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:

For ten years I have been polishing this sword;
Its frosty edge^[4] has never been put to the test.
Now I am holding it and showing it to you, sir:
Is there anyone suffering from injustice?^[2]

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.

• Classical Chinese poetry
• Han Yu
• Li He
• Luoyang
• Meng Jiao
• Tang poetry

Pine, Red, and Mike O'Connor. The clouds should know me by now: Buddhist poet monks of China. Boston: Wisdom Publications, 1999. Includes selection of dual-language poems.

• Works by Jia Dao at LibriVox (public domain audiobooks)  
• Books of the Quan Tangshi that include collected poems of Jia Dao at the Chinese Text Project:
  • Book 571
  • Book 572
  • Book 573
  • Book 574