Han Yu lived in a time when the Chinese Tang empire (618–907) was threatened by military separatism but enjoyed cultural creativity and economic expansion. He became a major writer in his youth and had a successful official career late in his life. He was an innovative poet and essayist and the chief champion of the guwen movement that paved the way for a fundamental change of prose style. More unusual for a writer, Han played a leading role in a crucial philosophical redirection.

As a thinker, Han's most important idea was that Confucianism is the sole legitimate teaching for human conduct, to the exclusion of Buddhism and Daoism. This was an extreme position in his own time, but it exerted profound influence throughout later Chinese history. Han presented this view most forcefully in his famous essay "Essentials of the Moral Way" (Yuan Dao). This essay...