Kakui’s Hakase-Shi-Kuden-no-Koto in Modern English Translation

A Window into the Workings of 13th Century Japanese Buddhist Neumes and a Step Forward for Comparative Liturgy

Abstract

The present work is a modern English-language translation and annotation of Kakui’s (1237-?)
Hakase-Shi-Kuden-no-Koto, the earliest dated medieval Japanese manuscript to give specific details
regarding the design and function of the go-in bakase, itself a system of diastematic neumes prevalent
in Shingon-sect Japanese esoteric Buddhist circles from as early as the thirteenth century used
for recording, as well as recalling, their hymnody. Hakase-Shi-Kuden-no-Koto has the secondary distinction
of being the earliest dated treatise on Shingon-sect Shōmyō oral transmission of any kind,
and it has the tertiary distinction of being, to the translator’s knowledge, the only extant medieval
Japanese manuscript to provide a comprehensive table of medieval Japanese neumes. The treatise
has been preserved in a manuscript in the hand of the eighteenth-century Shingon priest Reizui
(ca. 1756). Rezui’s copy is currently housed at the Koyasan University Library in Wakayama prefecture,
and it is upon this version of Kakui’s text that the current translation is based. This translation
is intended to provide both a point of entry into the world of Japanese, and indeed East Asian,
neume studies for musicologists, and a point of reference in the necessarily collaborative endeavor
of internationalizing the field of comparative liturgy. With that in mind, the footnotes include references
to neumes from the notational systems of the Latin and Byzantine Christian churches of
late antiquity and medieval times that are, to the translator, obvious graphic equivalents to neumes
given by Kakui. This is done not to suggest any particular historical interpretation, but rather to
identify phenomenological similarities that beckon to be explored for their historico-musicological
significance.