yri>Uhs: Selected Stories and O ther W ritings, ed. Donald A. Yates and James E. Irby (New Y ork ：New D irections, 1962), pp. 186-88. 27 Wallace Stevens, C ollected Poems (New Y ork: A lfre d A . Knopf, 1954)， p. 76. OQ ° Stevens w rites, "The eye does not beget in resemblance. It sees. But the mind begets in resemblance, as the painter begets in representatio n .'1 The Necessary Angel, p. 76.

transform ations from hexagram to hexagram as defined by the Book o f Changes.^

Whether or not the e x p lic it a rtic u la tio n o f correlations in any sense altered the p o ten tial fo r "discovery 11 in aesthetic experience, the awareness o f and interest in co rre la tive process provided a basis fo r discussing key and d e fin itiv e issues in the nature o f a rt. W ithout embarking on a general discussion o f epistemology th a t would exceed the bounds o f this essay, I would like to raise an epistem ological issue th a t is essential fo r in te rpre tin g much o f the theory and metaphor th a t the Chinese used fo r aes­ th e tic discussion. There are many dualistic themes in early Chinese c iv ili­ zation, by which I mean the various ra m ifica tio n s o f yin and yang or sim ila r fo rm a l constructs .30 Some are obvious to any student o f China, e.g., the use o f yin and yang in cosmological speculation, in Book o f Changes d ivinatio n, or in the in te rp re ta tio n o f m eteorological portents. Others are less obvious, e.g., the validation o f oracle bones in divination by the scribing o f com plem entary and sym m etrical positive and negative charges. Dualism is a pervasive feature in early Chinese comprehension o f the cosmos, o f cosmic process, o f the mind, and o f m ental process. I have already noted the dualistic structu re o f evaluative term inology. The im portance o f dualistic thinking is also illu stra te d in the linked definitions o f ritu a l and music，which were best defined as a pair. The m ental a c tiv itie s suggested by ritu a l and music, separation (d istinction and selection) on the one hand and union (association and integration) on the other, together describe the to ta lity o f thought processes, i.e ., "s p littin g " and "lum ping." In the discourse and lore about a rt and culture there is a persistent topos o f diplopia, a doubleness o f vision in which pairs o f things are sim ul­ taneously seen， th e ir parallels perceived, th e ir s tru c tu ra l s im ila ritie s apprehended. Ts'ang Chieh is said to have had four eyes; one set looks up, the other looks down, p e rm ittin g him to apprehend sim ultaneously the correlations o f heaven and earth .^1 Fu Hsi looks up and then looks down

^

Hou Han-shu, pp. 1914-39. Needham, Science and C ivilisa tio n in China ，2:273-78; and Fung, & Chinese Philosophy, 2:7-32. Jonathon Chaves, nThe Legacy o f Ts'ang Chieh ：The W ritten Word as Magic， ” O riental A r t Magazine 23， no. 2 (Summer 1977): 202-3. Note especially the representation o f Tsrang Chieh from the I-nan tombs in Shantung. A number o f ceram ic images o f Ts'ang Chieh illu s tra tin g his "quadrocular" capacity have been found and dated to the early Han.

From the S a n -ts^i t'u-hui.

before he transcribes the trigram s w ith w hich he schematized the relations among a ll things. W riting, trigram s, calendars, and other systems o f meaning and order are discovered, according to the mythologies, by those who look tw o ways. Looking tw o ways means not focusing on things per se, th a t is, on th e ir visible a ttrib u te s, th e ir essences, or th e ir ideals, but ra th e r on the relationship between things, th e ir resemblances and d istin ctio ns .32 Bateson stresses the c e n tra lity o f relations in nonrational psychological processes: " It is probably an error to th in k o f dreams, myths, and a rt as being about any one m a tte r other than relations .1'33 Wallace Stevens places the issue o f resemblance at the center o f poetic process: ,!The study o f the a c tiv ity o f resemblance is an approach to the understanding o f poetry. Poetry is a satisfying o f the desire fo r resemblance .'1 "R elations '丨 and "resemblance” are more palatable words fo r us in the di'scussion o f a rt than "correspondence" and ce rta in ly more palatable than "c o rre la tio n ." They speak to less predeterm ination o f the re la ta , less d e fin itio n o f th e ir sim ila ritie s, and more p o te n tia l fo r discovery. These are differences in degree, however, and a ll four term s address the in te g ra tin g nature o f the aesthetic act, the uniting o f tw o things in to one th a t is the pleasure o f a rt. This feature o f aesthetic process, re la tin g , resembling, corresponding, or correlating, narrowed to the compass o f a "device" and used to describe the a ffe c tiv e potentials o f a rt，is called "synaesthesia." Given the epistem ological background o f early Chinese th inking on a rt, I would argue th a t such thinking was ch a ra cte ris tic a lly synaesthetic, the term taken in a broad and fundam ental sense (Greek sun ：together + aisthanesthai ：to perceive). In th e ir study The Foundations o f A esthetics, a book in part inspired by a reading o f the Confucian D octrine o f the Mean, Ogden, Richards, and Wood lis t synaesthesia as a basic principle o f a r t .35 Described broadly, a synaesthetic theory o f a rt focuses on the com m u ta b ility

oo

The classical exorcist, fang-hsiang-shih 4 相 氏 ，is described in the C hou-li as having four eyes and is portrayed w ith four eyes in a number o f Han figurines. See Bodde, F e stiva ls ， pp. 77-80, 116-20; and Berthold Laufer, Chinese C lay Figures (Chicago: Field Museum o f N atural H istory, 1914)， p. 199, pis. x v -x v ii. Bateson, A n Ecology o f Mind, p. 150. % Stevens, The Necessary A n g e lt p. 37. Ogden, Richards, and Wood, Foundations o f A esthetics, p. 21. Synaesthesia is rule 16 in th e ir cla ssifica tio n o f nThe Senses o f Beauty."

o f sensations, the exchangeability o f objects and images, the in te rtra n s la ta b ility o f meaning from genre to genre, and, fin a lly , the natural in te rpenetration o f a rt and life . A synaesthetic theory o f a rt describes as the end o f a rt a sense o f harmony, equilibrium , and in te g ra tio n , attended by the pleasure th a t Stevens described. A synaesthetic notion o f a rt is evident in a synoptic review o f Chinese theories and lore. The idea o f chfi is as ubiquitous in the texts as ch'i was alleged to be in the cosmos. Being configured, chfi either created or re fle cte d s im ila rity in what were apparently unconnected or dissim ilar e n titie s and events. The result o f this s im ila rity , which had both tem poral and spatial dimensions, was cosmic accord. Ch'i was the means by which a moment o f cosmos, mind, and a rt were in te rre la te d . In early China, one 07 finds evidence o f this perception o f chH in discussions o f a rt, o f dreams, and o f lif e ， The role o f ch'i in a ll arts allows fo r a degree o f in te rtra n s la ta b ility and the p o te n tia l fo r harmonious adm ixture ：words and music, calligraphy and poetry, poetry on paintings, paintings on zithers, inscriptions on bells, anim al sculpture on chime stands, and the lik e . Mythologies o f the w ritin g and divinational systems emphasize th a t such systems embody patterns o f

36 Bateson, using psychoanalytic term inology, w rites: "In p rim ary process the things or persons are usually not id e n tified , and the focus o f the discourse is upon the relationships which are asserted to obtain between them . This is only another way o f saying th a t the discourse o f prim ary process is m etaphoric. A metaphor retains unchanged the relationship which i t 'illu stra te s' while substituting other things or persons fo r the re la ta ." An Ecology o f Mind, pp. 139-40. 37 The la te Han skeptic-philosopher Wang Fu made the follow ing 1 observation about dreaming: "Dreams o f hazy, rainy days make one bored and stu pified. Dreams o f sunny, baked-dry days make one confused and vague. Dreams o f b itte r cold make one b itte r and grave. Dreams o f great winds make one breezy and flig h ty . These are called 'chfi-m oved dreams.' 11 C h'ien-fu lim, "Meng-lielV 丨夢 $'J [Varieties o f dream s], 7.1b. See, fo r example, the role o f musie and dance in the keen-edged butchery o f Cook Ting. Watson, Chuang-tzu, pp. 50-51. What Watson translates as "p e rfe c t rhythm ” is c h u n g -y in 、 寸^§ , to be "rig h t on the tone."

nature. They are, therefore, considered iconic, not a rb itra ry or m erely conventional systems o f signs. W riting about music embodies m usical qualities, making i t an in cip ie n t m ultim edia presentation, ra th e r than a singular textual-sem antic representation. For example, musical discussions in the H uai-nan-tzu are rich in onomatopoeia and reduplicated term s ； in the Spring and Autum n Artnals o f Mr. L i i f technical arguments are marked w ith long cadences o f th re e - and fo u r-ch a ra cte r phrases. The fiv e musical voices described in the "Book o f Music" are expressed w ith onomatopoeia th a t m im ics the instrum ents themselves: ^ e n g /c h ie n 娘 (GSR 1252) fo r bells ，^ ie n g /c M n g 格 (GSR 832) fo r stones, *a r/a i 束 (GSR 550) fo r zithers, *glam /lan (GSR 609) fo r flu te s, and *^wan/huan 謂 (GSR 158) fo r drums. The rhyme-prose pieces w ritte n in profusion during the Han and early Six Dynasties were fille d w ith onomatopoeia and showed a marked preference fo r musical subjects, subjects th a t included not only instrum ents and performances, but noisy insects, lik e the cicada, and noisy things, lik e w aterfalls, as w ell. The texts strove to provide a measure o f the sensual experience o f hearing the sounds about which they w rote. The p ro c liv ity o f an a rtfu l te x t to be "presentational" as w e ll as "representatio n a l" becomes a norm al feature in la te r w ritin g , found, fo r example, in theories o f poetry w ritte n in poetry. The satisfaction o f the desire fo r resemblance is expressed in the yi/eh : music and lo : pleasure homographic pun. The pun, which its e lf conjoins the senses o f music and pleasure throughout early discussions, invites a retranslation o f the key utterance on music in the "Book o f M usic," v iz ” yueh-Vung, "music unites,,T as lo-t,ung，"take pleasure in resemblances .'1

Music and R itu a l The d ia le ctic tension between the definitions o f music and ritu a l found throughout early Han texts calls a tte n tio n to both s im ila ritie s and differences perceived in th e ir natures and functions. "Music unites that which is the same; ritu a l distinguishes th a t which is d iffe re n t.1' Discussions o f ritu a l are parallel to those o f music and are in no sense external to the concept o f a rt. There are shared values. Both music and ritu a l prize

m in im alizatio n and prize re stra in t, and both emphasize the im portance o f the e ffo rt ra th e r than the outcome. Both music and ritu a l address the tw in concerns o f s e lf-c u ltiv a tio n and social order, appropriately contextualized in the prevailing cosmic order. Discussions o f music resort to analogy w ith other elements in the rite s, e.g., the s a c rific ia l soup； and music was its e lf an instrum ent in the proper and e ffe c tiv e conduct o f the rite s —the c o n tro llin g drums and the rhythm o f the dancers. In the concept o f ya, proprieties o f both ritu a l and music were closely associated, and from that association the aesthetic ideal o f ya in regard to music emerged. In a v a rie ty o f form ulations, music and the rite s played coordinated roles in the achievement o f the ideal life and the ideal state o f mind. When issues o f individual mind are brought to the surface in discussions o f a rt, the re stra in t and cu ltiva tio n o f emotion is the expressed goal, ju s t as i t was in connection w ith the rite s when social concerns dominated the discus­ sions. Music and rite s are principal issues in the investigation o f human emotions. P a rtic u la rly in the Six Dynasties, em otion its e lf was widely discussed. In the prevalent line o f debate, the question was raised whether the sage had emotions, the sage being pursued as a model o f how ordinary men m ight deal w ith th e ir emotions. The em otional content or p o te n tia l o f a rt was then raised in this context. Ho Yen argued th a t the sage was devoid o f feelings, but Wang Pi d iffe re d .40 Wang Pi expressed confidence th a t emotions could be communicated, but Y in Jung 牧每虫 d iffe re d .41 The issues were combined in discussions o f music and the arts to which the best thinkers put th e ir minds. The Shih-shuo hsirt~yii describes a journey o f the pow erful Chin m inister Wang Tao, who, when crossing the Yangtze R iver, deigned to discuss only three subjects, one o f which was the joyless and sorrowless nature o f sound.42 Even a fte r the discussion o f musie was removed from a social con­ te x t, music retained a ritu a l dimension. A fte r the fa ll o f the Han, ya no longer referred d ire c tly to the orthodox perform ance o f a s a c rific ia l rite , but the achievement o f ya in music was s till via ritu a l reenactm ent. ChHn tunes were not pieces o f music but were prescriptions fo r movement,

Their positions in this debate were recorded by P'ei Sung-chih in his com m entary on the San-kuo chih and are redacted in Ch'Oan Shang-ku wen, comp. Yen K To-chiin, p. 1301. Fung, Chinese Philosophyt 2:185-86. Mather, New Account o f Tales o f the W orld, p. 102.

fitt in g closely the Han d e fin itio n o f li : ritu a l, which the d ictio n ary Explaining the Graphs and E xplicating T heir Combinations defines as !,[p re scribed] steps or paces." Performance o f chfin pieces, by v irtu e o f the expressed content o f the tune, was ofte n a re ite ra tiv e act, p o rtraying the performance act of a previous ch'in master, the movement o f a dragon in the clouds, or the movement o f a tortoise craw ling from the w ater. "Alas! The O rchid" ("I-lan 11 靖 蘭 ）is said to have been perform ed by Confucius upon his retu rn to Lu a fte r being rejected fo r employment. Traveling through a secluded valley, he happened upon a single orchid flourishing in its loneliness. When perform ing the piece, there should prevail a sense o f reenacting the disciplined response o f Confucius, through a reenactm ent o f his tuning, his fingerings, and his appreciation o f the orchid. The skilled Player relives the emotional processes of the sage. The tune embodies the model fo r its own appreciation. In the Chfin -ts ’a o ，a ll the "scores" are verbal descriptions o f how the tune was composed, or, in a c tu a lity , firs t perform ed. Each score begins w ith the title , which is follow ed by a b rie f intro duction o f the composer. The body o f the score then describes the circumstances o f the tune's com position, usually a situ a tio n o f some duress for* the composer.幻 i t is what Lu Chi described when he w rote, "In making an axe handle by c u ttin g wood w ith an axe, the model is indeed near at hand .”44 A remarkable tune e n title d lfWine Madness" ("Chiu-k'uang 11 姨支) , associated w ith Juan Chi, includes a coda su b title d "The Sound o f an Im m o rta l V om iting Wine" (nHsien-jen tUi-chiu shengn ■ {山 K 臂■ )， which has been described by a contem porary chrin player and scholar as a "h u m o ristica lly stylized im ita tio n o f the sound o f a person vom iting, ob­ tained through an appropriate use o f glissandi and tre m o li：1^

43 Ch^m-ch^ chi-c^eng, pp. 740-75. The score fo r nI-la n " is found on p. 741.

44 Lu Chi, W en-fu9 trans. ChTen Shih-hsiang ，in A nthology o f Chinese L ite ra tu re , ed. C y ril Birch (New Y ork ： Grove Press, 1965; Evergreen Paperbacks, 1967)， p. 204. 45 Liang, "Neo-Taoist Im plications," pp. 26-27. Liang notes th a t the earliest known edition o f the piece is in the Ming chfin co lle ctio n , the Shen-ch'i pi-p'u o f Chu Ch'uan 木 權 (A.D. 1376-1448). See C h 'in -fu , pp. 109-219. This song is found on pp. 129-30. The in tro d u ctio n to MWine Madness” illu stra te s the extent to which Juan Chi's memory was sim plified and idealized in subsequent centuries o f ch'in lore:

There is a pronounced tendency for discussions of music to draw attention away from the objects and audible events and to seek definitive qualities in the act. The highly regarded aesthetic act, like the highly regarded ritual act, is one that is properly performed, though not necessar­ ily intellectually understood. Both the ritual aspect of a musical perfor­ mance and the musical facet of ritual are aids to proper performance. Classical Chinese thinkers of various persuasions made a d istin ctio n be­ tween knowing how to do something and knowing about doing something.

The former was always considered superior to the latter. Interest in the la tte r could, in fa c t, impede success w ith regard to the f o r m e r . 祁 A rt and Cosmos The analogy between musical harmony and cosmic harmony is the most central association found in the theory and lore. Harmony is a perva­ sive theme throughout the classical texts. The Book o f Odes says that eating medicinal plantain creates "harmony and balance permitting the lady to joyfully bear her child."47 a central and recurrent metaphor in the Book o f Documents fo r the virtues o f the Chou kings was th e ir a b ility to harmo­ nize nabove and below .11 The Tales o f the States describes the m utually

generative feature of harmony, nthe process by which the notes bring about

"This tune was composed by Juan Chi. Chi sighed that the Way was not widely practiced and he was out of accord with his times. There­ fore he forgot the world of men and indulged his thoughts outside mate­ rial form, trusting to the spirits in the wine cup with joyful drinking to the end of his days. Is this really a case of uncontrolled addiction to wine? No, the Way was found therein." Chuang-tzu provides the best examples of this argument. For example, see the stories of Wheelwright Pien，Cook Ting, and Woodworker Ch!ing; Watson，Chuang-tzu, pp. 152-53，50-51，205-6. Gilbert Ryle differ­ entiates between "knowing how" and "knowing that," writing that it is an Mintellectualist fallacy" to argue that an act effectively and success­ fully done requires "regress11into a prior intellectual operation. See The Concept o f Mind (London: Hutchinson and Co., 1949)， pp. 25-61， esp. pp. 27-35. Shih-chingj Mao edition, no. 8; for Waley!s translation, see Book of Songs, no. 99, p. 91.

one another is called 'harmony.1 1,48 Harmony is contrasted to isolation in the A n alects ："Harmony [means to be] w ith o u t isolation .”49 In the Book o f

R ite s, the concept of harmony represents ultimate virtue in society, governance，and music. In association with harmony, music continued to be the most versatile problematique in which the early speculator indulged his cu rio sity about eosmic processes.

Discussions o f harmony again re ca ll

what Pater sought in a "principle11 to link the diverse impulses of the cosmos. Music was the superior art for this undertaking. Music permitted a dem onstration o f the one giving b irth to the many through the division of

strings. It permitted a demonstration of the many, remaining distinct unto themselves, yet melding back into a harmonious whole. The high and the low blend, innocent o f the contradiction th a t besets verbal arts. In music,

correctness of timing, tonal quality, and placement were the requisites of harmony; in human action, harmony obtained from doing t h in ^ in the proper tim e , in the proper place，and in the proper way. Over the centuries there were d iffe rin g prescriptions fo r achieving harmony, ranging from the researching o f detailed lis ts o f correlations (used to compute the parameters o f harmonious action) to the abandonment o f purposeful th inking in order to p erm it nature to play upon one. The principles th a t applied to the making o f music were the principles th a t applied to liv in g generally, and, u n til the Six Dynasties, when a rt was id e n tifie d as a p a rtic u la r and d istin c t undertaking, a ll disciplines th a t were geared to harmonious livin g 1 were

encompassed in the idea of what was aesthetic. Any endeavor, no matter how ordinary—butchering an ox, shaving wheel spokes, or succumbing to a fatal illness—if properly done achieved an aesthetic dimension and harmonized with the prevailing order. No "linen separated ordinary work from the making of art, another point that is made manifest in the paradigmatic images of harmony in early Chinese texts, the well-blended musical per­ formance and the well-seasoned soup. Early Chinese thinkers describe music as a reflection or a realization of nature's patterning in the human mind. The diversity of views on the nature of such patterning follows from a diversity of views on human nature. The patterning of mind invoked in discussions of musical harmony

Kuo-yiis "Chou-yii， " 3.18a. This entire section of the Kuo-yu (3.12a-18b) describes at length the dynamics of governance through stories of bellmaking and the search for harmony. Analects, chap. 16: nChi-shih,T身氏， v. 1.

was felt to be innate, cultivable, and corruptible. The diversity of ideas about pattern and music notwithstanding, they were virtually never di­ vorced from the enduring concern with the formal structure of the cosmos and the formal structure of the mind. In classical and early Han thinking, the emperor and society at large reside between the individual and the heavens. Patterning is exemplified by the ruler and is manifested in the harmonious society. The ruler and the society he oversees respond to what is projected down from the heavens and what emanates upward from the people. In later thinking, as interest in society recedes, the role of pat­ terning is emphasized as a direct link between the individual mind and nature at large. Embodiment of natural patterning is a definitive requirement of the aesthetic. As a result, there is a general inclination to differentiate be­ tween art (i.e., that which is aesthetic) and nonart (i.e.，that which is not aesthetic) rather than between good art and bad art. In other words, in the early stages, discussions of aesthetics inclined toward the theoretical, not the critical or evaluative. Not until well into the Six Dynasties were efforts made to grade art or to establish a consensus of critical norms. Earlier discussions, for example, of the music of Cheng, disqualified this genre from consideration as art entirely because it did not partake of natural patterning, did not harmonize with nature or society, and was corrupting to the patterning of the individual mind. The other major genre discussed in the classical period, the poetry of the Odes, was without defect：nThe Odes number three hundred yet may be covered with a single description—they are without depraved thoughts," Confucius argued.^^ The early Chinese concept of natural pattern obviates an important issue in the Western discussion of aesthetics, namely, the symptom-emotive approach to art as opposed to the affective approach. The former de­ scribes the function of music, for example, as an expressive (and cathartic) act from the perspective of the composer or performer. The latter ad­ dresses music’s communicative and influential significance vis-a-vis the listener. In the Chinese view, all parties to the aesthetic act are inherently participants in a validation of cosmic patterning. Their primary and in­ alienable relationship is to that prevailing order, not to the composer, performer, or audience and not to the art object or event. The later lore

% Analects, chap. 2；"Wei-cheng， " v. 2.

tends to diminish the active-passive disparity between the creative and receptive roles, emphasizing the ideal of passivity in performance and the skillful involvement in listening (e.g., Chung Tzu-ch'i). Cosmic order is omnipresent, and, when the mind is there as well, any of the common components of the aesthetic event can be eliminated—the performer, the sound, the instrument, the audience一as long as formal correspondence between the mind and nature is achieved. Vastly reduced in importance is the responsibility of the performer to "express," the burden of the music to |,affect， ” and the need for a listener to "respond." Above all, the aesthete is engaged in a process of communion between his mind and nature. The clouds sculpture in colors, with a genius surpassing any painter_ The plants and trees burst forth in blossoms, without waiting on the ingenuity of the embroiderer. Could it be but external emb^llishments? No, it is simply self-so. When the sounds of the forest*s piping intertwine, they are as melodic as the reed flutes and zithers. In the rhyme of spring waters gushing over rocks is harmony the like of jade chimes and bronze bells. When forms took shape, formal order came to be. When sounds issued forth, the patterns were born. Now, if things without con­ sciousness are so marked in variety, how could a thing with the mind of man be without such pattern as well? 51 The claim that the aesthetic embodies natural patterning, a revelation of order common to the mind and the cosmos, led to explorations of the relationship between art and nature. Chfin lore, in particular, emphasizes this relationship through elaborate metaphors for hand postures, a performance regimen that requires visualization of natural images and an affinity for natural themes in its programmatic aspects. Nature itself, appreciations of nature by previous masters, or stories of mythic communions with nature are the nearly exclusive topics of chfin songs.52

51 See the Kai-ming edition of the Wen-hsin tiao-lung, 1.1a. For another 52 version, see Shih's translation, pp. 9-10. Van Gulik classifies cm n tunes into five thematic groups: (1) mystic journey； (2) semihistorieal; (3) converted literary products;⑷ deseriptions of nature; (5) descriptions of literary life (Lore o f the Chinese Lute ， pp. 84ff.). A more careful analysis may be made by looking at the

Some explorations of the relationship between art and nature con­ strue it in terms reminiscent of Aristotle, that is, art as an imitation of 53 nature, I have raised examples of a particular kind of scale-modeling, comparable to the alchemists proportional reenactment of cosmic pro­ cess. But elaborated expressions of the art-nature relationship view it as more subtle and complex, and less purposeful, than a coarse imitation of surface features—petal for petal—of nature by art. Any visible or audible resemblance may or may not exist between art and its correlates in na­ ture. The ch'in hand postures are described in terms of the "character" of movement. K'un 球 "w elling-up": . . . A heron bathing in a whirlpool. One should think of a heron taking a bath in the small eddies of a stream in the shallow places along its banks: the whirling movement of the water, together with the flapping of the wings should suggest the character of the movement. The surface features are largely incomparable, hence the comparison exists at a more profound level. An ear is a small hollow, and a valley is a large hollow. Mountains and marshes are a "small valley11 and Heaven and Earth was a "large valley." (Theoretically speaking, then,) if one hollow gives out sound ten thousand hollows will give out sound; if sound can be heard in one valley it should be heard in all ten thousand valleys.^5 The patterning is inherent, not something that the aesthete willfully ob­ tains or imitates from nature. Rather than strive to imitate an external order in the making of art, the aesthete or artist must avoid a purposeful­ ness that would obscure the patterning within his mind. Bateson makes a

underlying content; virtually all of the pieces are descriptions of nature (a "classical inclination") or descriptions of supernature (a ,Tromantic inclination'1), either directly (1 and 4), through a borrowed text (3), or vicariously through the persona of a famous figure, literary or real (2 c o and 5). Croce takes up the theme of imitation of nature and explains its pitfalls when used as a concept in the discussion of art. See Aesthetic, pp. 2729. 54 Van Gulik, Lore o f the Chinese L u te , p. 124. The character should be read as kun.

similar claim for art, arguing that the corrective potential of art is pre­ cisely dependent upon its departure from "mere, purposive rationality."56 The extent to which the individual mind participates in a larger scheme of events and the extent to which the activities of the mind are revealed in music are illustrated in a story from Ts'ai Yung's biography： When Ts'ai Yung was living in Ch?en-liu, a neighbor gave a large party and invited Yung. The guests seemed already well intoxicated by the time Yung arrived. As he approached the door, one guest was playing the ch'in behind a divider. Yung secretly listened, then ex­ claimed, nWhat is the meaning of this? I was drawn over by the music only to discover someone here with a mind bent on violence!” So he returned home immediately. • He sent a messenger to the host to convey this message: !,Master Ts*ai came to your party, but he walked only as far as the door, and then he returned home." Now, Ts!ai Yung's family was long venerated throughout that area, so the host himself immediately rushed over to Yung's house to ask the reasons for this. Yung told the entire story, which left the host completely astonished. Later, the guest who had been playing the ch'in offered this expla­ nation: "As I was playing, I noticed a praying mantis about to pounce upon a singing cicada. The cicada was soon to take to flight, but had not yet flown away. The mantis moved tentatively, forward and then back. My heart skipped a beat as I watched, apprehensive that the mantis would lose his prey. Could this be the *mind bent on violence1 that took form in the sound?" Yung laughed when he heard this explanation. "That does explain it all!"57 At least in the expression of ideals, the disciplines of art embodied an element of passivity that is quite contrary to the image of the artist locked in struggle to control or confine the forces of nature. The passivity of the

In a discussion reminiscent of the self-so-ness ideal of the Six Dynasties thinker, Bateson writes, "Life depends upon interlocking circu its of contingency, while consciousness can see only such short arcs of such short circuits as human purpose may direct." An Ecology o f Mind, p. 146. 57 . Note fig. 4 above (p. 135), which illustrates the hand posture for MA Praying Mantis Captures a Cicada." Hou Han-shu, p. 2004.

aesthete and artist is exemplified in stories of zithers played by the wind or simply resonating on the river banks, humming pipes, music of the forests， and effortless whistling, all tales that refer back to the self-so sounding of the sympathetic resonating tuners. The aesthete produces art in much the same way that these instruments produce sound. Ideally, he is an instru­ ment of nature, not touched, but moved to sound seemingly of his own accord. Tsung Ping, a prominent ch'in player and painter of the latter fourth century, described the process of landscape painting, "My eyes resonate in sympathy, and my mind melds in communion.'^ Theories characterize the aesthetic process as bidirectional; art emanates from the resonating proximity of mind and nature. Nature does not bear on the mind; muses do not enter and "inspire.11 The "Book of Music" makes clear that the sounds that make music are always there. To hear them is to have music, which requires careful and skillful listening. What might intuitively be construed as a causal relationship is vitiated in the texts on theory by the use of such terms aska n , variously translatable as "move" or "be moved/1"touch upon” or "perceive.11 Aesthetic processes are described in the image of the fundamental civilizing processes. Things are never so much created by man as they are discovered by him, be it writing, hexagrams, or the twelve pitches. Hsi lOang，in his "shadow abstracts the plane" argument, and Liu Hsieh, in his chapter nOn Tao—the Source," make clear that the mind is party to a prevailing order with which it stands in a relationship of significant coinci­ dence.59 Significant coincidence is what is measured in the cosmic chfi experiments. Movement of the individual toward an aesthetic act is not accurately described as nbeing inspired." Rather, it is to be coincident with the particular configuration of ch!i around one, to be, in a sense, the proper pipe for the proper moment. The internal patterning of art is both a part and a replication of the larger patterning of the cosmos, of which the RD artist's mind is also a part.

58 Yen K ^chiin, comp., C^iian Shang-ku wen, pp. 2545-46. 59 Wen-hsin tiao-lung, pp. 9-15. 60 Bateson notes that we must see an art object "as both itself internally patterned and itself part of a larger patterned universe. • • An Ecology o f Mind, p. 132.

The polarity between art and nature which is explicit in many schools of Western aesthetics (revealed in the polysemy of the word art itself and its derivatives, e.g., "artifice," "artificial") is not in evidence in early Chinese theory. A functionally comparable polarity is that between order and disorder, with nature, art, and the correct state of mind associated with the former. Nature and natural patterning being at the hub of the arts, aesthetic endeavors of all kinds are part of human nature, not apart from it. In both the theory and practice of art, the early Chinese took pleasure in blurring the boundaries between extreme civility and cultivation and utter rusticity, in much the same way that Western past oralis ts celebrate and affect primitivism in the midst of elegant and courtly culture. In early China, however, the habits of theory and practice allowed for the less contrived return of art to nature than seemed possible, for example, for C8.stiglioners courtiers. In the same way that a perceived consanguinity of all arts allowed easy admixture of media，the perceived congruence of artistic and natural patterning allowed an easy admixture of art and nature. The lore speaks of "piping" in the trees; the instruments made from those trees find their perfect voice only when returned to their native setting. Poems are written on stones or bamboo slats or banana leaves; zithers are played to the streams and trees, and songs are whistled to be heard by nature alone. Lest art be perceived as artifice, it is always re­ turned to its natural context. Where poems are inscribed in stone along seenic trails, even the verbal arts are returned to the scene where Ts'ang Chieh first discovered writing in the tracks of birds and beasts. Such poems reveal the mental achievement of the poet in his appreciation of the spot. For those who come later, the poems are part of the nature there, an accumulation of the pattern of the place with which later visitors will find accord. The poem does not prescribe a proper response to the place; rather, it translates the scene's aesthetic significance into another art or medium. To see such inscriptions as artifice is to see them as defacements of the natural scene, a complaint unknown in the varieties of early works that collected and commented on them. As with all components of art, poems in stone derive in a spiritual and material way from the interaction of man and nature and are assembled in a natural process. Though the definition of ya ： refinement varied from the classical period to the early Six Dynasties, whether it meant "elegant" or "rustic,1' it never meant "unnatural." The process of refinement, through the practice of the arts and the aesthetic pursuit of life, brought a return from a state of

separation to a state of closeness with nature. We can best understand this by resorting to musie, as did the early Chinese thinkers who pondered the question of refinement. The ultimate refinement of the pitches was achieved in the discovery of the perfect pitches of the phoenix. The ulti­ mate refinement of the pipes was achieved in perfect coincidence with the seasonal movements of chfi. The ultimate refinement of music was achieved by resonation with the sound power by which nature moves the winds, the rains, and all things.

SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

I. Works in Chinese and Japanese

Ch'en Y in -kfo 味 賞 憤 • MT!ao Yiian-m ing ssu-hsiang y ii ch'ing-t'an chih kuan-hsin 陶讲! 甽 菸 络 廣 讀 ' 之闕 [The relationship between the thought o f T'ao Yiian-m ing and pure conversation] • In Chfen Y ink1。hsien-sheng Ivn-chi 味亨 ％ t 生 論 名 [CoHected essays o f Ch'en Y in - ^ o ], 2:1012-36. Taipei: Chiu-ssu Publishers, 1971. C h'ien-fu Iw i 3 ^ Fu

玉符.

[Discourses of the hidden one] • Compiled by Wang

Han Wei ts'ung-shu edition.

ChHn-cWil chi-cf^eng

秀曲名

^ [Compendium o f chfm music] • Compiled by

P完 i[Central Acad­ the Chung-yang yin-yiieh hsiieh-yUan 卞身 emy of Music] and the Ku-ch'in yen-chiu hui 右 ^"[Society for Researches in the Ancient Chftn] • Peking: Chung-hua shu-chii, 1963. Chin-shu 身 書 [H isto ry o f the Chin] • Compiled by Fang Hsuan-ling 齡 . Chung-hua shu-chii (Peking) edition.

各今

Ch， iu H s i-k u e i 裏 誠 老 • ^ 'a n -t'a n Sui-hsien Tseng Hou-i mu t i w en-tzu tz u liao" ^ it 乙| 的 文 坪 科 [Notes on the w ritte n documents found in the tom b o f Tseng Hou-i in Sui County] • Wenwu,

no. 7 (1979)， pp. 25-31. Chiu Vang-shu % 食 [Old history o f the T!ang] • Compiled by Liu Hsii % '} 碗 • Chung-hua shu-chii (Peking) edition.

Chou Fa-kao

闳蛄备•

Chin-wen k u -lin

金戈 觉 故

[Forest o f bronze

inscriptions] • Hong Kong: Chinese University of Hong Kong, Chu C h'ien-chih

决

• Chung-kuo yin -yiie h wen-hsiieh s h ih _

19 7 4

.

國音尊

又 皆 之

[H isto ry o f Chinese musical lite ra tu r e ]. Taipei: Commer­ cia l Press, 1965. C ^ u n -c ^ iu fa n -lu 春 表 脊 霖 [M yriad dewdrop com m entary on the spring and autumn annals]. Han Wei t^ung-shu edition. Feng-su Vim g-i SL ■選_ 義' [P enetrating popular ways] • Compiled by Ying Shao 省 . 办 . Han Wei t^ung-shu edition. * r• Han~shu ^ ^ [ H i s t o r y o f the H a n ]. Compiled by Pan Ku hua shu-chu (Peking) edition.

与王S J .

Chung-

Hou H o nshu 後 ^ 噹 [H is to ry o f the la te r H a n ]. Compiled by Fan Y e h fo ^ . Chung-hua shu-chii (Peking) edition. H uai-nan -U u 淮 葡 子 . Compiled by L iu An Yu 高令秀. I-w en edition.

Huang Hsiang-p'eng

考翔鸸.

制典•

Commentary by Kao

”Hsien Ch’in yin-yiieh wen-hua ti kuang-hui

ch!uang-tsao Tseng Hou-i mu t i ku yiieh-ch^" t

创达皆後 基的古染 X 文 物

奈^為夂化的

[The ancient musical instruments

unearthed from the tom b o f Tseng H ou-i ： Glorious creations o f preChTin musical culture] • Wenwu, no. 7 (1979)， pp. 32-39.

使 宗 吨 ， "Lu Chi W en-fu li-lu n yu yin-yiieh chih kuan-hsi" f t 辦 ' 天 喊 理 访 供 € 赞 之 關