The Courtier Who Left Because of His Brother

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.