Jia Dao

Life

Jia Dao entered the Buddhist clergy early in life and later returned to lay life. During the Yuanhe era, he presented poetry and prose to Han Yu in Luoyang and followed him to Chang’an; he is also said to have visited Zhang Ji. He repeatedly sat the jinshi examinations without passing; another account calls 822, the second year of Changqing, his final jinshi examination, and the order of his Buddhist and examination careers is disputed.

Known for painstaking composition, Jia Dao was once riding a donkey through the capital while working over a poem and, undecided between the characters tui (“push”) and qiao (“knock”), failed to notice that he had ridden into the carriage of Han Yu, the Jingzhao Yin. After hearing the explanation, Han Yu judged “knock” better, then rode alongside him discussing poetry and taught him composition; the episode became the famous “push-and-knock” story.

During Changqing, Jia Dao used “The Sick Cicada” to satirize court officials and was grouped with Ping Zeng and others as the “Ten Evils of the Examination Hall.” In the second year of Kaicheng (837), after a charge of feibi, he was demoted and appointed registrar of Changjiang County in Suizhou, becoming known as “Jia Changjiang”; after completing a three-year term, he was transferred to the post of assistant in the Puzhou granary administration. In the third year of Huichang (843), he was transferred to the post of military assistant in household administration at Puzhou, but died before receiving the appointment; his place of death is given as Puzhou. He was buried there the following year.

Jia Dao’s younger cousin was the monk Shi Wuke. He exchanged poems and prose with Han Yu, Zhang Ji, Liu Gongquan, Wang Jian, Meng Jiao, and Yao He, and his fame with Meng Jiao gave rise to the pairing “Jiao and Dao.”

Poetry and style

Jia Dao became known for painstaking composition, and his verse includes the line, “Two lines took three years to achieve; one recitation brought a pair of tears.” His five-character ancient verse followed Han Yu and Meng Jiao, often expressing personal feeling and aspiration through carefully carved language of hardship; examples include “Ancient Intent,” “The Swordsman,” “Morning Hunger,” and “The Guest Rejoices.”

After the Yuanhe era he concentrated on five-character regulated verse, inheriting the poets of the Dali period while turning toward an eccentric and recondite mode. He often described feeling and landscape, favoring such small, obscure subjects as fireflies, ant holes, moving snakes, and strange birds; the resulting style was pure, strange, austere, steep, and sharply wrought. “Seeing Wuke the Elder Off,” “Passing the Mountain Village at Dusk,” and “Inscribed on Li Ning’s Secluded Residence” are among the poems that most clearly display it. Later readers summarized the contrast between Meng Jiao and Jia Dao as “cold Meng Jiao, lean Jia Dao” (郊寒島瘦).

Influence and criticism

Su Jiang praised his “孤絕之句，記在人口” (“solitary, exceptional lines remembered by everyone”). Emerging after the high point of the Zhenyuan and Yuanhe poetry, Jia Dao’s work helped open a sharp, novel, recondite tendency in late-Tang poetry; many late-Tang poets imitated it, and the Four Elders of the Southern Song, especially the Yongjia Four Elders, revered him as a “Tang patriarch.” His poetic manner also influenced the Yongjia Four Elders’ writing.

Sikong Tu, however, wrote that he had “時有警句，視其全篇，意思殊餒” (“occasional striking lines, but when the whole poem is viewed its meaning is meagre”); later praise and blame often turned on the tension between the brilliance of individual lines and the relative lack of emotional and structural fullness in the complete poem.

Works

His works include the ten-volume Changjiang ji (《長江集》), also titled Jia Changjiang ji (《賈長江集》), and the three-volume Xiao ji (《小集》). A Sibu congkan edition of the Changjiang ji circulated, followed by Li Jiayan’s revised Changjiang ji; annotated editions include Chen Yanjie’s Notes on Jia Dao’s Poetry and Qi Wenbang’s Collated Commentary on the Jia Dao Collection.

The Complete Tang Poems preserves four scrolls of his poetry; the Supplement to the Complete Tang Poems and the Continuation of the Complete Tang Poems add two poems and fourteen fragmentary lines.