Yuèshè dàyì 樂社大義
The Great Meaning of Music and the Ritual Community by 梁武帝
About the work
The Yuèshè dàyì 樂社大義 is a short treatise on court ritual music attributed to Liáng Wǔdì 梁武帝 (梁武帝, Xiāo Yǎn 蕭衍, 464–549), founding emperor of the Liáng 梁 dynasty. The original work — one juàn — was lost long before the Qīng. What survives is a sequence of fragments preserved within the music treatise of the Suí shū 隋書·音樂志 (j. 13) and assembled in the Qīng by Mǎ Guóhàn 馬國翰 in his Yùhán shānfáng jíyì shū 玉函山房輯佚書. The text in the Kanripo edition (KR1i0024) follows that reconstruction.
The fragments expound three things: (1) the design of the four-stringed instruments called tōng 通 (玄英, 青陽, 朱明, 白藏), whose twelve strings are tuned to the twelve lǜlǚ 律呂 with specified silk-counts and string-lengths; (2) the construction of the twelve flutes shí’èr dí 十二笛, each tuned to one of the twelve pitches; and (3) the renaming of the twelve principal pieces of court ritual music — pieces used at the suburban sacrifices, the ancestral temple and the three court audiences — under names ending in yǎ 雅, with each new name justified by quotation from the Shī, Shū, Yì, Lǐjì, Zhōulǐ or Zuǒshì zhuàn. These three items belong together: they describe the music-theoretical and ceremonial reform that Liáng Wǔdì personally directed during his reign.
Abstract
The Yuèshè dàyì is a Six-Dynasties imperial treatise that survives only in citation. Liáng Wǔdì was renowned for his personal expertise in pitch-pipe theory and ritual music; the Suí shū yīnyuè zhì records that, when the seventy-eight schools of the day discussed music reform without converging on a method, the emperor — bĕn xiǎo zhōng lǜ, biàn xī jiùshì 本曉鍾律遍悉舊事 — himself fixed the system. The Yuèshè dàyì was the principal vehicle of that imperial pronouncement and was complemented by a companion piece, the Zhōnglǜ wěi 鍾律緯 (also one juàn, also lost, preserved in citations in Suí shū lìlì zhì 隋書·律歷志).
The date bracket for the work is set to the reign of Liáng Wǔdì (502–549) on the strength of the Suí shū attribution; no narrower window is recoverable. The reforms reported in the surviving fragments name Sòng Xiàojiàn 宋孝建 2 (455) and Sòng Yuánhuī 元徽 2–3 (474–475) as the earlier ritual layers being superseded, and refer to Qí Yǒngmíng 齊永明 6 (488), so the reform itself must be later than 488 and was promulgated during Wǔdì’s own reign. The ritual-music nomenclature documented here — 皇雅, 允雅, 夤雅, 介雅, 需雅, 雍雅, 滌雅, 牷雅, 誠雅, 獻雅, 禋雅, 俊雅 — is the canonical Liáng court repertoire as received in subsequent histories.
The two new ritual dances, Dàzhuàng wǔ 大壯舞 (replacing the older 武舞) and Dàguān wǔ 大觀舞 (replacing the older 文舞), are justified by direct quotation from the Yìjīng: dà zhě, zhuàng yě, zhèng dà ér tiāndì zhī qíng kě jiàn yě (大者，壯也。正大而天地之情可見也, from the Tuàn of 大壯) and dàguān zài shàng, guān tiān zhī shén dào, ér sìshí bù tè yě (大觀在上，觀天之神道，而四時不忒也, from the Tuàn of 觀). This Yì-classical scaffolding for ritual music is characteristic of Liáng Wǔdì’s broader cultural policy, which sought a Confucian-classical justification for every element of the state cult even as the emperor himself was deeply immersed in Buddhism.
Wilkinson’s Chinese History: A New Manual situates the Suí shū yīnyuè zhì among the principal monographic treatises (zhì 志) of the Tang-compiled Wǔdàishǐ zhì 五代史志 (presented 656); the Yuèshè dàyì fragments are recoverable precisely because they were absorbed into that treatise’s account of Liáng court music before the original juàn was lost.
Translations and research
- Mǎ Guóhàn 馬國翰 (comp.), Yuèshè dàyì 樂社大義, in Yùhán shānfáng jíyì shū 玉函山房輯佚書 (Qing dynasty). The standard reconstruction.
- Suí shū 隋書, j. 13 Yīnyuè zhì shàng 音樂上 (Béijīng: Zhōnghuá shūjú, 1973), pp. 287–304. The principal medieval witness.
- Yáng Yīnliú 楊蔭瀏. Zhōngguó gǔdài yīnyuè shǐgǎo 中國古代音樂史稿. Béijīng: Rénmín yīnyuè chūbǎnshè, 1981. Discusses the Liáng Wǔdì sì tōng 四通 reform within the broader history of pre-Táng pitch-pipe theory.
- Picken, Laurence E. R., et al. Music from the Tang Court. 7 vols. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981–2000. Tangentially relevant for the survival of Six-Dynasties instrument typology.
Other points of interest
The companion piece Zhōnglǜ wěi 鍾律緯 — also one juàn, also by Liáng Wǔdì, also reconstructed by Mǎ Guóhàn from citations in Suí shū lìlì zhì — completes the imperial program: Yuèshè dàyì covers ritual repertoire and instrument design, Zhōnglǜ wěi covers the metrological foundation (bell-pitches and the linkage to weights and measures). The two should be read together. The detailed silk-thread counts and string-lengths preserved in the sì tōng fragments here are among the most concrete numerical specifications for stringed instruments to survive from the Southern Dynasties and have been a starting point for modern reconstructive scholarship.