White Lotus Society

In A.D. 386, Huiyuan, founder of the Pure Land sect of Buddhism, built a monastery at the foot of Mount Lu in Jiangxi Province. This became the meeting point for his newly founded White Lotus Society, a group of scholars and monks from China, India, and Central Asia, to discuss and debate the Buddhist faith, which was still relatively new to China. Images of the White Lotus Society later become popular as painting subjects; this copy, likely made in the fifteenth century, purports to preserve a version by the Northern Song master Li Gonglin.