Zhongli Quan

Also Known As: 鍾離權; also Han Zhongli 漢鍾離, “Zhongli of the Han”; courtesy name Yunfang 雲房; religious title Zhengyang zhenren 正陽真人, Perfected of Correct Yang
Region/Culture: East Asia
Mythos: Chinese Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Gods and Deities
Mythical Attributes: He holds the complete method of the inner elixir and the authority to hand it to whoever proves willing to endure the training.
Role in Mythos: He is the eldest of the Eight Immortals and the patriarch from whom the Zhong-Lü lineage of internal alchemy descends, chiefly through his student Lü Dongbin.
Relation to Humans: He chose to stay on earth instead of ascending, in order to repay a failure in office by teaching mortals the way to immortality. For centuries he found nobody prepared to pay the price, which is the part of his story the pictures leave out.

The millet was still hard in the pot when the young man woke, and by then he had lived an entire life. He had passed the examination he failed in waking hours, held office, married, risen, been caught in corruption, been banished, and finally halted on a mountain road in a snowstorm with his horse refusing to move. All of it took less time than dinner. The stranger who had shared the brazier with him at the inn was still sitting there, waiting for him to work out what had just happened.

That stranger is the oldest of the Eight Immortals, and in almost every painting and porcelain set he stands at the head of the line. He is easy to pick out: a large, stately man with a round pot-belly showing through a robe he cannot be bothered to close, a beard down his chest, hair gathered into two blunt buns above the ears, and a fan tasselled with horsehair. Sometimes a peach instead, the fruit of the immortals’ paradise. An eighteenth-century wooden figure of him in the Musée Guimet has the belly and the beard; a Qing ivory only twelve centimetres high in a Granada collection has the buns, the fan and the same unhurried expression. Whatever the medium, the sculptors agree on the stomach.

The hagiographies make him a soldier. He came from Xianyang, near modern Xi’an, rose through the ranks, and was demoted when his views stopped matching the court’s. Under Emperor Wu of the Western Jin, who reigned from 265 to 290, he was given a generalship and led it into catastrophe against invaders from Central Asia. His other name, Han Zhongli, plants him three centuries earlier, in the Han dynasty, and one museum catalogue pushes him back further still, into the Zhou. The dates do not add up, and they never have.

What the accounts do agree on is the shape of the disaster. The army was gone, there was nothing to go back to, and he went up into the mountains alone. There an old man met him and walked him to the palace of the Imperial Lord of Eastern Florescence, who handed him talismans, texts and the teachings, and in time he became an immortal himself. One of the two books that carry his name tells a starker version: thirty scrolls of Numinous Treasure scripture found in a cave in the Zhongnan hills, sorted into three parts with titles like inventory labels, the Book of Golden Declarations, the Records Written in Jade, the Explanation of the Source of Perfection.

Then he did the strange thing. Offered heaven, he stayed. The failure in his official career was a debt, and he meant to settle it by giving away the method to anyone who wanted it. Nobody did. The training was cold, slow and physically miserable, and for something on the order of five hundred years he walked around China holding the keys to immortality and finding no takers. He was still looking in 836, when a well-educated young man named Lü Yan failed the civil examination and stopped at an inn on the way home.

After the millet, there were tests. Ten of them, and none were about knowledge. Lü had to give away what he owned, ignore what people thought of him, stand in front of things that could kill him, and put weaker creatures ahead of himself. The point was never virtue for its own sake. It was stamina, the raw appetite for a discipline that would take the body and the self apart. He trained afterwards on Mount Hua in the north or Mount Lu in the south, depending on which school later told the story and where that school happened to be.

What Zhongli Quan actually left behind is two books, and in both of them he is a voice answering questions. The Collected Transmissions of the Dao from Zhongli to Lü runs to eighteen chapters of dialogue: Lü asks, his teacher answers, and now and then Lü repeats the answer back before pushing on. Six chapters build the cosmos, six describe the alchemical work, six explain what the whole thing is for. At the end of it Lü asks for something more concrete, and the reply is almost brusque. For this, I have compiled the Conclusive Methods of Numinous Treasure. That second text is the practical one, and it is the book the Zhong-Lü tradition has been quoting ever since.

Here the ground gets honest. The Zhong-Lü system only appears fully documented in the twelfth century, and the earliest surviving copies of both texts sit inside a collection compiled around 1151, though the scholarship allows that they may reach back into the tenth or eleventh. The Eight Immortals do not appear as a company at all until the theatre plays of the thirteenth century, where they arrive as a cheerful, eccentric crew who turn up in emergencies. Ma Zhiyuan built a whole play out of the millet, calling it On the Road to Handan, Awakening from a Dream Dreamt While Cooking Millet. The Han general, in other words, is a Song and Yuan figure wearing Han clothes, and saying so takes nothing away from him.

It certainly took nothing away at the time. Two rival schools of internal alchemy reached back and hooked their lineages onto him. The Complete Perfection school in the north made him one of its Five Northern Patriarchs and told how he and Lü appeared to its founder mid-trance; the Southern School in the Yangtze country ran its own chain of masters back to the same pair. When a temple complex went up in Shanxi for Lü Dongbin, its surviving murals told the student’s life across the walls, teacher included.

His powers are all transmission. He does not slay anything. He holds a method, judges who can take it, and hands it over, and everything the tradition claims for the inner elixir follows from that one act. The limits are just as clean. He lost the only battle he is remembered for fighting. He was turned down by everyone for several centuries. He has no temple cult of his own, while the student he recruited at an inn is worshipped in halls across China and still answers questions at spirit-writing sessions. Even his seniority is disputed, since one tradition has him converted by Li Tieguai and demoted to second place in his own group. In the pictures he is always the one already seated, already talking, already partway through the sentence that will cost the other man his old life.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Zhongli Quan?

Zhongli Quan is the eldest of the Eight Immortals of Chinese religion and the patriarch of the Zhong-Lü tradition of internal alchemy. Hagiography makes him a general who lost a battle against Central Asian invaders, fled into the mountains, and received Daoist teachings from the Imperial Lord of Eastern Florescence. He is also called Han Zhongli and carries the religious title Perfected of Correct Yang.

Why is Zhongli Quan called Han Zhongli?

The name Han Zhongli places him in the Han dynasty, which ran from 206 BCE to 220 CE. It conflicts with other accounts that make him a general under Emperor Wu of the Western Jin between 265 and 290, and with at least one catalogue that puts him in the Zhou. The sources have never settled his dates.

What is Zhongli Quan’s connection to Lü Dongbin?

Zhongli Quan was Lü Dongbin’s teacher. He met him at an inn in 836, after Lü had failed the civil service examination, and let him dream an entire ruined official career in the time it took a pot of millet to cook. Lü then passed ten tests of character and endurance before being accepted as a student.

What did Zhongli Quan write?

Two texts carry his teaching: the Collected Transmissions of the Dao from Zhongli to Lü, eighteen chapters of dialogue with his student, and the Conclusive Methods of Numinous Treasure, which gives the practical instructions. Both are documented from the twelfth century, though parts may be older, and together they form the backbone of the Zhong-Lü school.

How is Zhongli Quan depicted in art?

He is shown as a heavy, bearded old man with a bare chest and a prominent belly, his hair tied into two buns above the ears, holding a fan with a horsehair tassel and sometimes a peach. Sculptures in the Musée Guimet and in the Rodríguez-Acosta collection in Granada follow the same pattern. He usually appears first when the Eight Immortals are shown as a group.