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魚山聲明集

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Text ID
KR6t0423
Date
1300–1450
Dynasty
日本

Yúshān shēngmíng jí 魚山聲明集

Collection of Shōmyō from Mt. Yú [Ōhara] [compiler unknown]

About the work

A single-fascicle anthology of shōmyō texts and melodic notations from the Ōhara 大原 Tendai liturgical-music lineage in the northern outskirts of Kyoto. “Mt. Yú” (魚山 Gyo-san) is a sobriquet for Ōhara — a deliberate calque on the Chinese Yúshān 魚山 in Shāndōng, the legendary site of the Cáo Zhí 曹植 (192–232) tradition of Chinese Buddhist hymn-singing, which became the foundation of the entire East Asian shōmyō tradition. The Ōhara gyo-san line is the principal Tendai shōmyō lineage of Japan, founded by 最澄 Saichō’s disciples and elaborated by Ryōnin 良忍 良忍 (1072–1132) in the early 12th c. into the systematic form transmitted thereafter.

Abstract

The work is a single-fascicle compilation of the most-performed shōmyō pieces of the Tendai-Ōhara repertoire, including: (1) the kōshiki-line lecture-liturgies (descended from the Hō-on kōshiki and Nijūgo zanmai-shiki traditions); (2) the Kannon-line Avalokiteśvara hymns; (3) the shari-line relic-veneration hymns; (4) the Pure Land-line Amida hymns. Each piece is presented with the melodic notation in the medieval Japanese neume system — a graphical notation indicating pitch, duration, and ornamentation, which evolved out of the Tang-Chinese jieyin 解音 graphic-notation tradition and is one of the oldest continuously-transmitted musical notation systems in the world.

The work is anonymously compiled and exists in multiple recensions through the late medieval period. The Taishō text is generally identified as the textus receptus assembled at the Ōhara Raigō-in 來迎院 (the principal gyo-san training-temple) in the late 14th to mid 15th c.

Date. Anonymous compilation, conservatively dated c. 1300–1450. The individual pieces are mostly older (some Heian, some early Kamakura) but the anthology as such is late medieval.

Structural Division

The CANWWW entry (div25.xml, T84N2712) records the work as a single-fascicle anonymous text with no internal toc sub-list and no related-text cross-references tabulated.

Translations and research

Critical edition: Taishō vol. 84 — though for liturgical-musical use the principal source is the Tendai shū sōden gyō-bon 天台宗總傳行本 (Mt. Hiei) and the Tendai shōmyō dai-zen 天台聲明大全 (Sankibō, 1968). Major studies: Imatomi Yū 今富裕, Tendai shōmyō no kenkyū 天台聲明の研究 (Hōzōkan, 1991); Sawada Atsuko 沢田篤子, Nihon shōmyō no kenkyū (Iwanami, 2009). English: Steven G. Nelson, “Court and Religious Music in Heian Japan,” in The Cambridge History of Japan, vol. 2 (CUP, 1999), pp. 401–415. On the gyo-san tradition more broadly: Niels Guelberg, Buddhistische Zeremoniale (kōshiki) (Stuttgart, 1999).

Other points of interest

The shōmyō musical notation tradition of Ōhara is one of the oldest continuously-living musical notations in the world — the same notation that appears in this 14th-c. text is still being used today by Tendai shōmyō singers, with continuous oral-textual transmission throughout the intervening seven centuries. The Ōhara Raigō-in continues to function as the principal gyo-san training-temple and is one of the principal sites where one can hear shōmyō performed in something approaching its medieval form.

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