Listening to YU Boya (ca. 387 – 299 BCE) playing the qin, ZHONG Ziqi (ca. 413 – 354 BCE) thoroughly understood Boya’s deep self. The player’s inner music echoes with the listener. This encounter between an accomplished musician and a humble woodcutter epitomizes the zhiyin notion. Since then, it has become an unavoidable classical allusion within the qin musical tradition. The tune “Flowing Streams” (Liu shui) gives an example of such allusion, which was interpreted by GUAN Pinghu (1897-1967) and included as representation of the Chinese music in the Golden Records of the Voyager spacecraft launched in 1977. Until today, this tune remains known as a masterpiece of the repertoire. From this perspective, this paper questions the posterity of the zhiyin notion among the contemporary heirs of the qin tradition. First, we will underline the diversity of tunes derived from this theme with reference to the audio-visual archives compiled from 1956 by ZHA Fuxi (1895 – 1976), some of which edited for the first time in 2017. Second, from this initial survey, we will trace and question the genealogy of these various tunes by studying the authoritative corpus of qin manuals (qinpu), dating back for the oldest one to the Handbook of Spiritual and Marvelous Mysteries (Shenqi mipu) printed in 1425.