Lü Dongbin occupies two positions at once, and the distance between them is unusual even by the standards of Chinese religion.
At the popular level he is a patron saint of extraordinary range. Barbers, ink makers, scholars and the sick petition him; he appears in spirit-writing cults, where a planchette traces characters in sand and the resulting texts are attributed to him, and a large body of such material circulated in the late imperial period; and he is the subject of a great many stories in which he arrives in disguise, tests somebody's generosity, and rewards or punishes accordingly. A proverb about a dog biting Lü Dongbin, meaning to fail to recognise a benefactor, is still in ordinary use.
At the institutional level he is Chunyang, Pure Yang, one of the patriarchs of the Quanzhen school of Daoism, which from the twelfth century organised monastic communities across northern China and remains one of the two principal Daoist orders. The Palace of Eternal Joy in Shanxi, built over what was said to be his birthplace, carries an extensive cycle of fourteenth century wall paintings depicting his life, and was moved stone by stone in the 1950s when a reservoir was built.
The atlas files him in the deity table on the same footing as Guan Yu and Mazu, deified humans who became objects of cult, rather than among the sages, because that is what the practice around him is.