Of all the immortals, the Chinese have loved Lü Dongbin (吕洞宾) the longest and the most warmly — and the foundation myth of his cult is, essentially, the tale of The World Inside a Pillow.
The legend says he was Lü Yán, a scholar of the late Tang, travelling to the capital to sit the examinations. On the road through Handan he stopped at an inn and fell in with a Taoist — Zhongli Quan, himself an immortal in disguise. While the millet cooked, the young scholar dozed on the Taoist’s pillow and dreamed his whole life: the examinations passed, high office won, marriage into a great family, fifty years of glory and intrigue and slander and exile, down to a deathbed surrounded by mourning sons. He woke with the millet still uncooked, and understood, and abandoned the examinations on the spot to follow the Taoist into the mountains.
There he was tested — the tradition loves its ten trials, temptations of fear, lust, wealth and pity, all of which he passed — and given the arts: the inner alchemy, and a sword. His sword is the famous sword of wisdom, which does not kill men but cuts away delusion — though in the martial tales it kills demons perfectly well. He became the great wandering immortal: riding the clouds with sword and gourd, appearing as a beggar, a boatman, a drunkard in wineshops, testing the hearts of strangers and rewarding the few who pass.
His legends are a genre of their own. He three times tried to enlighten the courtesan White Peony; he helped or teased half the figures of later mythology; he is credited with poems, swordsmanship, medicine and a magnificent temper. Temples to him spread across China, and he became the patron of barbers, ink-makers, scholars and the down-and-out — everyone, in short, who had ever failed an examination, in any sense, and needed a god who understood.
He is in this library because he is the hinge between two genres: the scholarly dream-tale and the immortal’s wandering legend. The man who learned, in one nap, that the whole game of worldly success is a dream — and then spent eternity helping others wake up.