Legend & Origin
Before he became an immortal, Lü Dongbin was a scholar who kept failing the imperial exams. In the Tang dynasty he went to Chang'an many times to sit the jinshi exam and never passed.
The night that changed his fate happened in a Chang'an tavern. He met the immortal Zhongli Quan, who was cooking a pot of millet. While waiting for it, Lü Dongbin dozed off — and in his dream he topped the exam list, rose step by step, married and had children, and reached the highest office in the land, only to be framed by scheming rivals, lose his wife and children, and end up on the streets.
When he woke with a start, the millet still wasn't cooked.
A whole lifetime of highs and lows, in less time than it takes to cook a pot of millet. (This is the version from the Yuan-dynasty play The Yellow Millet Dream; the idiom 'a yellow millet dream' first comes from the Tang tale 'The World Inside a Pillow,' whose characters are Scholar Lu and the Taoist Lü Weng.) Lü Dongbin saw through worldly ambition on the spot and became Zhongli Quan's disciple. He then passed the 'Ten Trials' — of beauty, wealth, life and death, and more — and attained immortality. Rather than retreating to the mountains, he traveled the human world helping people, and the carefree tale of his 'getting drunk three times at Yueyang Tower' is still told today. Of the Eight Immortals, this exam-failer is the one with the most human warmth.