White Lotus (白蓮教 Pinyin: báiliánjiào Wade-Giles: Pai-lien chiao) was a type of Buddhist sectarianism that appealed to many Han Chinese, who found solace in worship of the "Unborn or Eternal Venerable Mother" (trad.: 無生老母, simplified: 无生老母), who was to gather all her children at the millennium into one family.
The doctrine of the White Lotus included a forecast of the imminent advent of the future Buddha Maitreya.
Read more about White Lotus: Origins, White Lotus Revolution, Later Rebellions
Famous quotes containing the words white and/or lotus:
“We are all androgynous, not only because we are all born of a woman impregnated by the seed of a man but because each of us, helplessly and forever, contains the other—male in female, female in male, white in black and black in white. We are a part of each other. Many of my countrymen appear to find this fact exceedingly inconvenient and even unfair, and so, very often, do I. But none of us can do anything about it.”
—James Baldwin (1924–1987)
“I passed a little further on and heard a lotus talk:
Who made the world and ruleth it, He hangeth on a stalk,
For I am in His image made, and all this tinkling tide
Is but a sliding drop of rain between His petals wide.”
—William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)