Writers › Writer / Poet
Jia Dao
Mid-Tang poet and former monk known for laboring over every word, the source of the 'push or knock' anecdote involving Han Yu
In a study at night, a desk holds a brush pot, a porcelain vase with a plum branch, a lit red lantern, a folded fan and an unrolled blank scroll, with no one seated there, while through a round window the moon rises over a lake with a sailboat.
Also known as Zi Langxian · Zi Langxian · Jieshi Shanren
- Roles
- Writer / Poet
Jia Dao, courtesy name Langxian, came from Fanyang and spent his early years as a Buddhist monk under the name Wuben. In the Yuanhe era he brought his poems to Han Yu in Luoyang and Chang'an, won his favor, and returned to lay life to sit the examinations, which he failed again and again. A story preserved in the Recorded Occasions of Tang Poetry (Tangshi jishi) has him riding a donkey while deciding whether a monk should 'push' or 'knock' at a gate under the moon, so absorbed that he ran into the procession of Han Yu, then governor of the capital, who settled on 'knock'. Under Emperor Wenzong he was demoted to keeper of records at Changjiang county, later becoming a granary official in Puzhou, where he died in 843 at sixty-five. He described his slow labor over lines in the couplet 'two lines took three years', his collection is titled Changjiang ji, and Su Shi summed up his and Meng Jiao's styles as 'Meng cold, Jia thin'.
Life and times
Dates 779 CE–843 CE