Late-Míng (Wàn-lì-era) classicist and minor official, native of Quánjiāo 全椒 (Chúzhōu prefecture, modern Ānhuī). Zì Dàoxíng 道行. Jìnshì of Wànlì 8 / gēngchén 庚辰 (1580). CBDB records the name (id 131727, index year 1550, suggesting a birth around mid-century) but no firm lifedates. Two further homonymous entries (293590, 488328) appear in CBDB; the present id is the most plausible match given the jìnshì year and the late-Wàn-lì Chūnqiū activity. Míngrén zhuànjì zīliào suǒyǐn p. 695 is the standard modern reference.
His one canonical work is the Chūnqiū zhì yí 春秋質疑 (KR1e0087) — a focused, item-by-item critique of Hú Ānguó’s KR1e0036 Chūnqiū zhuàn, finished around the very end of the sixteenth century: Yáng’s own preface is dated Wànlì jǐhài 萬曆己亥 (1599), and the second preface by Qiū Yīnghé 邱應和 is dated Wànlì gēngzǐ 萬曆庚子 (1600). The work is broadly aligned with the contemporaneous anti-Hú current of Yuán Rén 袁仁, Xú Xuémó 徐學謨, and Jiāng Bǎo 姜寶, but Yáng’s tone is distinctly less polemical and more probabilistic — its title-character zhì 質 (“to put a question, to seek confirmation”) signals scholarly inquiry rather than wholesale rejection.