Fayan

The Fayan, known in English as Model Sayings or Exemplary Figures, is a Classical Chinese text by Yang Xiong (52 BCE–18 CE), a writer and poet of the Han dynasty. It is a collection of dialogues and aphorisms in which Yang answers a wide range of questions on philosophy, politics, literature, ethics and scholarship. Its date of publication is unknown.

The work is divided into 13 chapters and takes the form of dialogues between Yang and an anonymous interlocutor. Yang replies with terse, authoritative pronouncements that rely more on wit and wordplay than on logical argument. The style is deliberately modeled on the Analects of Confucius, and its aim was to counter the ideas of the "syncretic" philosophical school, which Yang believed contradicted the orthodox teachings of Confucianism and the ancient Chinese sages.