Nehunya ben HaKanah belongs to the first generation of tannaim, the teachers whose rulings the Mishnah collects, and he is placed around the destruction of the Temple in 70 CE. The rabbinic corpus preserves very little of him.
Berakhot 4:2 records two brief prayers he said, one on entering the house of study and one on leaving it, asking that no offence come about through him and giving thanks for his portion. Pirkei Avot 3:5 gives him a single saying: whoever takes on the yoke of Torah has the yoke of government and of worldly care lifted from him, and whoever throws off the yoke of Torah has both laid on him instead. A handful of further traditions credit him with a method of reasoning from the general and the particular. The Talmud has him asked how he reached great age and answering that he never sought honour at another man's expense, never went to sleep holding a grievance, and was open handed with his money.
That is close to the whole record, and the thinness of it is the point. He is a name attached to a few sayings and to a reputation for equanimity, with no biography, no school named after him and no book of his own. That combination is exactly what makes a figure available to later writers looking for an ancient voice to speak through, and it is what happened to him a thousand years afterwards.