Chinese gods and immortals

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Chinese gods and immortals are beings in various Chinese religions seen in a variety of ways and mythological contexts.

Many are worshiped as deities because traditional Chinese religion is polytheistic, stemming from a pantheistic view that divinity is inherent in the world.^[1]

The gods are energies or principles revealing, imitating, and propagating the way of heaven (天, Tian),^[2] which is the supreme godhead manifesting in the northern culmen of the starry vault of the skies and its order.^{[citation needed]} Many gods are ancestors or men who became deities for their heavenly achievements. Most gods are also identified with stars and constellations.^[3] Ancestors are regarded as the equivalent of Heaven within human society,^[4] and therefore, as the means of connecting back to Heaven, which is the "utmost ancestral father" (曾祖父, zēngzǔfù).^[5]

There are a variety of immortals in Chinese thought, and one major type is the xian, which is thought in some religious Taoism movements to be a human given long or infinite life. Gods are innumerable, as every phenomenon has or is one or more gods, and they are organised in a complex celestial hierarchy.^[6] Besides the traditional worship of these entities, Chinese folk religion, Chinese Buddhism, Confucianism, Taoism, and formal thinkers in general give theological interpretations affirming a monistic essence of divinity.^[7]