ABSTRACT
Chinese philosophy and religion owe an immense debt to the scholars of the Han dynasty that is only grudgingly acknowledged. One of the main philosophical convictions of the Han, shared by all its schools and almost all its scholars, is called "correlative thinking". The Han was an era that produced some of the most famous classical exegetes in Chinese history along with philosophers such as Tung Chung-shu. The Chinese imperial state- both the dream and the reality- probably produced the longest running set of political institutions in the history of the world. The government's side was presented by Sang Hung-yang and was opposed by a group of Confucian scholars. Yang Hsiung, considered the foremost Old Text scholar of his generation, gave a more humanistic and rational account of Confucius' life than did some of the more enthusiastic New Text conferees such as Tung Chungshu.
