Guan Lu was a diviner of Cao Wei. The Records of the Three Kingdoms say that his courtesy name was Gongming and that he came from Pingyuan. Wikidata's Chinese label is 管輅, so the title stays as it was. Wikidata and Chinese Wikipedia both give his life as 209 to 256.[1][3][2]
Appearance and temperament
Chen Shou writes that he was coarse and ugly in looks, had no dignified bearing and loved wine, and ate, drank and joked without choosing his company, so that people mostly liked him but did not respect him.[3]
Youth
The Separate Biography of Guan Lu, quoted in Pei Songzhi's commentary, says that at eight or nine he loved to look up at the stars, asked everyone for their names and would not sleep at night, and that his parents' bans could not stop him. He said that though he was small his eyes liked to watch the heavens, and that household chickens and wild swans know the hour, so why not people. He drew the sky, sun, moon and stars in the dirt with the children next door. The biography adds that at fifteen he went to study at his father's post in Jiqiu in Langye. The governor Shan Zichun gathered more than a hundred guests to meet the boy. Guan Lu first asked for three measures of clear wine, then argued with the whole company, answering every challenge with something to spare, and Shan Zichun praised the grandeur of his speech, so that Xuzhou began to call him a prodigy. As an adult he mastered the Book of Changes and was skilled at reading the sky, wind-augury, divination and physiognomy, and the biography calls him generous and inclined to return kindness for injury.[3][2]
Prophecies
The Records tell of several of his predictions. His father served as an official at Licao, where the three Guo En brothers were all lame and asked him to divine the cause. Guan Lu said that the hexagram showed a family grave with a woman's ghost, an aunt who had been thrown down a well for a few measures of grain, and the brothers wept and confessed. Liu Fenglin's wife in Guangping was dying and a coffin had been bought. Guan Lu said her fate would come at noon on the xinmao day in the eighth month, and so it did. When Wang Ji, governor of Anping, asked him to divine three omens, he said they were the mischief of old goblins in a house, not an evil sign, and no harm followed. When women in the household of the magistrate of Xindu were sick with fright, he pointed to the bones of two dead men in the wall of the north hall, and they recovered once the bones were moved. Travelling west with the army he passed the Guanqiu Jian tomb, leaned on a tree and sighed, saying that by the rules of geomancy the family was due to be wiped out within two years, and the Records say it came about as he said. When the governor of Qinghe asked him about rain during a drought, he said it would rain that night, and in spite of a dry day heavy rain fell at night.[3]
Foretelling the death of He Yan and Deng Yang
He Yan invited him, with Deng Yang present. He Yan asked whether he would rise to the highest ministers, and about a dream of dozens of blue flies settling on his nose and refusing to leave. Guan Lu answered that He Yan's rank was as heavy as a mountain and his power like thunder, yet few were grateful and many were afraid, which was not the way to much blessing; that the nose is the mountain at the center of the face, and that foul flies gathering on it were a warning to think of rise and fall. He urged him to follow King Wen's lines and Confucius's judgments, and then the highest office could be won and the flies driven off. Deng Yang called this an old scholar's commonplace, and Guan Lu replied that the old scholar sees what is not born and the commonplace sees what is not spoken. He Yan said they would meet again after the new year. Guan Lu told his uncle, who rebuked him for speaking so sharply, and Guan Lu said, "Why fear to speak to dead men?" After the new year came the news that He Yan and Deng Yang had been executed, and his uncle then gave way. This corresponds to the Gaoping Tombs coup of the tenth year of Zhengshi.[3][2]
Death
In the second year of Zhengyuan his younger brother Guan Chen asked whether the regent's good treatment meant wealth was coming. Guan Lu sighed that Heaven had given him intelligence but not years, that he feared he would not live past forty-seven or forty-eight, and that he was likely to govern ghosts on Mount Tai rather than the living. That year in the eighth month he became deputy of the Ministry of the Privy Purse, and he died in the second month of the following year at the age of forty-eight. Chen Shou places him in the same fascicle as Hua Tuo, Du Kui, Zhu Jianping and Zhou Xuan, and Chinese Wikipedia quotes Chen Shou's praise of these men for their mysterious skill and extraordinary art.[3][2]