This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
In 402, Huiyuan gathered one hundred and twenty three lay and monastic disciples at Mount Lu before an image of the Buddha Amitabha, a documented single assembly distinct from a gradual accumulation of individual devotional practice, and led them in a collective vow to be reborn together in Amitabha's western Pure Land. That the vow was made jointly, by a named number of participants in one recorded gathering, rather than adopted separately by each disciple in his or her own time, is documented as the specific shape later tradition points to when naming the founding act of Pure Land practice in China.
The community organized around that vow took the name White Lotus Society, a documented lay and monastic grouping built at Donglin Temple, the monastery Huiyuan himself had founded at Mount Lu near Jiujiang after settling there from his native Shanxi. Later Chinese Buddhist tradition honored him posthumously as the first patriarch of the Pure Land school, though the record is documented as showing that formal lineage of patriarchs was itself compiled only after his death, a retrospective ordering rather than a title Huiyuan held or claimed during his own lifetime.
That a single dated gathering of one hundred and twenty three disciples before an image of Amitabha, vowing together rather than separately to seek rebirth in his Pure Land, came to be treated by later tradition as founding an entire school of Chinese Buddhist practice marks Huiyuan's White Lotus Society as a documented case where one collective ritual act, rather than doctrine written down in advance, gave a devotional movement its origin point.