The stringless qin: why Tao Yuanming played an instrument with no strings
Tao Yuanming kept a qin with neither strings nor position markers and would stroke it when he had been drinking, saying that if you know the delight within the qin, there is no need for sound on the strings. This article covers the two historical accounts, the Daoist thinking behind the line, how later poets took up the image, and why a man who could not play became a name no history of the qin can leave out.
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Translated from the Chinese original.
Imagine a gathering. It is the last years of the Eastern Jin dynasty, early in the 5th century, at a farmhouse outside Xunyang, near today's Jiujiang on the Yangzi. A few friends have come with wine. Their host is in his fifties. Not long ago he resigned as magistrate of Pengze county, and he is the man who said he would not "bow and scrape for five pecks of rice", the meager salary of a minor official. Now he farms, and not very well. In one of his own poems the weeds grow thick and the bean shoots are sparse.
Halfway through the wine, the host takes a qin down from the wall. The guests notice that it has no strings and no hui, the inlaid position markers. It is just a bare board. He lays it across his knees and, as the others sing, strokes it in time with them, his fingers moving back and forth over the empty wood as though he were really playing.
Someone cannot help asking about it. The host answers with a sentence that has been quoted for sixteen hundred years:
As long as you know the delight within the qin, why trouble with sound on the strings?
Two accounts
The scene is recorded in two historical sources. The first is the Songshu (the history of the Liu Song dynasty, 420–479, compiled around 488), in its chapter on recluses:
Qian did not understand music, yet he kept a plain qin without strings, and whenever wine had put him in good spirits he would stroke it to express his feelings.
Tao Qian is Tao Yuanming's other name. The Jin Shu (the "Book of Jin", compiled in the 7th century) tells it at greater length, and this is the more famous version:
By nature he did not understand music, yet he kept a plain qin lacking both strings and hui. Whenever friends gathered to drink, he would stroke it in accompaniment, saying: "As long as you know the delight within the qin, why trouble with sound on the strings?"
A "plain qin" (素琴, suqin) is one without ornament. "Lacking both strings and hui" means it did not even have the markers that fix pitch. The hui are the thirteen points inlaid along the face of the instrument, and without them a player could not even find where to stop the strings. This instrument was never meant to be played.
Xiao Tong, the 6th-century prince who compiled the famous anthology Wenxuan, also recorded the episode in his biography of Tao Yuanming, in nearly the same words. Three works describing the same scene show that within a century of Tao Yuanming's death in 427, this had become the standard story told about him.
Could he really not play?
All three works say he "did not understand music". Yet the qin appears again and again in Tao Yuanming's own writing. In "Returning Home", his rhapsody on leaving office, he says he takes "pleasure in the qin and books to dispel his cares". In a poem answering Adjutant Pang: "Under my humble gate there is a qin, there are books." In a poem to Registrar Guo: "I break off social calls and roam in idle pursuits; rising or lying down, I toy with books and qin." And in a letter to his sons he describes himself: "When young I studied the qin and books, and by chance I loved quiet."
Why would a man who "did not understand music" study the qin from childhood and write about it constantly?
One explanation is that he played a little, not well, and the historians stressed his ignorance to heighten the symbolism. Had he been an accomplished player, the stringless qin would be a mere eccentricity; because he was not, it became a gesture.
Another is more interesting. For Tao Yuanming the qin was never an instrument to practise but a sign of a way of life. "Qin and books" go together, and like books the qin speaks simply by being there: I am a scholar, I have my own world, and I am not going out into yours. Whether it has strings does not matter.
Either way, the sentence is what counts: as long as you know the delight within the qin, why trouble with sound on the strings?
Where the line comes from
This was not Tao Yuanming's idea alone. It has a lineage.
Go back far enough and you reach the Laozi, the founding text of Daoism, which says that "the great sound is faint", the greatest sound being one that cannot be heard (see The great sound is faint). The Zhuangzi, in its chapter "On Making All Things Equal", distinguishes the "pipes of heaven", the "pipes of earth" and the "pipes of man", and the sounds people blow are the lowest of the three. Closer to Tao Yuanming's own time, the philosophers of the Wei and Jin, engaged in what was called "profound learning", spoke of "grasping the meaning and forgetting the words". Once you have understood the sense, you can dispense with the words, just as you can forget the fish trap once you have caught the fish, or the snare once you have caught the rabbit.
Tao Yuanming brought this whole way of thinking down onto a single qin. Strings and sound are means; the delight within the qin is the end, and once it is reached the means can be dropped. A stringless qin is "grasping the meaning and forgetting the words" in physical form, a philosophical proposition turned into furniture and hung on the wall.
That is why later writers quoted the story so often. It is not one man's eccentricity but the concrete image of a whole set of ideas. "Grasping the meaning and forgetting the words" is hard to explain, but you can point at that qin and say: that is what it means.
The poets take it up
The stringless qin became a literary image, and an extremely useful one.
The Tang poet Li Bai wrote, in a poem to Cui of Qiupu:
The great sound makes its own tune; he simply plays the stringless qin.
Bai Juyi, in "There Is a Gentleman in the Hills", described a recluse who "walks wrapped in a rope-belted robe and sits tapping a stringless qin". Wang Wei and Meng Haoran used the image as well. In the Song dynasty (960–1279) Su Shi mentioned "Yuanming's stringless qin" many times, and even wrote a short essay asking whether it was really true that Tao Yuanming did not understand music and kept a stringless qin. His conclusion was that Tao Yuanming probably could play; he simply did not want to play for others.
From then on, "the stringless qin" became almost a code name for Tao Yuanming, alongside the "five willows" (from his self-portrait as Master Five Willows), the "eastern hedge" (from his line about picking chrysanthemums there) and the Peach Blossom Spring (from his tale of a hidden utopia). So many emblems for one man show how badly later ages needed him.
Qin players accepted the image too. Ming-dynasty writings on the highest level of the art often quote "know the delight within the qin". Xu Shangying's Xishan Qinkuang ("Twenty-Four Qualities of Qin Sound", 1641) has a section on xisheng, "faint sound", and what it describes is exactly what lies beyond sound. In this way a man who could not play the qin entered the heart of qin aesthetics.
What became of the instrument
No trace of the instrument survives; nobody preserves a bare board as a relic. But it was handed down as a practice.
In the Ming (1368–1644) and Qing (1644–1912) dynasties some scholars did hang an unstrung qin in the study, a "stringless qin" or "Tao qin", never played. It was a declaration: I do not pride myself on technique; I admire Tao. By then the object had become a symbol. Those who hung one had not necessarily read the Book of Jin, but they knew what it stood for.
It also lives on less obviously, in the silences of qin playing. Qin music is full of "empty sounds", notes the right hand never plucks but the left hand draws out by sliding along the string, so faint they can hardly be heard. At the end of a piece the harmonics fade and the last note is drawn out until it vanishes; the player's hand stays on the string until the resonance has died. For those seconds the qin is silent, but the piece is not over. Xu Shangying's section on "faint sound" is about precisely those seconds.
Tao Yuanming's stringless qin, you could say, takes those few seconds and enlarges them into an entire instrument.
Read it against Bo Ya
The history of the qin has two stories about not playing, and they make a natural pair.
Bo Ya "broke his qin and cut its strings" because Zhong Ziqi had died. There was no one left to listen, so he stopped playing (see Zhiyin). Tao Yuanming's qin "lacked strings and hui" because he felt no need to play; the delight within the qin was already there. One story faces outward: playing is for someone to hear. The other faces inward: playing is for oneself.
Both stories say that the meaning of the qin does not lie in the sound itself. Bo Ya says it lies with the listener; Tao Yuanming says it lies in the player's heart. The Chinese understanding of the qin moves, broadly speaking, between these two poles.
What a player makes of it
People learning the qin tend to react to this story in one of two ways.
The first is resistance. If you cannot play, you cannot play, and no philosophy will produce a note. A bare board is no qin.
The second is too much acceptance. Why bother with strings, when intention is enough? So the learner skips the fingerings, skips yin (吟, narrow vibrato) and nao (猱, wide vibrato), and talks about "resonance" from the first lesson.
Both miss the point. The stringless qin does not deny playing; it says the purpose of playing lies beyond the sound. Real players understand this best. In a yin or a nao the hand makes a movement but seeks resonance; when a piece is practised long enough the fingers stop being an obstacle, and only then does the delight within the qin appear. The sound on the strings exists to reach the place where the strings are silent, and unless you reach it, there is no way to talk about that place.
Tao Yuanming simply skipped the journey and stood at the destination. He could do that because he was not a qin player. He was a poet, and a poet can go straight to the conclusion. A qin player has to walk the road honestly, along the strings.
So if you are learning the qin, treat this story as a mountain in the distance. Know that it is there, but first walk the road in front of you. For what those movements on the strings actually are, see the technique index. Learn the sound on the strings first, then talk about the delight within the qin; the order cannot be reversed. Tao Yuanming would probably not agree, but every qin player knows it.