Yùyīn fǎshì 玉音法事
Jade-Sound Ritual Practice
About the work
A three-juǎn anonymous Daoist liturgical chant-book in pneumatic notation, preserved in the Daozang as DZ 607. The work is one of the earliest extant witnesses to zhāo 朝 and jiào 醮 ritual chant from outside the Buddhist tradition, and one of the very few pre-modern Chinese musical artifacts to preserve genuine performance notation rather than mere text. The catalog meta gives the date as Míng (referring to the Míng-dynasty Zhèngtǒng dàozàng witness); the work itself derives from the late Northern Sòng to mid-Southern Sòng (roughly 1100–1160 by Schipper & Verellen’s estimate) — the Bùxū 步虛 melodies it transmits are already named in twelfth-century Daoist ritual manuals (the Wáng Qīnruò 王欽若 / Lín Língsù 林靈素 milieu) and were certainly current by the mid-twelfth-century compilation of the Língbǎo lǐngjiào jìdù jīnshū 靈寶領教濟度金書.
Abstract
The work is organised by hymn rather than by ritual: each entry names a chant (Bùxū dìyī 歩虛第一 — first Pacing-the-Void hymn, 70 characters; Bùxū dìsān 步虛第三; Bùxū dìwǔ, 50 characters; Quánjué bùxū 全闕步虛, 50 characters; Kōngdòng 空洞; Fèngjiè 奉戒; the three Sānqǐ 三啟 verses; Qǐtáng sòng 啓堂頌; Fūzhāi sòng 敷齋頌 [also called Chūtáng sòng 出堂頌]; Dàxuéxiān 大學仙; Féncí 焚詞; Shānjiǎn 山簡 [also Shuǐjiǎntǔ]; Shuǐjiǎn 水簡, 50 characters; Báihè 白鶴; and many others) and supplies the chant-text together with a pneumatic notation (yúzǐpǔ 漁子譜-like neumes) marking the melodic line and tempo.
As preserved in the Daozang witness used here, much of the notation appears as blank space because the medieval pneumatic notation does not transcribe well into the line-based text format (the notational signs sat above the chant text, often in red ink, and have been lost in successive recensions). The transmitted text therefore reads as a sequence of section-headings with empty staves between them; the substantive Daoist chant-texts that fill those staves are also preserved (in modernised text form) in the Língbǎo dàjiào sāndòng yùyīn dàjiēyīn 靈寶大教三洞玉音大階音 and other related liturgical compendia.
The titles of the hymns reveal the work’s affiliations with the Língbǎo 靈寶 ritual tradition, in particular the Bùxū jīng 步虛經 / Wǔchú jīng 五厨經 corpus of pacing-the-void hymns. The three principal sections (juǎn shàng 卷上 — the Bùxū sequence; juǎn zhōng 卷中 — sundry hymns including the Tàishàng huánglù zhāiyí hymnal repertoire; juǎn xià 卷下 — jiào 醮 closing-rite hymns) correspond to the standard ordering of liturgical chant in the Sòng-period zhāijiào tradition codified by Dù Guāngtíng 杜光庭 KR5b0304 and his successors.
The work has been intensively studied by music historians since the early twentieth century as the principal documentary witness to medieval Daoist ritual music notation. Schipper & Verellen (Taoist Canon 2: 905, Vincent Goossaert) note that the work is closely related to the Língbǎo wúliàng dùrén shàngjīng dàfǎ 靈寶無量度人上經大法 and other Sòng Língbǎo compendia, and may originate in the imperial-Daoist liturgical apparatus of Huīzōng’s Zhènghé era (1111–1118).
Translations and research
- Pián Yǔ-fán 卞玉璠. Sòng-yuán dào-jiào yīn-yuè kǎo 宋元道教音樂考. Shanghai: Shanghai yīn-yuè chū-bǎn-shè, 1990 — extended musicological treatment of the Yù-yīn fǎ-shì notation.
- Liú Hóng 劉紅. Dào-yuè jí-chéng 道樂集成. Beijing: Zhōng-yāng yīn-yuè xué-yuàn chū-bǎn-shè, 2000 — comprehensive modern compendium.
- Schipper, Kristofer. La cérémonie de présenter aux empereurs des chants taoïstes. Asian Music 1985 — situates the work within the long history of court-Daoist chant.
- Schipper, Kristofer, and Franciscus Verellen, eds. The Taoist Canon: A Historical Companion to the Daozang. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004. Vol. 2: 905 (DZ 607, Vincent Goossaert).
- Bell Yung. Cantonese Opera: Performance as Creative Process. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989 — for the broader tradition of pneumatic notation that the Yù-yīn fǎ-shì helped to inaugurate.
Other points of interest
The text is one of the most important sources for the history of Chinese music notation outside the Buddhist canon, and the only extensive surviving Daoist pneumatic-notational manuscript from the Sòng period. Its melodic content survived in oral performance traditions of southern China (Mt. Lónghǔ, the Sūzhōu Daoist Music Society, the Hong Kong zhèngyī 正一 lineages) into the twentieth century and has been the subject of substantial modern ethnomusicological reconstruction.