道法自然
呂祖 呂洞賓
Immortal & Inner-Alchemy Pioneer
Festival · 14th day of the 4th lunar month
Immortal & Inner-Alchemy Pioneer
The most beloved of the Eight Immortals and a founding patriarch of internal alchemy. Temples to 'Patriarch Lü' stand across China; he is honored as scholar, swordsman, healer and dispenser of oracles through the planchette.
Festival · 14th day of the 4th lunar month
History · 史记
Lü Dongbin (traditionally born 796) is the most worshipped of all Taoist immortals — patron of inner alchemy, of scholars and of healers, exorcist of demons, hero of a hundred folk tales. The Song Shi mentions him in the biography of Chen Tuan; the Yuan zaju plays made him a stage hero; the Yuan court enfeoffed him as Chunyang Yanzheng Jinghua Fuyou Dijun. Quanzhen venerates him as one of the Northern Five Patriarchs.
His icon is the sword — not for killing, but for cutting the three poisons of anger, desire and greed. He is the immortal who keeps returning to the wine-shop and the marketplace, disguised as a beggar, testing hearts.
In a Handan tavern, Lü Dongbin slept while the millet cooked and dreamed a whole lifetime — examination, office, marriage, disgrace, death. He woke to find the millet still raw, and Zhongli Quan smiling: a lifetime of glory, one pot of millet. He asked to be taught.
Zhongli Quan tested him ten times — with fear, with gold, with beauty, with death itself. Lü Dongbin passed them all unmoved; only then was he given the way of the sword and the pill.
He returned three times drunk to Yueyang Tower, singing: three times drunk at Yueyang, none knows me; I fly over the lake on my sword. No one recognized the immortal — that was the point. The Yuan play of the same name made it famous.
宋史·陳摶傳
The earliest official mention of Lü Dongbin and his disciples in the mountains.
元雜劇·岳陽樓
The Yuan stage plays that made him China's favorite immortal.
元史
Records the Yuan enfeoffment that crowned him Fuyou Dijun.