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:
“The birch stripped of its bark, or the charred stump where a tree has been burned down to be made into a canoe,—these are the only traces of man, a fabulous wild man to us. On either side, the primeval forest stretches away uninterrupted to Canada, or to the “South Sea”; to the white man a drear and howling wilderness, but to the Indian a home, adapted to his nature, and cheerful as the smile of the Great Spirit.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“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)