Lü Dongbin

The story that carries Lü Dongbin is one of the most retold in Chinese literature. A young scholar, having failed the examinations again, stops at an inn. Another guest, Zhongli Quan, is heating millet on the stove. The young man dozes and dreams an entire successful life: he passes the examinations, rises to high office, marries well, has children and grandchildren, is slandered, loses everything, sees his family destroyed and dies in exile in the snow. He wakes. The millet is not yet done.

Everything after that is commentary on it. He accepts Zhongli Quan as his teacher, undergoes a series of tests, traditionally ten, in which he is confronted with terror, wealth, temptation, loss and insult and does not react, and is granted transcendence. He asks, in the best known version, to be allowed to remain in the world until every living being has been saved, which is a bodhisattva's vow arriving in a Daoist story and one of the clearest instances of the two traditions borrowing from each other.

He is drawn as a scholar in a robe with a sword across his back, and both attributes matter: he is the immortal who kept his learning, and the sword is for cutting through delusion and subduing demons rather than for fighting. Of the eight he is by a wide margin the most worshipped in his own right.

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.