Japanese study of Ritsuryo shinsho (C. Lulu xinshu, a Song-dynasty treatise on music) is thought to have developed primarily around the figure of Nakamura Tekisai (1629‒1702), a Kyoto-based Neo-Confucian scholar. Yet when we look at the earliest research on this book, we find that Hayashi Gaho (1618‒1680), second-generation head of the Hayashi family, who served as the chief academician of the Tokugawa shogunate, was aware of Ritsuryo shinsho even before Nakamura, and left us a treatise on it entitled Ritsuryo shinsho genkai (1677). However, this latter work went largely unnoticed at the time and is almost never cited in other early modern works on Ritsuryo shinsho. Thus, Ritsuryo shinsho genkai has been overlooked until now, along with the contribution of the Hayashi family to research on the original text. This paper investigates the research on Ritsuryo shinsho conducted by the Hayashi family, the process of writing Ritsuryo shinsho genkai, and the kinds of music practiced within the Hayashi family, concluding with an elucidation of the purposes for which Ritsuryo shinsho genkai was written, and its value as a treatise in its own right.
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