beat him. After the capture of Nanking by the T'ai-p'ings he established himself in the Viceroy's yamên and lived in great state. In August 1856 he was detected in a seditious moyement against the Heavenly King and was slain, and his body is said to have been eaten.
2379Yang Hsiung 揚雄 (T. 子雲). B.C. 53–A.D. 18. A native of Ch'êng-tu in Ssŭ-ch'uan, who as a child was fond of learning but given to straying from the beaten track and reading whatever he could lay his hands upon. He stammered in his speech, and consequently gave much time to meditation. In poetry he made Ssŭ-ma Hsiang-ju his model, and ere long was considered to be quite the equal of his master. He attracted the notice of the Emperor Ch'êng Ti, and received a post at Court, from which he is sometimes spoken of as 揚執戟. Later on he accepted office under Wang Mang, the Usurper, for which he is severely blamed in history, Chu Hsi stigmatising him as "Mang's Minister." On one occasion he nearly lost his life by throwing himself out of window to escape arrest on a charge for which a son of Liu Hsin, who had been a pupil of his, was put to death. He propounded an ethical criterion occupying a middle place between those insisted upon by Mencius and Hsün K'uang, teaching that the nature of man at birth is neither good nor evil, but a mixture of both, and that development in either direction depends wholly upon environment. In glorification of the Canon of Changes he wrote the 太玄經, and to emphasise the value of the Confucian Analects he produced the 法言, both between A.D. 1 and 6. On completion of this last, his most famous work, a wealthy merchant of the province was so struck by its excellence that he offered to give 100,000 cash if his name should merely be mentioned in it. But Yang answered with scorn that a stag in a pen or an ox in a cage would not be more out of place than the name of a man, with nothing but money to recommend
