Jiācái 迦才 (Tang, fl. mid-7th c.)
A mid-Tang Pure Land master, contemporary of 善導 Shàndǎo and 道綽 Dàochuò’s immediate successors. Native place not preserved. He is known principally for his Jìngtǔ lùn 淨土論 KR6p0042 (T47N1963), a substantial three-juǎn doctrinal treatise on the Pure Land, completed (according to internal evidence) at Hóngfǎsì 弘法寺 in Cháng’ān 長安 — Jiācái identifies himself in the colophon as 京師弘法寺釋迦才撰.
The author’s preface to the Jìngtǔ lùn is unusually candid about his methodology and his predecessors: he praises the early Pure Land patriarchs Lúshān Huìyuǎn 廬山慧遠 and Xiè Língyùn 謝靈運, and explicitly engages with 道綽 Dàochuò’s Ānlè jí KR6p0037, which he criticises for being “broadly cited but mixed in argument and confused in chapter-arrangement” (其文義參雜。章品混淆。後之讀之). Jiācái’s Lùn is thus partly a structural reorganisation of the doctrinal material gathered in Dàochuò’s work, with cleaner chapter divisions and tighter doctrinal articulation. The Jìngtǔ lùn circulated in the Tang and was cited by later Pure Land literature, although less extensively than Dàochuò’s Ānlè jí and Shàndǎo’s Guānjīng shū.
His exact dates are uncertain; the author’s preface refers to Dàochuò (d. 645) as the most recent of his predecessors but not yet to Shàndǎo’s mature corpus, suggesting a working period in the 640s–660s. DILA Authority id A001294.
Sources: Sòng gāosēng zhuàn 宋高僧傳 has no entry for Jiācái; he is mentioned briefly in Fó zǔ tǒng jì 佛祖統紀 vol. 28 and Lèbāng wénlèi 樂邦文類 KR6p0048. Mochizuki, Chūgoku jōdo kyōrishi (1942/1964), discusses his life and works.