Around 1133, during the Southern Song dynasty, the monk Mao Ziyuan founded a lay Buddhist devotional confraternity in Jiangsu that became known as the White Lotus Society, teaching a simplified Pure Land practice built around group recitation of Amitabha Buddha's name. Its central promise, that ordinary householders could achieve rebirth in the Pure Land through devoted chanting without abandoning family life or entering monastic discipline, made it accessible to laypeople who had no path into formal monastic Buddhism, and Mao Ziyuan used visual aids and simplified liturgy to spread the teaching among people with little or no classical education.
Barend ter Haar's 1992 study of the White Lotus tradition argues that the label's later history obscures more than it reveals, because Chinese officials from the Yuan dynasty onward applied the term White Lotus to almost any lay Buddhist group that showed millenarian tendencies or drew official suspicion, regardless of whether that group had any real connection to Mao Ziyuan's twelfth century teaching or to each other. On ter Haar's reading, White Lotus functioned less as one continuous secret organization than as an administrative shorthand that let officials treat unrelated movements as a single recurring enemy, a pattern that made the label durable even as the groups it was attached to had little in common beyond unwelcome official attention.
That administrative habit had real consequences: once labeled White Lotus, a lay Buddhist movement inherited centuries of official suspicion and the presumption of subversive intent, regardless of its actual teaching, shaping how the Chinese state responded to lay religious organization for the rest of the imperial period.