In the seventh year of Kaiyuan a Taoist known as Old Lü, who had the arts of the immortals, was travelling the Handan road and stopped to rest at a roadside inn. Presently a young man named Lu came in, riding a sorry grey colt and wearing a coarse short coat, on his way to look at his fields. He sat down near the old man, and they fell to talking, and the talk was good — until Lu looked down at his own shabby clothes and sighed from the bottom of his soul.
“A man is born into the world,” he said, “and this is what he amounts to. I farm; I study; and I shall die as I am, in a coat like this.”
The old Taoist looked at him. “You are young and healthy and good company,” he said. “Why do you call yourself unfortunate?”
“Because this is not living,” said Lu. “To live is to pass the examinations, to serve the emperor, to command armies and fill a great hall with guests, to marry a wife whose name opens doors, to leave sons who carry your name high. That is living. I have studied for it and failed, and here I sit.”
Old Lü reached into his bag and took out a porcelain pillow, green-glazed, with a hole at each end. “Rest your head on this,” he said, “and you shall have the life you describe.”
The innkeeper had just put a pot of yellow millet on the fire. Lu lay down — and found the hole in the pillow growing, widening, until it was a gate of light, and he stepped through it into his own house and his own life, remade. He married a beautiful girl of the great Cui clan of Qinghe. Money came with her, and with money came ease, and with ease came success: he passed the jinshi examination, entered the Hanlin Academy, rose office by office. He dredged rivers and fed provinces; the people sang his name. He commanded an army on the frontier and broke the Tibetans. He became, in time, Chief Minister, the first man of the empire after the emperor — and then, as the wheel turns, his enemies slandered him, and he was dragged to prison expecting death, and sent into exile at the end of the earth, and only years later, white-haired, recalled and honoured again, loaded with titles, adored by sons who filled his hall.
He lived to be over eighty. On his deathbed, surrounded by weeping sons and imperial messengers, he wrote his last memorial, thanked the emperor for a life of undeserved grace, and closed his eyes.
And woke in the inn at Handan, with Old Lü watching him, and the yellow millet not yet cooked.
Lu sat up slowly. He looked at the old man, at the steaming pot, at his own coarse coat. “So that is what it is,” he said at last, very quietly. “Fifty years of rise and ruin — a dream. The emperor, the Cui girl, the army, the prison — a nap by the road. I chased it all my waking life as though it were the only real thing.”
He bowed to the old Taoist, thanked him for the lesson, took his colt, and rode away — not to his fields, and not to the examinations. Where he went the tale does not say; but it is careful to tell us that he never again complained of his coat.