Fayan
法言 (Fayan, 'Model Sayings')
Confucius remains the only reliable standard against which every later teaching, Daoist mysticism, Legalist expediency, or literary fashion, should be measured, and a scholar's proper task is not to invent a new doctrine but to defend and clarify that standard in plain, quotable language.
- deliberately modeled on the Analects's dialogue form
- defense of Confucian orthodoxy against rhetorical fashion
- written by a court poet who later disavowed his earlier ornamental verse
- continuation rather than innovation of Confucius's project
A collection of aphoristic dialogues by Yang Xiong, a Western Han court scholar and poet, deliberately modeled on the Analects both in its short question-and-answer form and in its underlying purpose, restating and defending orthodox Confucian values, moral cultivation, the priority of virtue over cleverness, deference to the classics, against what Yang Xiong saw as the shallow, ornamental rhetoric fashionable in the court poetry (fu) of his own earlier career, which he later disavowed as a waste of talent. Less original than imitative by design, it is valued as a clear statement of scholarly Confucian orthodoxy in the late Western Han and for its explicit self-positioning as a continuation of Confucius's own project.
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