Cao Guojiu

Cao Guojiu is the only member of the group who begins at the top and stays there until something forces him out. The tradition makes him a relative of the Song imperial house, a brother of an empress, holding the standing that came with it. His younger brother used that standing badly: the accounts have him extorting, seizing what he wanted, and killing a man whose wife he was pursuing, on the assumption that the family connection made him untouchable.

What Cao Guojiu did about it varies by version. In some he tries to make restitution and fails; in others he simply withdraws, unable to hold office in a family that had done such a thing, and goes into the mountains with a small amount of money that he gives away.

The scene that follows is the one that fixed him in the group. Zhongli Quan and Lü Dongbin find him living rough and ask what he is doing. Nurturing the Way, he says. And where is the Way? He points at the sky. And where is the sky? He points at his own heart. The two immortals laugh and tell him that the heart is the sky and the sky is the Way, that he has understood, and they take him as a student. It is a short exchange and it does the work of a treatise: the last thing he has to give up is the idea that the Way is somewhere else.

Cao Guojiu is the thinnest of the eight in the literature, and the reason is that he arrived late. Groupings of transcendents circulated for centuries before the standard set existed, and the membership was not stable: different Tang and Song lists include figures who are now outside the group and omit some who are now inside it. What produced the fixed eight was the stage. The zaju drama of the Yuan period returned to them repeatedly, and by the time the Ming novel of the journey to the east was written, the membership had settled into the list used ever since.

The number itself carried weight before the members did. Eight is the number of the trigrams, of the directions, of the divisions of the year, and a group of eight anything reads as complete in Chinese arrangement. A set of eight immortals is therefore not merely eight individuals but a full compass of ways to reach the same end, which is exactly how the tradition presents them: a general, a scholar, an old recluse, a musician, a courtier, a beggar, a singer of unfixed gender and a young woman, covering rank, age, sex and condition between them.

His attributes reflect the late arrival. He is shown sometimes with a jade tablet of court audience and sometimes with a pair of castanets, and the two are not easily reconciled. He is patron of actors and of theatrical troupes, plausibly because a figure in court dress on stage was the natural candidate for the profession to adopt.