ABSTRACT

Jia Yi (Chia I, 200-168 B.C.E.) was a classical scholar, philosopher, and poet who served in the office of erudite (boshi) and then palace grandee (taizhong daifu) beginning in 179 B.C.E. under Emperor Wen of the Han dynasty. After being slandered at court, Jia was sent away from the capital to serve as grand tutor (taifu) to the prince of Changsha. A few years later, Jia was rehabilitated and served briefly as grand tutor to the prince of Liang before dying at age thirty-three. Despite Jia’s early death, his memorandums, poems, and essays preserved in the standard histories, taken with the fifty-eight chapters of the New Writings (Xinshu) attributed to him, constitute an exceptionally large body of work-from which we can reconstruct his highly original efforts to integrate Confucian moral psychology with political philosophy.