Liǔ Zǐhòu 柳子厚 / Liǔ Zōngyuán 柳宗元 (773–819)
The major mid-Táng poet, essayist, and political reformer; one of the Eight Masters of Táng and Sòng Prose (唐宋八大家) and one of the principal figures of the gǔwén 古文 (“ancient prose”) movement that revived classical literary Chinese against the high Táng biànwén 駢文 (parallel-prose) style. Zì Zǐhòu 子厚; native of Hédōng 河東 (modern Yùnchéng 運城, Shānxī), whence his alternate epithet Liǔ Hédōng 柳河東; later exiled to and died at Liǔzhōu 柳州 (modern Guǎngxī), whence the further alternate epithet Liǔ Liǔzhōu 柳柳州.
He passed the jìnshì exam in 793 (Zhēnyuán 9) at age 21 and rose rapidly in central government service, becoming closely associated with the reformist circle around Wáng Shūwén 王叔文 during the brief Yǒngzhēn 永貞 reign (805). After the failure of the Yǒngzhēn reforms he was exiled to the southern provinces (first Yǒngzhōu 永州 in modern Húnán, where he spent a decade; then Liǔzhōu in Guǎngxī) and died in exile at Liǔzhōu in 819, age 47. The Yǒngzhōu years produced his most celebrated literary works — the Yǒngzhōu bājì 永州八記 (Eight Records of Yǒngzhōu) and the Bǔ shézhě shuō 捕蛇者說 (the famous essay on the snake-catcher) — and his deepest engagement with Buddhism.
The brief allegorical essay 《東海若》 Dōnghǎi ruò — preserved with the Qīng-period commentary of 實賢 Xǐng’ān as the Dōnghǎi ruò jiě KR6p0097 — is one of his Buddhist-philosophical compositions, a parable on the nature of the dharma drawn from the Zhuāngzǐ 莊子 Qiūshuǐ 秋水 chapter (the dialogue between the river-god of the Yellow River and Ruò 若 of the Eastern Sea). His Buddhist commitments — particularly his interest in Chán and Pure Land — are unusually explicit for a major Confucian-trained literatus of the mid Táng and made him an attractive figure for the late-imperial Confucian-Buddhist syncretic tradition.