Lord of the Three in One: The Spread of a Cult in Southeast China

Lin Zhao’en (1517–1598) set out to popularize Confucianism by combining Confucian studies with Daoist inner alchemical techniques and Buddhist Chan philosophy into something he called the Three in One Teachings. Despite periods of clandestine activity since its inception, the Three in One cult has undergone a remarkable revival in post-Mao China. Today, in more than a thousand temples by tens of thousands of cult initiates, Lin is worshipped throughout Southeast China and Southeast Asia as Lord of the Three in One. Many of the temples have been restored since the late 1970s, when China began to experience an explosive resurgence of popular culture and religion. In this book, Kenneth Dean draws on a decade of field work to document the reemergence of this cult, which seeks to transmit a universal vision of truth yet retains a strong local appeal through its healing rituals and spirit mediumism. Although the Chinese government still tries to suppress these resurgences in the interest of modernization, the cult’s locally based networks are unstoppable social forces.

Dean explores the organization and transmission of the Three in One’s unique cultural vision, the reception of this vision, and the construction of subjectivity within a vibrant ritual tradition. Outlining such features as inner alchemical meditation, scripture and iconography, ritual practice, and spirit mediumism, he demonstrates the cult’s transformative potential as well as its contemporaneity and dynamism. Rural Chinese popular culture emerges here as resilient, highly complex, and always evolving.