Mid-Míng religious thinker and founder of the Sānyī jiào 三一教 (“Three-in-One Teaching”) religious movement; the most successful of the late-Míng sānjiào héyī 三教合一 syncretists. Zì Màoxūn 懋勳, sobriquets Lóngjiāng 龍江, Sānjiào zhǔrén 三教主人 / Sānyī jiàozhǔ 三一教主, Zǐgǔzǐ 子谷子. Born Zhèngdé 12 = 1517 in Pútián 莆田 (Fújiàn) into a prosperous gentry family; renounced an examination career in 1551 to pursue a syncretic religious vocation. Taught a mature synthesis in which Confucian moral cultivation, Daoist inner-alchemical practice (nèidān), and Buddhist meditative insight were harmonized as three aspects of a single Confucian-grounded xìng 性 (“inborn nature”); developed a nine-stage cultivation system culminating in the jiǔxù xīnfǎ 九序心法.
Built a large devotional movement centered on the Sānyī Cí 三一祠 in Pútián, with extensive lay and gentry following across Fújiàn, Jiāngnán, and southeast China. The movement survived him and continues today in southeastern China, Taiwan, and overseas Fujianese diaspora communities. Composed extensive treatises on the three teachings and a series of commentaries on each tradition’s key texts; the Jīngāng jīng tǒnglùn 金剛經統論 (KR6c0064, X25 no. 476), in which he reads the Vajracchedikā through Sānyī cosmogony, is one of his Buddhist-side compositions. Died 1598 (Wànlì 26).
Standard study: Kenneth Dean, Lord of the Three in One: The Spread of a Cult in Southeast China (Princeton UP, 1998); also Judith Berling, The Syncretic Religion of Lin Chao-en (Columbia UP, 1980). DILA A000853.