Xu Zhonglin
Biography
Xu Zhonglin (許仲琳) was a novelist of the Ming dynasty from Yingtian Prefecture, the area around present-day Nanjing. His dates are uncertain. The English article gives 1560 as his year of death, while the Chinese article gives approximate years in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries and marks both as doubtful, so this page gives no life dates. He used the pen name Zhongshan Yisou (鍾山逸叟), roughly 'the old recluse of Mount Zhong', and some sources write his name as 陳仲琳.
He is traditionally credited with Investiture of the Gods (封神演義, Fengshen Yanyi), a novel of one hundred chapters about the fall of the Shang dynasty and the rise of the Zhou. It is set among gods, immortals and demons, with rival groups of immortals fighting across its pages. The book mixes history with folk religion, Buddhism, Taoism and Confucianism, and it is one of the major works of Ming fiction about gods and demons. It was first printed in book form between 1567 and 1619. The attribution to Xu rests mainly on an inscription in an early printed edition that names him as the editor. Recent scholars often think the novel was written largely by the Taoist scholar Lu Xixing (陸西星), and that Xu's part was that of an editor who reorganised the chapters and revised the text before reprinting.
On this site the book is credited under the form 陳仲琳, which the Chinese article also gives as another name for him. The page uses the English form Xu Zhonglin, with the other spellings as aliases. Do not confuse him with a later politician of the same name, who governed Anhui province in the early 2000s.
This biography was written by a language model. The sources below are where to check it; treat details with care.
Books
封神演義
by 陳仲琳
The tyrant Zhou of Shang offends the goddess Nuwa and sets heaven and earth against him, as the sage Jiang Ziya leads King Wu of Zhou to war with immortals and monsters on both sides. At the end the fallen heroes are invested as gods in a celestial bureaucracy. This book…
Summary written by Claude Sonnet 5.5.