Scribal Practice within the Earliest Scroll of Qin Treatises: Manuscript Hikone, Hikone-jō Hakubutsukan V633 Yang Yuanzheng

Abstract

Manuscript Hikone, Hikone-jō Hakubutsukan V633, is in many ways one of the most unusual sources of qin music. The recto of the Hikone scroll preserves a number of treatises on the fingering of qin playing, making it the oldest source of texts on qin fingering – and one contemporaneous to early qin music practice – that is preserved today; the verso in turn contains sketches of a saibara piece, Chinese verses and three groups of casual drawings. Being the only Japanese source housing exclusively Chinese or Chinese-derived practical treatises on early qin music, it is self-evident that the Hikone scroll is of paramount importance for any exploration of the transmission of ancient East Asian music. Moreover, the original scroll, while indirectly available to scholars through a number of tracing copies all along, had disappeared among the historical documents of the Ii family for several centuries, and therefore was unknown to modern scholarship until its (re-)discovery was announced by Goshima Kuniharu in 1994. As a result, our knowledge of this crucial source remains incomplete: No full-fledged codicological study of the original scroll has been offered to date; the origins of the Hikone manuscript remain shrouded in darkness; and its contents have only been insufficiently catalogued. To address these lacunae, a careful physical examination of the Hikone manuscript was carried out in November 2004 as part of my ongoing study of the source. In the present paper, using codicological analysis, I shall investigate the Hikone manuscript as a physical artifact and provide the first detailed description of its external features; an analysis of the various scripts and their owners; a reconstruction of the copying sequence; and an inventory of its contents.