Description
Much has been written on different aspects of the White Lotus Teachings (bailian jiao ็ฝ่ฎๆ) by Chinese, Japanese and Western scholars of very different persuasions. The study of the White Lotus Teachings presents daunting problems to the modern scholar, in terms of conflicting sources (e.g. sources written by believers and by their persecutors), contradictions in its historical development (such as the assumed transition from the devotionalist belief of rebirth in Amitabha's Western Paradise into the messianic belief in Maitreya's imminent descent on earth) and the enormous variety of beliefs to which the name White Lotus Teachings is applied. In nearly all research to date it has been taken for granted that the name White Lotus Teachings refers to one and the same tangible phenomenon and that any occurrence of the name in a Chinese language source can be considered sufficient proof of the presence of this phenomenon. Doubts have been aired about the precise contents of the name, but the use of the name by believers to refer to themselves (in other words, as an autonym, which is the term I shall use hereafter) or by later writers (persecutors and historians alike) as an analytical category has never been systematically questioned.'
This study involves three different problems: 1. the socio- religious phenomena as I shall reconstruct them; 2. the use of the names "White Lotus Society" (bailian she ็ฝ่ฎ็คพ, the supposed predecessor of the Teachings) and "White Lotus Teachings" in our sources by different elites (principally Buddhist monks and literati-officials of different religious denominations); 3. modern scholarship on both of these topics. As the rest of this study should make clear, the uses of the two names (with some variants) are closely interrelated historically and themselves form a valid topic of investigation.
ISBN:9780824822187
