Zhiyin: Bo Ya, Zhong Ziqi and a smashed qin

Start with a scene.

A riverbank, just after rain. An official's boat is moored below the bank. A lamp burns in the cabin, and a man sits with a qin across his knees, adjusting the strings. He is not playing for anyone. His attendants have long since gone to sleep, the bank is pitch dark, and the only sound is the water. He plays for a while, and then, without warning, a string snaps.

The player looks up. People in old China believed that when a qin string broke for no reason, someone nearby was listening. He sends a servant ashore to look. Sure enough, under a tree on the bank crouches a woodcutter in a straw rain cape, his bundle of firewood at his feet, perfectly still.

You may have seen this scene on the opera stage, in a novel, or at the Guqin Terrace in Hanyang, Wuhan. It is China's most famous qin story. But it did not begin this way. In the beginning, it was two sentences long.

Two passages from before the Qin dynasty

The earliest record is in the Liezi, a Daoist book whose core goes back to the Warring States period (475–221 BCE), in the chapter "Questions of Tang":

Bo Ya was good at playing the qin, and Zhong Ziqi was good at listening. When Bo Ya played with his mind on climbing a high mountain, Zhong Ziqi said: "Splendid, towering like Mount Tai." When his mind turned to flowing water, Zhong Ziqi said: "Splendid, vast like the great rivers." Whatever Bo Ya had in mind, Zhong Ziqi was sure to grasp it.

Look at how the passage spends its words. Bo Ya's skill gets a single phrase; four times as much goes to how Zhong Ziqi listened, and both exclamations are Ziqi's. The hero of the passage is not the one who plays. It is the one who listens.

The ending is in another book, the Lüshi Chunqiu (the "Spring and Autumn Annals of Master Lü", compiled around 239 BCE), in the chapter "The Root of Flavors":

When Zhong Ziqi died, Bo Ya broke his qin and cut its strings, and never played again as long as he lived, holding that there was no one left in the world worth playing for.

"Broke his qin and cut its strings" is a heavy phrase. For an educated man the qin was part of his identity; the Book of Rites says that a gentleman does not put away his qin and se without cause. To smash it was to smash part of himself. And the reason given is not grief, at least the text mentions none, but a judgment: no one was left worth playing for. It is the highest praise a player can give a listener. Without you, my qin has no meaning.

The two passages together run to fewer than a hundred characters. There is no boat, no rain, no snapped string and no woodcutter.

What later writers added

So where did the boat, the rain, the string and the woodcutter come from?

From the Ming dynasty (1368–1644). Feng Menglong, an editor of popular fiction, opened his collection Jingshi Tongyan ("Stories to Caution the World", 1624) with "Yu Boya Smashes His Qin in Gratitude to the One Who Knew His Music". Here Bo Ya acquires a surname, Yu, and a post as a senior minister of Jin sent as envoy to Chu; a date, the mid-autumn night of the fifteenth of the eighth month; a place, the mouth of the Han River at Hanyang; the string that snaps for no reason; and the woodcutter on the bank. The two men agree to meet again the following year; Bo Ya keeps the appointment and finds only a fresh grave. In the story's last scene Bo Ya plays one piece at the graveside, then "raised the qin in both hands and dashed it with all his strength against the stone altar, so that its jade pegs flew apart and its golden hui were scattered."

All of this is Feng Menglong's work. The early texts give only "Bo Ya", and "Bo" was more likely a clan name; there is no early evidence for the surname Yu. The river mouth, the mid-autumn night, the woodcutter and the altar are props added so the tale could be staged. The Guqin Terrace in Wuhan is a memorial built to match this Ming version.

Separating the layers is not fault-finding. A parable exists to be added to, and Feng Menglong added well; the snapped string, which makes the listener visible, is an especially good touch, and that is why his version lasted. It is only worth knowing that the pre-Qin writers supplied the bones and the Ming storyteller the flesh.

The word zhiyin

One more thing is worth noticing. Neither of the two early passages contains the word zhiyin (知音), literally "one who knows the sound", which is how Chinese speakers today describe a person who truly understands them.

It became a fixed expression only in the Southern Dynasties (420–589). Liu Xie, writing the great work of literary criticism Wenxin Diaolong ("The Literary Mind and the Carving of Dragons") around 500 CE, gave one chapter the title "Zhiyin", and opened it with this sentence:

How hard it is to know the sound. The sound is truly hard to know, and one who knows it is hard to meet. To meet one who knows your sound happens perhaps once in a thousand years.

Liu Xie was really complaining about how rare a reader is who can appreciate good writing, but the image he borrowed was Bo Ya and Zhong Ziqi. From then on zhiyin left the qin behind and became a word about being understood. Someone who says "you are my zhiyin" today probably does not play the qin, but he means exactly what that woodcutter did more than two thousand years ago.

Gao Shan and Liu Shui

Bo Ya's "mind on high mountains" and "mind on flowing water" were later set as music. The Shenqi Mipu (神奇秘谱, "Handbook of Spiritual and Marvelous Mysteries", 1425), compiled by the Ming prince Zhu Quan and the earliest surviving printed collection of qin scores, contains Gao Shan ("High Mountains") and Liu Shui ("Flowing Water"), with this note:

High Mountains and Flowing Water were originally a single piece. In the Tang it was divided into two pieces, without numbered sections. In the Song, High Mountains was divided into four sections and Flowing Water into eight.

So: one piece before the Tang (618–907), two in the Tang, sectioned in the Song (960–1279). The Liu Shui most often played today is that of the Qing-dynasty Sichuan-school player Zhang Kongshan, who added the "seventy-two gun fu" (滚拂), a long central passage of rapid sweeps across several strings, imitating water from trickle to torrent. Close your eyes and it really does sound like water.

In 1977 Guan Pinghu's recording of this version went onto the Golden Record carried by the Voyager probes and out of the solar system. For a disc addressed to unknown civilizations, the compilers chose a piece about being understood. The choice itself retells Bo Ya's story.

Why a woodcutter could understand

Feng Menglong's story handles this well. Told that the listener is a woodcutter, Bo Ya at first does not believe it, invites Zhong Ziqi aboard and tests him on the instrument's origins and construction. Ziqi answers fluently: the legendary ruler Fuxi carved the first qin from paulownia; it measured three chi, six cun and six fen, for the 366 days of the year; it had five strings for the Five Phases, and King Wen and King Wu of Zhou each added one, making seven. Only then does Bo Ya offer him a seat.

The passage is the novelist's, but it answers a real question: why a woodcutter?

In the early text Zhong Ziqi's identity is blank; he is simply "good at listening". Later tellers deliberately gave him the lowest station they could think of. Understanding music has nothing to do with rank or learning. A senior minister plays and a woodcutter understands, while the officials and the boatload of attendants do not. From the start zhiyin carried this meaning: it does not ask who you are, only whether you heard.

This is also why the story is so often invoked by those who feel unrecognized. The Tang poet Li Bai wrote:

Zhong Ziqi is long since gone; in all the world there is no one who knows my sound.

And the Song general Yue Fei, in a song lyric:

I would entrust my heart to the jade qin, but those who know the sound are few. If a string breaks, who will hear?

Both complain of the same thing: I played, and no one understood. Zhong Ziqi became a measure, not of the listener but of how lonely the player is.

What the story left on the qin

Besides the two pieces Gao Shan and Liu Shui, the story has left a few other traces on the instrument and its culture.

The first is in names. Many parts of the qin have names unrelated to the story: the longyin ("dragon gums"), the hardwood ridge at the tail that carries the strings, or the "dragon pool" and "phoenix pond", the two sound holes underneath; one literary name for the qin, "the lone paulownia of Mount Yi", comes from the Book of Documents. But when players name their own instruments they favor words like "Flowing Water", "High Mountains", "Zhiyin" and "Ziqi", and more than one Qing-dynasty qin is named Liu Shui.

The second is the yaji, the gathering where players take turns playing for one another. Afterwards the listeners are expected to say what they heard, which puts every listener in Zhong Ziqi's place. In a qin society, "knows how to listen" is higher praise than "plays well".

The third is that breaking the qin became a gesture. Later players who lost a close friend sometimes stopped playing, not by smashing the qin but by putting it away. The gesture was still Bo Ya's.

Why the story has lasted two thousand years

Go back to the scene at the beginning. A man plays on a boat and a man listens on the bank. The player does not know anyone is listening, and the listener has not announced himself. Then a string breaks.

What truly moves people here is not technique. The text never says how well Bo Ya played, only how precisely Zhong Ziqi heard. The Chinese tradition treats playing the qin as a kind of speech, "the qin is the heart", and speech needs someone to hear it. One person who understands you is worth more than a room full of applause, and when that person is gone, no number of listeners can make up for the loss. That is the core of the parable, and the reason it has been told from the Warring States to today.

Players often feel the story when they play Liu Shui. The next time you hear it, ask yourself one question first. That "vast like the great rivers" in the music: is it something the player thought, or something the listener heard? Before Zhong Ziqi spoke, it may have been only sound. It was the woodcutter who turned the sound into rivers.