**1. Introduction**

In his preface to *The Enchanted Date*, a long prose narrative recounting the life of the immortal Sa Shoujian , the author-editor Deng Zhimo - stresses that this book is not only intended for adepts who devote themselves to the Daoist path, but also for "those who wish to cultivate their minds and revere the gods". His book, Deng claims, is the fruit of meticulous research whose goal is to present the "true traces of the immortal". Indeed, *The Enchanted Date*, published in 1603, is not only the first comprehensive hagiography of Sa Shoujian, but it is unprecedented in its encyclopedic scope, weaving historiography, hagiography, and ritual practice into the fabric of the immortal's life story.

This book joins two other narratives by Deng Zhimo published around the same time: *The Iron Tree*, devoted to the Daoist patriarch Xu Xun , and *The Flying Sword*, celebrating the famous immortal-bard Lü Dongbin --. The three books, which I refer to collectively as Deng Zhimo's *Saints Trilogy*, offer informative and entertaining retellings of the three immortals' life stories that serve as vehicles for their veneration. The three books of the *Saints Trilogy* are composite texts that incorporate a variety of materials, ranging from canonical instructions for Daoist inner-alchemy to poems and folktales, within the framework of long "vernacular" narrative-texts (*xiaoshuo*). In its multitextuality (Bisetto 2012, pp. 917–25), the *Saints Trilogy* bridges the realms of book culture and cultic reverence. Similarly to contemporaneous "paraliturgical" narrative-texts that grew out of reverential and ritual contexts, the *Saints Trilogy* should likewise be understood as part of a larger, predominantly lay, hagiographic repertoire, and as such, its book consumption challenges narrow definitions of "reading" (see Cedzich 1995; Meulenbeld 2007, 2015; Shahar 1998, 2015).

This paper examines the multitextuality of the *Saints Trilogy* in the context of late-Ming publishing.1 I argue that Deng Zhimo's intertextual practices in the *Saints Trilogy* reflect a conscious attempt to produce comprehensive portfolios of the three immortals that would allow readers to "follow in the footsteps of the immortals", as Deng phrased it. By repackaging the hagiographies of the three immortals and reinterpreting the teachings that were associated with their lore, Deng Zhimo presented

**Citation:** Ganany, Noga. 2022. Writing and Worship in Deng Zhimo's *Saints Trilogy*. *Religions* 13: 128. https://doi.org/10.3390/ rel13020128

Academic Editors: Xiaohuan Zhao and Thomas Michael

Received: 18 October 2021 Accepted: 25 January 2022 Published: 29 January 2022

**Publisher's Note:** MDPI stays neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

**Copyright:** © 2022 by the author. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ 4.0/).

15

a renewed vision of Xu Xun, Sa Shoujian, and Lü Dongbin as miracle-working masters of inner alchemy who protect humanity from natural and demonic threats. As guidebooks for the immortals' lore and the doctrinal teachings that came to be associated with them, the *Saints Trilogy* offered resources for the immortals' reverence and inspiration for the pursuit of spiritual cultivation. In this respect, the *Saints Trilogy* shines a valuable light on the unique role of the commercial publishing industry in shaping the discourse on the lore and reverence of cultic figures through producing, reframing, and disseminating knowledge in late-imperial China.
