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Jia Dao (traditional Chinese: 賈島; simplified Chinese: 贾岛; pinyin: Jiǎ Dǎo; Wade–Giles: Chia Tao) (779–843), courtesy name Langxian (浪仙), was a Chinese Buddhist monk and poet active during the Tang dynasty.
賈島
松下問童子
言師採藥去
只在此山中
雲深不知處
Seeking the Master but not Meeting by Jia Dao
Beneath a pine I asked a little child. / He said the Master went to gather herbs. / Alone was he upon this mountainside, / The clouds so deep he knew not where he was.
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Jia Dao was born near modern Beijing; after a period as a Buddhist monk, he went to Chang'an. He became one of Han Yu's disciples, but failed the jinshi exam several times. He wrote both discursive gushi and lyric jintishi. His works were criticised as "thin" by Su Shi, and some other commentators have considered them limited and artificial.[1]
According to Dr. James J.Y. Liu (1926–1986), a professor of Chinese and comparative literature, Jia's poem The Swordsman (劍客) "seems...to sum up the spirit of knight errantry in four lines."[2][3] "The Swordsman" reads in Liu's translation as follows:
A metric translation of the original Chinese poem with one iamb per Chinese character[5] reads as follows:
A decade long I honed a single sword,
Its steel-cold blade still yet to test its song.
Today I hold it out to you, my lord,
and ask: "Who seeks deliverance from a wrong?"
The original Chinese:
劍客: 十年磨一劍, 霜刃未曾試. 今日把示君, 誰有不平事.
The opening line of The Swordsman is often used as a proverb to refer to a long and arduous undertaking.[6]
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