Jīn Shèngtàn 金聖歎 (1608–1661)
The most consequential late-imperial Chinese literary critic; native of Chángzhōu 長洲 / Sūzhōu (modern Jiāngsū). Original name Jīn Rénruì 金人瑞 (also recorded as Jīn Cǎi 金采), zì Shèngtàn 聖歎 (“Sage’s Sigh”). CBDB person id 65871; recorded there as 1610–1661, but conventional scholarship gives his birth-year as 1608 (the issue concerns the xū / xūsuì 虛歲 reckoning).
He is best known for his extensive critical commentaries on the Liù cáizǐ shū 六才子書 (“Six Books of Genius”): the Zhuāngzǐ 莊子, the Lí sāo 離騷, the Shǐjì 史記, Dù Fǔ shī 杜甫詩, the Xīxiāng jì 西廂記, and the Shuǐhǔ zhuàn 水滸傳. His commentary editions of the latter two — particularly his radical re-edited Shuǐhǔ zhuàn — became the standard reading texts of those works for the entire Qīng dynasty and reshaped Chinese conceptions of vernacular fiction and drama as objects of high-literary commentary.
In addition to his literary writings he was active as a Buddhist lay practitioner, with particular interest in Pure Land devotion (niànfó) and Chán cānjiū. His short essay 《念佛三昧》 Niànfó sānmèi — preserved in the Tánjǐ cóngshū 檀几叢書 èrjí juǎn 23 (1697) and re-anthologised into the Xùzàngjīng as KR6p0109 (X1190) — is a distinctively literary-critical doctrinal reading of the Ēmítuó jīng.
He was executed at Sūzhōu in Shùnzhì 18 (1661), aged 53 (Western reckoning), in the politically motivated Sūzhōu Kūmiào 哭廟 case — the early-Qīng prosecution of the Sūzhōu Confucian-Buddhist literati who had protested the conduct of the Wú district magistrate Rén Wéichū 任維初 by mourning at the Confucian temple. He was beheaded together with seventeen co-defendants. He left numerous further writings, many published posthumously through the lay-Buddhist literati network of the late seventeenth century.