Seeking a Hermit, Without Finding Him

Lines 1–2 — A question the poem leaves out

問 names the act of asking, and 言 introduces what the attendant says. The visitor’s question is never quoted. “Where is your master?” is one way to infer it from the answer 師採藥去. 童子 is a young attendant or disciple in this scene. The master becomes imaginable through a task, gathering medicinal herbs, before any location is given.

Lines 3–4 — Nearby and out of reach

只在此山中 sounds briefly helpful. 此 picks out this mountain, and 只 narrows the search to it. The next line immediately takes away the knowledge that would let the visitor act. 雲深 gives the obstruction, while 不知處 says the exact spot is unknown. The English sets the last two lines as the attendant’s continuing answer. You can also hear another unspoken question between them. That pattern of omitted questions makes the conversation feel larger than its twenty characters.

The five-character quatrain holds a miniature dialogue in twenty characters. One explicit act of asking supports several implied questions. The last line answers the title’s 不遇, “not meeting,” without an account of the visitor’s departure.

See jueju for the larger formal pattern. Pinyin gives modern Mandarin pronunciation; a historical level/oblique grid is not inferred from those modern tones.

The source records a competing attribution to Sun Ge, under the title Visiting Master Yang. This page follows the familiar Jia Dao attribution while making the uncertainty visible. The poem’s text can be read closely without claiming that the visitor’s identity or the encounter is independently established.

Continue with Jia Dao and the nature reading path. Compare To a Daoist in the Quanjiao Mountains and Deer Enclosure using the reading connections below.