The Tang Dynasty was a prosperous age of poetry in the history of our country. In such a splendid and prosperous age, many female talents were produced who did not allow men to specialize in poetry. Li Jilan, a female Taoist priest as famous as Xue Tao, was one of them. Outstanding. Li Jilan's original name was Li Zhi, the same name as Emperor Gaozong of the Tang Dynasty.
Li Jilan was born in the Kaiyuan period. When she was 6 years old, her father used poetry to test her. At that time, she recited a poem about roses, in which there were two lines: "The passage of time has not stopped, My mind is in turmoil.” "Jiaque" is homophonic to "marry but". Her father felt that although she was young, she had a restless temperament and would cause trouble in the future, so he sent her to become a monk at the Yuzhen Temple in Yanzhong and changed her name to Li Jilan.
As he grew older, Li Jilan's poetry gradually spread far and wide, and his reputation became wider and wider. The poetry gatherings she initiated became increasingly influential. One year, Li Jilan and various sages gathered at Kaiyuan Temple in Wucheng, Zhejiang. Among them, Liu Changqing, a poet from Hejian, suffered from "yin-heavy disease", which is called "hernia" in traditional Chinese medicine. For a young man's disease, the patient often has to use a cloth bag to hold up the kidney sac to reduce pain.
Li Zhi knew that Liu Changqing had this disease, so he recited a poem by Tao Yuanming: "The mountain air is getting better day by day." The mountain air was a homophone for hernia, which meant that Liu Changqing was getting better recently. Liu Changqing immediately responded with Tao's poem: "All birds are happy to have support" is a borrowed word, and the word "bird" is the word "bird" commonly used by Li Da in the black whirlwind. This reflects the romantic spirit of the female poets of the Tang Dynasty. Men and women talk, laugh and joke without restraint, which is evident in their unrestrained style.
Li Jilan's poems are "both majestic in form and poetic in spirit, and are rarely seen since Bao Zhao and later." Li Zhi once wrote a six-character poem "Eight Arrivals" that is known as an eternal masterpiece:
From near to far, from east to west, from deep to shallow clear stream.
The highest to the bright sun and the moon, the closest relatives to the distant couple.
In the feudal patriarchal system, husband to wife, sovereignty is greater than love, and wife to husband, obligation is greater than love. This kind of love is also maintained by the feudal system, but Li Zhi saw through this relationship between husband and wife with one sentence The six-character poem reveals the essence of this kind of relationship between husband and wife: the most intimate on the surface, the weakest in reality. A clear statement, astonishingly bold.
Later, even Emperor Xuanzong of the Tang Dynasty heard of Li Jilan's name and read some of her poems. He was very interested, so he issued an edict to come to the capital to see her. Just when Li Jilan rushed to Chang'an, the "Anshi Rebellion" broke out, causing chaos in Chang'an.