White lotus

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The White Lotus ( Chinese  白蓮教 , Pinyin Báiliánjiào ) was a movement founded by Mao Ziyuan from Suzhou around 1133 under the Southern Song Dynasty .

Philosophical basics

It is based on a Buddhist - Daoist worldview interspersed with Manichaean elements and was mainly recruited from the ranks of poor, exploited peasants, but also from members of other underprivileged classes such as carters, hauliers, and small traders. The cult members lived strictly vegetarian and refused to pay taxes or forced labor to pay. Earthly catastrophes such as famines or floods were interpreted as portents for the messianic arrival of the Buddha Maitreya, who was particularly revered by the sect .

14th Century

Towards the middle of the 14th century, the "Rebels of the Red Turbans " emerged from the sect , who campaigned against the rich landlords, but especially against the foreign rule of the Mongolian Yuan dynasty . It was a collection of loosely organized and quarreling gangs that roamed the country, robbing, killing and looting. At some point the rebels were joined by the impoverished, orphaned farmer's son Zhu Yuanzhang , who was soon to gain a leading position in the movement and, in 1368, was to found the Ming Dynasty as Emperor Hongwu .

For the next four hundred years all was quiet about the White Lotus. Under the tight regiment of the emperors of the Ming and early Qing dynasties, the sect largely withdrew into the underground.

18./19. century

Towards the end of the reign of the Qing -Kaisers Qianlong , the situation of Chinese peasants intensified by the lack of arable land, an increase in the tax burden, the devaluation of the copper money in relation to silver, the increasing concentration of land in the hands of a few large landowners and the related decline of Small farmers to farm laborers. As a result, there were several peasant uprisings based on the ideas of the White Lotus, such as the Wang Lun uprising in 1774. The movement was not suppressed until 1803 by the ruling Qing dynasty.

As early as 1811, however, renewed unrest broke out, controlled in particular by the Lotus offshoot " Sect of the Sky Law" (Chinese: Tianlijiao), but also secretly supported by court officials dissatisfied with the austerity policy of the new Emperor Jiaqing . In 1813, in the course of a plot, the Beijing Imperial Palace was even broken into and almost murdered the Son of Heaven if he had not been saved at the last moment by his son Daoguang .

The numerous subsequent uprisings that were to shake China during the 19th century were also influenced - to varying degrees - by the ideas of the White Lotus. Examples include the riots that broke out in Shandong , Henan , Anhui and Jiangsu in 1851 , as well as the Boxer Rebellion in 1900.

reception

The uprising of Wang Lun is dealt with in Alfred Döblin's historical novel The Three Jumps of Wang Lun, published in 1916 .

literature