Zhongli Quan

The story the tradition tells about Zhongli Quan begins with a defeat. He is a Han commander sent against the tribes of the north west; the campaign goes badly, the army is scattered, and he escapes alone into the mountains with nothing. There he meets an old man, or in some versions finds an inscribed jade casket in a wall, and receives the instructions that make him a transcendent.

The shape of that account matters more than its details. A man at the top of the worldly hierarchy is stripped of everything by failure, and the failure is the doorway. The same pattern runs through the whole group: an official who cannot pass his examinations, a courtier disgraced by his brother, a beggar in a borrowed corpse. The Eight Immortals are not a pantheon of the successful, which is a large part of why they have been popular for six centuries with people who were not successful either.

He is drawn as a heavy bare-bellied man, cheerful, with his hair tied in two loops on the top of his head and a large feather fan in his hand. The fan is his instrument: in the stories it raises the dead, and in one widely repeated episode it turns stones into silver which he distributes to the poor. He is usually placed first in the group and is regularly shown as the senior of the two figures in the teaching pair with Lü Dongbin.

Beyond the popular stories, Zhongli Quan carries a second and more technical reputation. A considerable body of internal alchemical literature is transmitted under the joint names of Zhongli Quan and Lü Dongbin, the best known being a dialogue in which the elder instructs the younger in the refinement of the vital forces of the body. Whether either man wrote any of it is not a serious question: the texts belong to later periods and use the pair as an authorising frame, in the way traditions regularly do.

That gives him a double life which the atlas records as such. In the temples and on the New Year prints he is a jovial fat man with a fan. In the Daoist canon he is one end of a transmission line for a discipline concerned with the circulation of breath, the sealing of the vital essence and the eventual formation of an immortal embryo, which is described in those texts and is not set out here, since it is a practice transmitted through a teacher.

The Quanzhen school, founded in the twelfth century, placed both men among its patriarchs and thereby joined the popular cult to a monastic order with a real institutional history. The Eight Immortals as a fixed set of eight only settle into their standard membership in the Yuan and Ming periods, on the stage and in fiction, so the group is later than several of its members' individual cults.