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With the extraordinary growth of China’s economy over the past decades, a new generation of successful business entrepreneurs and billionaires has appeared, most of whom are incarnations of dreams of “rags to riches.” At the same time, the gap between the rich and poor has widened, and, far (and sometimes not so far) from the booming cities of the coasts, China’s impoverished rural hinterlands often suffer from declining public investment in health and education. Many of the new barons of business have established charitable foundations to help alleviate poverty—a growing trend that is promoted by the Chinese state. In a bid to publicize generosity and encourage charity, many magazines and government bodies regularly publish honor rolls and lists of China’s “top philanthropists.” Most of them are wealthy real estate developers and pop stars—but one name that often appears is that of an illiterate, eighty-year-old former beggar, Lin Dong, a charismatic Buddhist healer who has donated tens of millions of dollars to build schools in poor villages all over China. Born in 1930, Lin Dong became an orphan as a child and began a life of errant mendicancy. He married another beggar and, after the People’s Republic was established in 1949, was assigned a job as a manual laborer, helping to ship loads of goods along the waterways of Guangdong province. In the 1970s he lost his right hand in an accident, and a few years later he suffered from a stroke. In a state of near death, he had a vision of the Chinese god Jigong, who assured him that he would recover and entrusted him with the mission of rescuing those who suffer in the world. Jigong …