(vi.) The Leader

Have you ever had a dream that seemed to go on forever? Lu Dongbin, before becoming leader of the immortals, once dozed off while cooking his dinner and had a dream that lasted decades and somehow felt impossibly real- a rags-to-riches-to-rags story, a rise and fall spanning an entire lifetime that actually took place only in the several minutes it took for his pot of yellow millet to finish cooking on the stovetop. Lu awoke having learned a disturbingly vivid lesson on the dangers of chasing transient glory, which led him to study the way of the Dao. Accounts of his brief yet time-consuming trial became a cautionary tale known throughout China as the “Yellow Millet Dream”...