Yīnlǜ jīnghuā jí 音律菁花集
Anthology of the Choicest Flowers of Pitch-Theory by 賴驗 Raigen (撰)
About the work
A single-fascicle treatise on Buddhist musical pitch-theory by Raigen 賴驗 賴驗, a Tendai shōmyō scholar of the medieval period. The catalog meta gives the title as Raigen-shū 頼驗集 (with a stray closing bracket and the work mistakenly named after its author) — this is a scribal error in the catalog; the correct title, as given in the source file and the CANWWW entry (T84N2716), is Onritsu shōkeshū 音律菁花集 — “Anthology of the Choicest Flowers of Pitch-Theory.” (The catalog name 頼驗 is also a variant orthography of 賴驗.)
Abstract
The work is a theoretical treatment of the twelve pitch-pipes (十二律 jūni-ritsu) system as employed in Japanese Buddhist shōmyō. The pitch-pipe system was inherited from Tang Chinese music theory and provides the theoretical foundation for the gyo-san mode system. The treatise opens: “Sound-modes are the working-out of dharma-nature itself, the spontaneous principle. Their color cannot be seen, their form does not exist; naturally they are present within the void. Yet they transform with the singer’s intonation and follow the sound-rhymes’ coming and going — they are not the work of human agency, yet they appear as if they were. They are neither existing nor non-existing — this is the principle of a-ji fu-shō (a-character non-arising), the dharma-realm pervading the Five Greats.”
The work is doctrinally distinctive in integrating music-theory with esoteric (Shingon-Tendai) doctrine: the pitch-pipe relations are read as expressions of the dharma-realm (法界 hokkai), and the singer’s correct intonation is understood as a devotional-cosmological practice rather than mere musical performance. This Buddhist musicology is one of the distinctive contributions of medieval Japanese Buddhism to the broader East Asian musical-theoretical tradition.
The author Raigen is otherwise obscure; precise lifedates are not securely attested. The work is conventionally placed in the Kamakura period, conservatively c. 1200–1300.
Structural Division
The CANWWW entry (div25.xml, T84N2716) records the work as a single-fascicle treatise by Raigen (賴驗) with no internal toc sub-list and no related-text cross-references tabulated.
Translations and research
Critical edition: Taishō vol. 84. No English translation. Major studies: Imatomi Yū, Tendai shōmyō no kenkyū (Hōzōkan, 1991); Sawada Atsuko, Nihon shōmyō no kenkyū (Iwanami, 2009); on the East Asian pitch-pipe theory generally: Joseph Needham, Science and Civilisation in China, vol. 4.1 (CUP, 1962), section on acoustics.