Lǐ Áo 李翱 (772–841)
Zì Xízhī 習之. Of Wúzhōu 武州 (some sources Chángān 長安) origin. Jìnshì of Zhēnyuán 14 (798). Disciple and longtime collaborator of Hán Yù 韓愈 (韓愈); married a woman of Hán Yù’s family. Wilkinson (§28.7.3) groups him with Hán Yù and Liǔ Zōngyuán 柳宗元 as the late-Táng Confucian revivalists who are the intellectual pre-history of Sòng Neo-Confucianism.
Career: rose to Húbù shìláng 戶部侍郎 and later shānnándōngdào jiédùshǐ 山南東道節度使. Prose works collected in the Lǐ Wéngōng jí 李文公集 (18 juàn).
His most influential individual work is the Fù xìng shū 復性書 (“Treatise on Recovering [the Original] Nature”) — a three-part essay synthesising Confucian Zhōngyōng / Yìjīng moral metaphysics with vocabulary partly drawn from Buddhist xìngfǎ 性法 discussion. The Fù xìng shū is one of the principal Táng-period sources of the Sòng Lǐxué doctrine of original good nature obscured by passion (qíng 情); Zhū Xī cites it explicitly in the Sìshū commentaries.
In Kanripo Lǐ Áo’s name appears principally in the Lúnyǔ bǐjiě 論語筆解 (KR1h0008) — a co-authored set of dialogue-readings on the Lúnyǔ with Hán Yù, where the “Lǐ yuē” 李曰 entries are by him. The Sìkù tíyào (at KR1h0008) treats the work as a posthumous collection of margin-notes from Hán Yù’s draft Lúnyǔ commentary, into which Lǐ Áo’s discussion-replies were also incorporated.
(CBDB gives birth/death “0/0” for this personid 22052, indicating that no precise dates are recorded; the conventional dates 772–841 are derived from the Jiù Tángshū 舊唐書 biography 160 and the dating of his individual essays. Some sources give a slightly later death-year 836 or 838.)