Lìn Dàorén 藺道人 (“Mr Lìn the Daoist”, also rendered 藺道者 Lìn Dàozhě) is the legendary author to whom the earliest extant Chinese bonesetting / orthopaedic manual, the Xiānshòu lǐshāng xùduàn mìfāng 仙授理傷續斷秘方 (KR3ed004), is attributed. According to the work’s narrative preface, he was a tóutuó 頭陀 (Buddhist mendicant, characterised in the text alternately as a Daoist hermit) of ancient appearance who claimed to be 140 or 150 years old. He built a thatched hermitage at Zhōngcūn 鐘村 in Yíchūn 宜春 (Yuánzhōu 袁州 prefecture, modern Jiāngxī) during the 會昌 reign (Wǔzōng, 841–846). Asked his name, he said Lìn Dàozhě; asked his clan, he said he was a man of Cháng’ān 長安. He healed the son of the village elder Péng 彭叟 of a serious neck-and-arm injury, then transmitted his orthopaedic recipes to Péng under three oaths (not to profit unjustly, not to sell cheaply, not to transmit to unworthy persons), and ultimately disappeared — said by his sole drinking-companion 鄧先生 to have “ascended to immortality.”
No external historical record of Lìn Dàorén survives, and he does not appear in CBDB or in standard Táng prosopographies. The figure is best understood as the legendary author of a transmitted technical text whose actual composition is anchored to the Yíchūn 宜春 orthopaedic tradition of the late Táng (841–846 conventional date). The Daoist xiānshòu “immortal-transmitted” topos by which esoteric medical or alchemical knowledge is passed from a long-lived hermit to a recipient layman who then carries it forward is a TángSòng narrative type with multiple parallels.