 Yang Xiong (53 BCE–18 CE) was one of the last major philosophical figures before the end of the Western Han Dynasty, whose life spanned into the short-lived “interregnum” period of Wang Mang’s Xin Dynasty (9–23 CE). Yang’s late work represents a crucial pivot point toward the new kind of philosophical thought that would come to dominate in the Eastern Han period. Though the naturalism of the early Han remained, later Han thought moved back toward the kind of metaphysically sparse realism of the pre-Han period, away from the elaborate correlative systems of the earlier Han. Yang Xiong’s Fayan (“Model Sayings”) returns to the style and ideas of early texts such as the Analects.