Lü Dongbin

Lü Dongbin's central legend is the "Yellow Millet Dream": while waiting for millet to cook at a wayside inn, he fell asleep and dreamed an entire life — official success, marriage, children, disgrace, exile, old age, death — compressed into the minutes it took the grain to finish cooking. He woke transformed, understanding worldly achievement as fundamentally empty, and left to study under the immortal Zhongli Quan (Han Zhongli), eventually attaining the Dao himself and becoming, in most tellings, the most capable and most frequently depicted of the Eight Immortals — carrying a sword said to cut through ignorance and passion rather than flesh.

His significance to organised Taoism runs deeper than his place in the Eight Immortals group: Quanzhen tradition holds that Lü Dongbin appeared to Wang Chongyang at a wayside inn in the 1150s and personally transmitted the teaching that led to Wang's founding of the Complete Perfection school, making Lü a direct spiritual patriarch of the lineage that produced the Longmen branch and White Cloud Temple. He is also venerated independently as a patron of scholars, physicians, and barbers, subject of his own extensive temple cult (most prominently the Yongle Palace in Shanxi, built around a cycle of murals depicting his life), and a stock protagonist of vernacular fiction and opera in which he tests, tempts, or rescues ordinary people to teach a moral lesson about detachment.