The White Lotus Teachings in Chinese Religious History

Barend J. ter Haar's The White Lotus Teachings in Chinese Religious History is a major scholarly revisionist study arguing that the White Lotus, long treated by both Chinese officialdom and earlier Western scholarship as a single continuous heterodox rebel tradition, was in fact largely a label imposed by suspicious authorities onto a shifting and much more diverse range of popular religious groups. Its authority rests on close archival work with Chinese primary sources across several centuries, and the book substantially reshaped how specialists in Chinese religion now approach the category. Because it directly overturns an older historiographical consensus, later scholars have continued to test and in places refine ter Haar's own boundaries for which groups the corrective properly applies to.