White Lotus Societies
Over time, however, the term "White Lotus" became associated with diverse salvationist and apocalyptic movements, often blending elements of Buddhism, Daoism, and Chinese folk religion.
Many later White Lotus groups adopted millenarian ideologies, predicting the imminent arrival of a new age or a divine savior (mainly the future Buddha Maitreya) to rectify social and cosmic imbalances.
[1] These movements frequently arose in times of political turmoil, natural disasters, or social unrest, positioning themselves as vehicles for both spiritual liberation and sociopolitical reform.
[1] The key figures involved in the creation of these Song dynasty Pure Land societies were Tiantai school monks like Shengchang (959–1020) and Siming Zhili.
[5][6] Zhili's society included monks and laypersons, men and women who vowed to recite the name of Buddha Amitabha one thousand times a day.
[8] During the later Yuan, Ming and Qing dynasties, various new White Lotus groups developed, influenced the organizational methods of the Song era societies.
This fear of secret societies carried on in the law; the Great Qing Legal Code, which was in effect until 1912, contained the following section: [A]ll societies calling themselves at random White Lotus, communities of the Buddha Maitreya, or the Mingtsung religion (Manichaeans), or the school of the White Cloud, etc., together with all who carry out deviant and heretical practices, or who in secret places have prints and images, gather the people by burning incense, meeting at night and dispersing by day, thus stirring up and misleading people under the pretext of cultivating virtue, shall be sentenced.
The White Lotus doctrines and religious observances, particularly their "incense burning" ceremonies which in the popular mind came to typify them, merged with the doctrines and rituals of the Maitreyan sectarians; that produced a cohering ideology among rebel groups, uniting them in common purpose and supplying discipline with which to build a broad movement, recruit armies, and establish civil governing.
[13] His exceptional intelligence took him to the head of a rebel army; he won people to his side by forbidding his soldiers to pillage in observance of White Lotus religious beliefs.
It was here that he began to discard his heterodox beliefs and so won the help of Confucian scholars who issued pronouncements for him and performed rituals in his claim of the Mandate of Heaven, the first step toward establishing a new dynastic rule.
In 1774, the herbalist and martial artist Wang Lun founded a derivative sect of the White Lotus that promoted underground meditation teachings in Shandong province, not far from Beijing near the city of Linqing.
Wang Lun remained sitting in his headquarters wearing a purple robe and two silver bracelets while he burned to death with his dagger and double-bladed sword beside him.
[citation needed] Beginning in 1794, two decades after Wang Lun's failed uprising, a movement also arose in the mountainous region that separates Sichuan from Hubei and Shaanxi in central China as tax protests.
[citation needed] In the first decade of the nineteenth century, there were also several White Lotus sects active in the area around the capital city of Beijing.
[citation needed] White Lotus adherents who collaborated with the Japanese during the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937–1945) were fought against by the Muslim General Ma Biao.
[16][better source needed] While traditional historiography has linked many Maitreyist and millenarian uprisings during the Ming and Qing dynasties as all related to the White Lotus, there are reasons to doubt that such connections existed.
B. J. Ter Haar has argued that the term "White Lotus" became a label applied by late Ming and Qing imperial bureaucrats to any number of different popular uprisings, millenarian societies or "magical" practices such as mantra recitation and divination.
[17] If this interpretation is correct, the steady rise in the number of White Lotus rebellions in imperial histories during the Ming and Qing does not necessarily reflect the increasing strength of a unified organization.
After there was no longer any need for the triads on the battlefield, some high-level military leaders resorted to criminal activity in order to find means of survival.
