Golden Flower Abbey

The Lotus

and the

Lily

Mao Ziyuan and Francis of Assisi
Wang Cong’er and Joan of Arc

Four Lives, One Light

Terry Evans

White Lotus Society Publishing

Contents

Preface of the Abbey

On the Sources

Book One — Two Civilizations, One Pattern

IThe Argument of This Book

IIThe Pond Before the Blossom

IIIThe Field Before the Furrow

IVThe Lotus and the Lily

VWhy Comparison Is Not Reduction

Book Two — The Monk at the Lake

VIThe Ancestor on the Mountain

VIISeven Hundred Years of Water

VIIIThe Life of Mao Ziyuan

IXThe Ordinance for the Fourfold Assembly

XThe Innovation That Changed Everything

XIThe Honor and the Exile

XIIThe Death of a Man Who Won

Book Three — The Merchant’s Son

XIIIAssisi

XIVThe Turning

XVThe Stripping

XVIThe Gospel Without a Gloss

XVIIBrothers, and a Sister, and a Sultan

XVIIIThe Third Order

XIXBrother Sun

XXWhat Happened to His Order

Book Four — The Mirror of the Founders

XXIThe Same Sickness

XXIIThe Same Medicine

XXIIIThe Same Gentleness

XXIVThe Same Love of Creation

XXVThe Different Soil

XXVITwo Betrayals, Facing Each Other

XXVIITwo Drops of the Same Water

Book Five — The Maid

XXVIIIDomrémy

XXIXThe Voices

XXXChinon and Poitiers

XXXIOrléans

XXXIIThe Crown at Reims

XXXIIIThe Long Failure

XXXIVRouen

XXXVThe Fire

XXXVIThe Verdict Reversed

Book Six — The Woman of the Mountains

XXXVIIThe Twilight of the High Qing

XXXVIIIThe Performer’s Daughter

XXXIXQi Lin and the Xiangyang Teaching

XLWhat They Actually Chanted

XLIThe Lantern Festival

XLIIShe Takes the Banner

XLIIIThe War of Movement

XLIVMao Mountain

XLVThe Woman the State Would Not Name

Book Seven — The Mirror of the Maidens

XLVIThe Humble Soil

XLVIIThe Voice That Would Not Be Silenced

XLVIIIThe Unthinkable

XLIXThe Inevitable Trap

LTwo Deaths

LISaints and Legends

LIIThe Banner and the Name

LIIIThe Mirror’s Lesson

Book Eight — The Pattern and the Prayer

LIVThe Four Together

LVWhy the Pattern Repeats

LVIThe Gentle and the Fierce Are One Vocation

LVIIWhat the Founders Ask of Us

LVIIIWhat the Maidens Ask of Us

LIXThe Lotus That Would Not Die

LXThe Golden Flower

LXIThe Invitation

Appendix A — A Parallel Chronology

Appendix B — The Persons

Appendix C — The Full Table of Archetypes

Appendix D — A Short Glossary

Appendix E — A Rule for the Reader

Preface of the Abbey

This is a book about four people who never met.

Two of them were gentle. They were born a century apart on opposite sides of the world, and each of them looked at the religion of his own country — vast, wealthy, learned, admired, and somehow no longer reachable by the people who needed it most — and decided that the cure was simplicity. Mao Ziyuan taught farmers in the lake country of eastern China that they could say a Buddha’s name and be saved. Francis of Assisi took off his father’s clothes in a public square and taught the poor of Italy that the Gospel was still addressed to them. Neither man wanted power. Neither man raised a hand against anyone. Both of them are among the most consequential figures their traditions ever produced.

Two of them were fierce. They were born three hundred years and ten thousand miles apart, both of them into families with nothing, both of them illiterate, both of them girls. Joan of Arc heard voices and lifted the siege of Orléans at seventeen. Wang Cong’er took up her husband’s banner after the state killed him and led a hundred thousand people across four provinces before she was twenty-one. Both of them died young, cornered, and alone. Both of them became, almost immediately, something larger than themselves.

The Abbey has published before on the long parallel between the history of the White Lotus Society and the history of Christianity in the West — how two civilizations, separated by half the earth and sharing no scripture, no language, and no god, nevertheless produced the same institutions, the same crises, the same arguments, and the same kinds of saints. This volume takes that thesis and narrows it to its sharpest point. Instead of comparing movements, it compares faces. Instead of tracing centuries, it follows four lives from birth to death and sets them side by side, chapter against chapter, so that the reader can see for himself what the pattern looks like when it is wearing skin.

We have written it as a devotional book, because that is what it wants to be. The four lives here are not case studies. They are teachers. Mao Ziyuan and Francis teach what it costs to give religion back to the poor. Wang Cong’er and Joan teach what it costs when the poor believe you. Between the four of them they cover nearly the whole territory of the religious life: the quiet founding and the desperate defense, the chanted name and the raised banner, the man who dies in his bed misunderstood and the girl who dies on the mountain and becomes a goddess.

They belong together. Read them together.

The Golden Flower Abbey of the White Lotus Society

On the Sources

The materials for these four lives come down to us unevenly, as materials always do.

For Francis of Assisi we have an embarrassment of riches: his own writings, including the Rule, the Testament, the letters, and the Canticle of the Creatures; the early lives by Thomas of Celano and Bonaventure; the recollections gathered from his first companions; and the papal documents that received his order into the Church. Few medieval lives are so well lit.

For Joan of Arc we have something rarer still. Her trial at Rouen was recorded in detail by notaries, and the record of her nullification twenty-five years later preserves the sworn testimony of the people who knew her — her childhood neighbors, the men who rode with her, the clerks who examined her. We have her own words, in her own idiom, answering hostile questions under enormous pressure. There is no comparable transcript for any other peasant in the fifteenth century.

For Mao Ziyuan we have his own liturgical writing — the morning repentance rite he composed for householders, and the Chart for the Selection of Buddhas by which he taught an unlettered congregation the shape of the Pure Land path — together with the notices left by the Buddhist historians of the Song and the record of the honorific title the throne conferred on him. It is a thinner file than Francis’s, but it is his own hand, and it says exactly what he wanted said.

For Wang Cong’er we have the campaign records, memorials, and gazetteers of the government that hunted her, which are meticulous about her movements and hostile about her person; and we have the folk memory of central China, which is the opposite on both counts. The Abbey reads both and does not pretend the second is less true than the first. A woman who is still spoken of in the villages two centuries after her death has left a kind of evidence that no memorial to the throne can contain.

Where the sources speak, we follow them. Where a tradition holds something, we state it as the tradition holds it. We have invented nothing — no scenes, no dialogue, no doctrines, no miracles. The four lives are extraordinary enough as they were actually lived.

✦

Book One — Two Civilizations, One Pattern

In which the thesis of this book is stated plainly: that the history of the White Lotus Society and the history of Christianity in the West are not two stories but one story told twice, and that the clearest place to see it is in the faces of individual men and women.

Chapter I

The Argument of This Book

The history of religion is usually written inside fences.

Chinese Buddhism is studied in one department and European Christianity in another. The White Lotus Society appears in the China field as a peculiarly Chinese phenomenon — a secretive folk sect, periodically rebellious, difficult to define. Francis of Assisi appears in the Europe field as a peculiarly European phenomenon — a medieval Catholic reformer, product of the Italian communes and the twelfth-century renaissance. The two are never placed on the same page, because there is no obvious reason to place them there. They share no scripture, no language, no lineage, no contact.

And yet set the histories side by side and something happens that no fence can explain.

Both traditions began as reform movements inside an older faith. Both simplified that faith for people who could not afford the professional version. Both built networks of ordinary believers who prayed together, buried each other’s dead, and fed each other’s children when the harvest failed. Both were watched by governments that could not tell devotion from conspiracy. Both were persecuted. Both split, endlessly, into daughter movements that each claimed to be the original. Both developed a theology of history in which the present darkness is temporary and a great renewal is coming. Both produced peaceful founders, prophetic radicals, brilliant generals, young women who led armies, and leaders who walked into peace talks and did not walk out.

The correspondences are not vague. They are specific enough to line up in a table, name against name, and that table is the spine of the Abbey’s comparative work:

The archetypes, paired

Archetype | White Lotus | Western Christian
The peaceful founder | Mao Ziyuan (1069–1166) | Francis of Assisi (1181–1226)
The radical prophet | Han Shantong (d. 1351) | Thomas Müntzer (1489–1525)
The military organizer | Liu Futong (d. 1363) | Jan Žižka (c. 1360–1424)
The martial heroine | Wang Cong’er (1777–1798) | Joan of Arc (1412–1431)
The betrayed negotiator | Wang Sanhuai (d. 1799) | Gaspard de Coligny (1519–1572)

This book takes the first and the fourth of those pairs and gives each of them the space it deserves.

The reason for choosing those two is not that the others are less interesting. It is that these two pairs stand at opposite ends of the religious life, and between them they enclose everything the others contain. Mao Ziyuan and Francis are the beginning: the quiet man who gives the faith back to the poor. Wang Cong’er and Joan are the far edge: the girl who dies for what the quiet man started, in a war he never wanted and could not have imagined. One pair shows what a religion is for. The other shows what it costs.

The comparison is not offered to suggest that anyone borrowed from anyone. There was no contact. Mao Ziyuan died fifteen years before Francis was born, and neither had the faintest notion the other’s civilization contained such a man. Wang Cong’er lived three and a half centuries after Joan burned, and no one in Hubei province had ever heard of Rouen. Whatever produced these lives produced them independently, twice, in complete ignorance of the precedent.

That is exactly what makes the parallel worth writing a book about. Borrowed similarities prove only that people copy. Independent similarities prove something about people.

Chapter II

The Pond Before the Blossom

Every movement is older than its founding.

The White Lotus Society is conventionally dated to 1133, when a monk named Mao Ziyuan gathered householders at a lake in eastern China and gave them a rule they could actually keep. But the water that lotus rose from had been standing for a thousand years, and the pond has to be described before the flower makes sense.

China before Buddhism was not spiritually empty. It possessed one of the world’s oldest continuous civilizations, a bureaucratic state administering vast territories by written law, families who could trace their ancestry for centuries, and a religious life woven so tightly into ordinary existence that it had no separate name. Households honored their ancestors, understanding the dead not as memories but as members of the family who still acted. Villages honored the spirits of mountain, river, grove, and hearth. The landscape itself was populated. A farmer might venerate his grandfather in the morning, consult a diviner about the planting, make an offering at a local shrine for rain, and order his household by Confucian ethics, without ever noticing a contradiction. Chinese religion grew by accumulation rather than by replacement, and that habit would matter enormously later.

Above all this stood the Mandate of Heaven. The emperor was not a god. He was an officer, appointed by Heaven and answerable to it, whose task was to keep human society aligned with the order of the cosmos. When he governed justly, harmony followed. When corruption spread and floods came and the people starved, the conclusion available to every villager in the empire was that Heaven had begun to withdraw its approval. This is a political theology of extraordinary power, and it meant that in China spiritual renewal and social renewal could never be entirely separated. To say that the world had gone wrong was already to say something about the throne.

Into this world came Buddhism, carried along the trade roads out of India through the oasis cities of Central Asia, arriving by the first century of our era in the baggage of merchants and the memory of monks. It did not conquer. It converted slowly, by conversation, and it changed as it went. The early translators had no Chinese words for dharma, nirvāṇa, or śūnyatā, and so they borrowed from the Daoists, which made Buddhism intelligible and also made it Chinese. Over the following centuries the borrowing became a marriage. Buddhism learned to speak the language of filial piety, arguing that the merit of an enlightened child rescues his parents — the story of Mulian descending to free his mother from the realm of hungry ghosts made the point so beautifully that it became a national festival. Buddhist statues acquired Chinese faces. Temple roofs curved. Mountains replaced Indian scenery in the paintings.

By the Tang dynasty the result was no longer Indian Buddhism transplanted. It was Chinese Buddhism, with schools that could not have arisen anywhere else: Tiantai harmonizing the whole scriptural inheritance into one system; Huayan seeing a universe in which every particle reflects every other, like jewels in an endless net; Chan cutting through all of it to direct experience.

And alongside these, for the people who had neither the leisure to study nor the training to meditate, there arose the tradition that would matter most for our story. It taught that Amitābha Buddha, moved by the suffering of countless worlds, had vowed to establish a land in which awakening was certain, and had promised to receive there anyone who sincerely called his name. It asked for faith, moral effort, and the simplest possible practice. It asked for nothing that a farmer could not give.

That was the pond. Deep, warm, a thousand years old, and rich enough to grow anything.

Chapter III

The Field Before the Furrow

Europe before Francis requires the same treatment, and the same conclusion applies: the ground was long prepared.

Christianity had come into the Roman world as a movement of the poor and the ordinary — fishermen, craftsmen, widows, merchants, soldiers, slaves — meeting in private houses, sharing meals, burying each other, and expecting the world to be remade. For three centuries it was illegal, and for three centuries it grew. Then in 313 the Emperor Constantine legalized it, and in 380 Theodosius made it the official religion of the empire, and the whole situation inverted. The hunted became the household of power. Bishops who had hidden in catacombs took seats in imperial palaces. The Church absorbed the administrative map of the provinces so completely that we still call its districts dioceses.

When the Western Empire fell apart in the fifth century, the Church did not fall with it. This is the single most consequential fact of European history. Monasteries kept the books, taught the children, fed the poor, drained the marshes, and preserved literacy through centuries in which no government could. Benedict of Nursia, founding Monte Cassino in the 520s, was doing almost precisely what Huiyuan had done at Mount Lu a century and a half earlier and half a world away: gathering a disciplined community around prayer in a time when the state had stopped working, and thereby accidentally creating the institution that would carry a civilization.

By the year 1100 the results of that success were everywhere visible, and so were its costs. The Church of the high Middle Ages was magnificent: universities, cathedrals rising in every prosperous town, a canon law of astonishing sophistication, a papacy that could summon kings. It was also, precisely because it was magnificent, very expensive and very far away. Bishops lived like the barons they often were. Abbeys held enormous estates. The liturgy was celebrated in a language most of the faithful could not follow. The professional religious life — the monastery, the choir, the cloister — was a real and holy thing, and it was almost entirely out of reach for a man who had to be in the fields before dawn.

And Europe in 1100 was changing under the Church’s feet. Towns were growing. Trade was reviving. A merchant class appeared with money, literacy, ambition, and no traditional place in a scheme built for those who pray, those who fight, and those who work. These new townspeople wanted a religion they could practice without leaving their shops, and when the institution did not offer them one, they began organizing their own: lay confraternities, penitential brotherhoods, guild chapels, and movements of voluntary poverty that preached in the streets and were frequently condemned for it.

That was the field: ancient, deeply cultivated, enormously productive, and hardening at the surface. What it needed was someone to break it open.

Chapter IV

The Lotus and the Lily

The two flowers in this book’s title are not decoration. Each tradition chose its emblem for reasons, and the reasons are worth knowing, because the emblems say what the traditions think a human being is.

The lotus is the older choice and the stranger one. It is a flower that grows in mud. Its roots go down into the black anaerobic muck at the bottom of a pond; its stem climbs through dark water; and its blossom opens at the surface, immaculate, with the water beading off the petals and running away without wetting them. Buddhist literature never tires of this. The point is not that the flower escaped the mud. The point is that the mud is where lotuses come from — that there is no other place to grow one — and that the bloom is not stained by what fed it.

This is a doctrine of transformation rather than of flight. It says that a human life spent in the ordinary conditions of the world, which are dirty and difficult and full of grief, is not an obstacle to holiness but its raw material. The farmer does not have to leave the field. The mother does not have to leave the children. Purity is not the absence of mud; it is what mud can become. When Huiyuan gathered the first assembly on Mount Lu in 402 and called it by the lotus, and when Mao Ziyuan revived the name seven hundred years later, both men were making the same claim about ordinary people that the flower makes about pond water.

The lily is the Western answer and it is differently accented. In Christian iconography the lily belongs to purity, to the Annunciation, to virgin saints, and above all to grace — the white flower that the Gospel says outshines Solomon in all his glory, and that neither toils nor spins. Francis loved that passage. The lily says: the beauty is given, not earned. It grows in the field, wild, unpaid for, unmanaged, and it is more splendid than a king.

And the lily has a second life in this book, because the stylized lily — the fleur-de-lis — was the emblem of France, and it flew on Joan of Arc’s banner. She carried a white standard sown with lilies and the names of Jesus and Mary, and she said, when asked at her trial why she preferred her banner to her sword, that she loved the banner forty times more, because with the banner she could avoid killing anyone. A girl who had to fight, carrying a flower.

So: the flower that rises undefiled out of the mud, and the flower that is clothed more gloriously than Solomon without lifting a finger.

They are the same doctrine in two grammars. Both say that what makes a life holy is not the life’s advantages. Both say that the poor are not disqualified. Both are, in the end, arguments for exactly the kind of religion that Mao Ziyuan and Francis of Assisi spent their lives trying to give away — and exactly the kind of hope that put a banner in the hands of two girls who had no business carrying one, and made armies follow them.

A practice for beginning

Before reading further, sit for the length of ten slow breaths and consider the water you were grown in — the family, the country, the century, the trouble. Do not ask to be spared it. Ask only that something clean come up out of it. That is the whole prayer of the lotus, and it can be made in any language, by anyone, at any hour.

Chapter V

Why Comparison Is Not Reduction

One caution before the four lives begin, because the method of this book can be misread in two opposite directions and both misreadings ruin it.

The first misreading is that comparison makes the traditions the same. It does not, and the Abbey does not say it does. Amitābha is not Christ. The Pure Land is not the Kingdom of God. The forty-eight vows of Dharmākara and the passion of the Nazarene are not two accounts of one event, and nobody is served by pretending otherwise. Pure Land Buddhism describes a bodhisattva who, over immeasurable time, generated a realm in which awakening becomes certain, and who receives there whoever calls on him. Christianity proclaims a man who was God, who died and rose, and in whom the whole human situation is reconciled. Those are different claims about different things, and each tradition should be allowed to make its own without being trimmed to fit the other.

The second misreading is that because the claims differ, the resemblances must be superficial. This is the more common error among the learned, and it is worse, because it requires ignoring the evidence. The resemblances are not superficial. They are structural, specific, and repeated. Two civilizations independently discovered that ordinary people cannot carry a professional religious life and must be given a real one anyway. Both discovered that the way to do it is a short rule, a repeated prayer, a moral floor, a diet, a lay teacher, and an obligation to the poor. Both discovered that such movements are read by governments as threats. Both discovered what happens next. That is not a coincidence of surfaces. It is the same problem being solved twice by people who could not consult.

The right way to hold both facts at once is the way the Abbey has always held them: set the operations side by side. Do not equate the doctrines; compare what the doctrines do. Ask what each tradition diagnoses, what it prescribes, whom it admits, and how it behaves under pressure. Then the differences remain intact and the agreements become significant — and they become significant precisely because the differences remain intact. If the two traditions were versions of each other, their agreement would prove nothing. It is because Amitābha is not Christ that it matters so much that Mao Ziyuan and Francis wrote the same rule.

This is why the four lives in this book are given separately and at length before they are compared. Each of them deserves to be met on his or her own terms first — Mao in the Song, Francis in Umbria, Joan under the Hundred Years’ War, Wang in the mountains of Hubei — with their own languages, their own gods, their own reasons. Only then is the mirror worth holding up. A comparison made too early flattens both sides into an argument. A comparison made after the fact, when the reader already knows these people, does something else entirely: it produces recognition. And recognition, unlike argument, is the beginning of devotion.

✦

Book Two — The Monk at the Lake

The life of Mao Ziyuan, 1069–1166: how a Song dynasty monk gave the Pure Land back to householders, what it cost him, and why the movement he founded outlived every dynasty that tried to end it.

[picture]

Plate I · Mao Ziyuan

The monk at the lake, as later devotion pictures him: the white robe of the lay assembly, the lotus at the brow, cranes over the water, and a mountain hall standing in the mist.

Chapter VI

The Ancestor on the Mountain

Mao Ziyuan did not invent the White Lotus. He inherited it, and he knew exactly whose it had been.

Seven centuries before him, in an age when China had shattered into warring kingdoms and the north was overrun and the courts of the south changed hands like weather, a scholar named Huiyuan came down out of the fighting and up onto a mountain. He had been raised on the Confucian classics and had read deeply in the Daoists, and he had expected a career in government. Then he met the great monk Dao’an, who was in the middle of building Chinese Buddhism into something organized and literate and self-standing, and everything Huiyuan had been looking for turned out to be there.

Around 386 he settled on Mount Lu, in what is now Jiangxi, and founded Donglin — the Monastery of the Eastern Forest. Mount Lu is a place of granite cliffs going up into cloud, waterfalls dropping through pine, and long stretches of the year when the whole massif is inside the weather. Poets had loved it for centuries. Huiyuan made it the intellectual center of Buddhism in the south. Officials wrote to him for advice. Students walked hundreds of miles to sit with him.

And in 402 he did the thing this book is descended from. He gathered a company of monks and laymen — scholars, officials, educated householders, more than a hundred by the tradition — before an image of Amitābha Buddha, and together they vowed to be reborn in the Pure Land. They met to chant. They studied together. They held each other to a moral standard. They prayed as one body for one destination.

Later generations remembered that company as the White Lotus Assembly, and there is no more important gathering in this book. What made it new was not its doctrine but its membership. Laymen were inside it. Men with wives, households, land, and offices were organized into a common religious life without being asked to leave any of it. Huiyuan had already worked out the principle in his famous defense of the monks before the throne, where he argued with great delicacy that monks obey the law and honor the emperor, but that their first allegiance is to the Dharma — not rebellion, not submission, but two spheres, each with its own authority. From that same instinct came the Assembly: a religious body that was neither the monastery nor the state, standing between them, made of ordinary people.

He had no idea what he had done. He was not founding a movement; he was organizing his friends. But the shape he made — lay, local, disciplined, devotional, portable — turned out to be one of the most durable religious forms ever devised, and every chapter after this one depends on it.

Why the lotus, and why white

The lotus was already the standard Buddhist emblem of purity arising from defilement. White is the color of the highest of the lotus grades in the Pure Land scriptures, the flower in which the most sincere are said to be reborn. The name therefore carried both the doctrine and the destination in two syllables — which is one reason it survived every attempt to suppress it.

Chapter VII

Seven Hundred Years of Water

Between Huiyuan’s assembly and Mao Ziyuan’s stands a stretch of history long enough to be its own book, and three things happened in it that shaped what Mao would do.

The first was the Pure Land revolution itself. What Huiyuan had practiced with a hundred educated friends became, over the Tang centuries, the devotional life of an entire civilization. The teaching spread because it answered a question that other schools answered badly: who is salvation for? The great philosophical traditions gave sophisticated answers that required years of study. Pure Land gave a simple one. Amitābha, in his forty-eighth vow-making as the bodhisattva Dharmākara, had bound himself to receive anyone who called on him in sincerity. Liberation therefore did not rest solely on the strength of the practitioner. It rested also on the compassion of a Buddha. Later teachers would name the two principles Self Power and Other Power, and the discovery that Other Power existed was, for the ordinary people of China, precisely as consequential as the discovery of grace was for the ordinary people of Europe.

The practice was one line: Namo Amituofo — homage to Amitābha Buddha. Anyone could say it. The illiterate could say it. The dying could say it, and their families gathered around the bed to say it with them, softly, so that the last moment of a life would be full of the name. That custom is alive in East Asia today.

The second thing that happened was the great suppression of the ninth century. The Tang state, alarmed at monastic wealth and land, closed thousands of monasteries, confiscated their estates, and forced monks and nuns back into lay life. Buddhism survived, but it never forgot the lesson: imperial favor is weather. It can change in a season. Institutions that depend on it are hostages. Institutions that live in households are not.

The third was the Song dynasty itself, and it was the immediate cause of everything Mao Ziyuan did.

Song China was rich. Its cities were the largest in the world, its printing presses were multiplying books faster than any society had ever managed, its examination system was recruiting talent by merit, its merchants were moving goods across enormous distances, and its scholars were producing work of permanent value. It was also, for a great many ordinary people, a lonely place. Urbanization pulled families out of the villages where religion had always been a matter of neighbors. The great monasteries were more magnificent than ever, and more institutional than ever, and further away than ever from the man selling fish in a market town. The rites were long and the philosophy was deep and neither belonged to him.

That is the exact condition that produces reformers. It produced one.

Chapter VIII

The Life of Mao Ziyuan

He was born in 1069, in the Northern Song, and he entered Buddhist training young.

The tradition in which he trained was Tiantai, the most architecturally ambitious of the Chinese schools, the one that had taken the whole scriptural inheritance and organized it into a single coherent structure of teaching and contemplation. Mao learned it thoroughly. He was not a simple man reacting against learning he did not possess. He was a trained scholastic who concluded, from inside the system, that the system had grown a wall around itself.

What he saw was this: the great tradition promised universal liberation and delivered it, in practice, to specialists. The scriptures said Amitābha’s vow was for all beings. The institutional reality said that the serious religious life required ordination, celibacy, a monastery, leisure, literacy, and years. The gap between the promise and the arrangement was, to Mao Ziyuan, intolerable — not because the monasteries were corrupt, but because the promise was true and was not being kept.

He looked back for a precedent and found Huiyuan. The Assembly at Mount Lu had solved this exact problem seven hundred years earlier: a real religious community, with real discipline, made of people who kept their households. Mao did not present himself as an innovator. He presented himself as a man restoring something that had been allowed to lapse. This is the invariable posture of religious reform, East and West — nobody says I have a new idea; everybody says we have forgotten what we had — and in Mao’s case it was simply accurate.

Around 1133 he settled at Dianshan Lake, in the marshy water country near the mouth of the Yangtze, and gathered a congregation. He called it the White Lotus.

The place matters. He did not build in a capital or attach himself to a great foundation. He went to the water, among the reed beds and the fishing villages, and made a small hall, and the people who came were the people who lived there: farmers, boatmen, small merchants, their wives, their parents. He kept the ascetic discipline himself — vegetarian, plain, poor — and he asked of them only what they could actually do.

Mao Ziyuan, in brief

Born 1069, Northern Song. Trained in the Tiantai school. Founded the White Lotus congregation at Dianshan Lake c. 1133. Composed a morning liturgy of repentance for lay use and the Chart for the Selection of Buddhas, a single visual teaching-diagram of the Pure Land path. Received from the throne the honorific Cizhao Zongzhu — Patriarch of Compassionate Illumination. Denounced by opponents and banished to Jiangzhou, the prefecture of Mount Lu. Later pardoned. Died 1166, aged ninety-seven.

Chapter IX

The Ordinance for the Fourfold Assembly

What did he actually teach?

He taught the five precepts, which are the moral floor of Buddhism everywhere and which he stated in words a child could hold: do not kill; do not steal; do not lie; do not take intoxicants; do not commit sexual misconduct. He taught vegetarianism as the ordinary shape of a compassionate household, on the plain ground that a man who will not kill should not be eating what was killed for him. He taught the recitation of Amitābha’s name as the daily practice, morning and evening, alone and together. And he taught that the community was obliged to its members: that the sick were to be visited, the widowed supported, the dead buried, and the hungry fed.

The four assemblies of his title are the classical Buddhist fourfold community: monks, nuns, laymen, laywomen. To write an ordinance for the fourfold assembly was to say, in the technical vocabulary of the tradition, that the same rule was being handed to all four — that the layman’s religion and the monk’s religion were not different religions.

He put the doctrine into a diagram. The Chart for the Selection of Buddhas laid out the whole Pure Land path on a single sheet: the lands, the contemplations, the grades of rebirth, the way up. A teacher could hang it on the wall of a village hall and take an illiterate congregation through the entire architecture of their own salvation with a pointing finger. It is one of the great acts of pastoral imagination in the history of religion, and it tells you everything about the man. He did not lower the teaching. He built a staircase to it.

And he wrote a liturgy — a morning rite of repentance, in the vernacular register, short enough to be done before work. Not the great monastic offices, which take hours and require training, but a real liturgy, with real repentance in it, sized for a household. He gave the people a form of prayer that fit inside their actual day.

The morning of the fourfold assembly

Rise. Face the image if you have one, or the east if you do not. Confess what you did yesterday that you would not want done to you; do not dwell on it, only name it. Recite the Name ten times, unhurried, letting the breath carry it. Then ask, once, that whatever merit is in the act go to someone else — a neighbor, a stranger, the dead. Then go to work.

This is not a simplification of the monastic office. It is the office, in the form a working household can carry.

Chapter X

The Innovation That Changed Everything

Mao Ziyuan’s most consequential decision was not doctrinal. It was organizational, and he may not have understood what he was doing when he made it.

He allowed leadership to be lay.

He remained a monk himself, but he did not build the White Lotus around monks. Congregations organized themselves locally. A respected householder taught, and when he died another rose from the same congregation, and the transmission ran from teacher to disciple inside the community rather than down from an institution outside it. Leaders married. They had children. They worked. They lived in the villages where they preached, ate what their neighbors ate, and suffered the same taxes.

Compare what this meant. A monastic order is a building with an address. It can be endowed, and it can be closed. Its lands can be confiscated, its abbot summoned, its gate sealed. Everything valuable about it is visible.

A lay network is a habit distributed among households. It has no address. It requires no wealth. It meets in a farmhouse, a granary, a small hall, or under the sky. If the state arrests the teacher, the congregation has another by the next new moon. If it crushes the congregation, three more appear in the neighboring county, because the practice lives in the memory of everyone who ever attended.

In 1133 this looked like a practical arrangement for poor people. Over the following six centuries it turned out to be one of the most survival-adapted structures any religious movement has ever possessed. Emperors would ban the White Lotus by name in their legal codes. Governors would execute its teachers by the hundred. Armies would burn its villages. And it would not die, because there was nothing centralized enough to kill.

Chapter XI

The Honor and the Exile

Success brought both of the things success always brings.

From above came recognition. The throne conferred on Mao Ziyuan the honorific title Cizhao Zongzhu — Patriarch of Compassionate Illumination. It is a real honor, formally granted, and it establishes beyond argument that the White Lotus began as a licensed, publicly acknowledged religious movement and not as anything hidden.

From nearer at hand came the opposition. The established clergy did not care for him. A monk who told householders they did not need the monastery in order to be saved was making an argument with consequences for donations, for prestige, and for the whole understood order of religious life. And the civil authorities, who preferred religion to arrive through channels they supervised, were uneasy about a man drawing crowds at a lake with no official sponsor and no bureaucratic handle.

The charge, when it came, was the one always brought against such men: that he was disturbing social order and confusing the people. He was banished to Jiangzhou.

There is a quiet perfection in that sentence which the historians who wrote it did not intend. Jiangzhou is the prefecture of Mount Lu. The state, punishing Mao Ziyuan for reviving Huiyuan’s assembly, sent him to Huiyuan’s mountain. Whatever the intention, the man who had spent his life pointing back toward Donglin was made to live in its shadow.

He was later pardoned and allowed to return. The movement continued to spread. But the precedent had been set on both sides: the White Lotus now knew that the throne could turn, and the throne now knew that the White Lotus could gather people it had not authorized. Nothing between them was ever entirely easy again.

Chapter XII

The Death of a Man Who Won

He died in 1166, an old man of ninety-seven, having outlived nearly everyone who knew him at the start.

What had he actually accomplished? By the ordinary measures, not much: no cathedral, no order of thousands, no seat at court, no school of philosophy bearing his name. He had made a small congregation at a lake, written a short liturgy and a wall chart, been honored once and exiled once, and taught for something over thirty years.

By the measures that matter, he had done one of the great things. He had taken a religion of professionals and handed it back to the people it was originally addressed to, and he had done it in a form so simple and so portable that no government in the following seven hundred years could get it out of their hands. Millions of Chinese households would keep his practice. The name he revived would be carried by generations who had never heard of him — and, eventually, by generations who used it for things he would not have recognized.

He did not see the Mongol conquest. He did not see the Red Turbans, or the Ming law code that outlawed the name he had chosen, or the Qing armies in the mountains of Hubei, or a twenty-one-year-old woman on a cliff with the imperial cavalry closing in behind her. He died in his bed in a country at peace, an honored and controversial old teacher, believing he had restored something ancient.

He had. What was done with it afterward belongs to the people who did it, not to him. A man is responsible for the water he pours; he is not responsible for the shape of every vessel it is later poured into.

But the water was clean, and it was his, and it is still running.

What Mao Ziyuan actually founded

Not a secret society. Not a rebellion. Not a heresy. A licensed lay congregation practicing the ordinary devotions of Chinese Pure Land Buddhism under a rule of five precepts, vegetarian diet, morning repentance, recitation of the Name, and mutual aid. Every later thing the name was attached to grew from that root or borrowed the label. The root is what the Abbey claims and what this book describes.

✦

Book Three — The Merchant’s Son

The life of Francis of Assisi, 1181–1226: how a rich young man of an Italian hill town gave the Gospel back to the poor, and how the Church that might have destroyed him made him a saint instead.

[picture]

Plate II · Francis of Assisi

Francis among the birds, in the Umbrian country whose sun and wind and earth he called brother and sister.

Chapter XIII

Assisi

He was born in 1181 or 1182, in Assisi, on the western slope of Mount Subasio in Umbria, and he was not poor.

His father, Pietro di Bernardone, was a cloth merchant with business in France — successful enough to be traveling there when the child was born, successful enough that his son grew up with money to spend and a reputation for spending it. His mother was called Pica. The father wanted the boy named Giovanni; on his return he renamed him Francesco, the Frenchman, after the country where his fortune was made. There is something almost too apt in a man of the new commercial age naming his son after a market.

The Assisi of Francis’s boyhood was a small walled town of a few thousand people, and it was in the middle of the great European transformation. The old order had been the castle on the hill and the peasants below it. The new order was the commune: townsmen organizing themselves, throwing out the imperial garrison, tearing down the fortress, and running their own affairs. Francis was a child of the winners. His class was rising, and he lived like it — well dressed, generous, popular, the center of the young men who went out singing in the streets at night. The early biographers, who were writing hagiography and had no motive to say it, say plainly that he was vain and that he wasted his father’s money.

What he wanted was to be a knight. That was the dream of every ambitious merchant’s son in Italy: not trade, which was where the money actually was, but arms, which was where the glory was. He wanted the songs. He wanted to be one of the men the troubadours sang about.

He got his chance in 1202, when Assisi went to war with Perugia, the larger city across the valley. The Assisians were routed at Collestrada. Francis, because he was well dressed enough to be worth a ransom, was not killed but taken, and he spent about a year in a Perugian prison.

He came out sick. Then he was sick for a long time at home. And when he could walk again, according to everyone who knew him, the world had gone flat. The clothes did not help. The singing did not help. He went out into the countryside he had known all his life and found that he could not feel it.

This is the beginning of every conversion story worth telling: not a revelation, but a failure of appetite. The things that had worked stopped working, and the silence that opened up behind them had to be filled with something.

Chapter XIV

The Turning

He tried the dream once more. In 1205 he set out for Apulia to join a papal army under a well-known commander, magnificently equipped, riding south with everything a young knight could want.

He got as far as Spoleto and turned around.

What he said afterward was that he had been asked, in the night, whether it was better to serve the master or the servant, and had answered the master, and had been told to go home and wait to be told what to do. He rode back into Assisi without an explanation that anyone found satisfying. His friends thought he was ill. His father thought he was ruined.

Then came the leper.

The roads outside every medieval town had lepers on them, kept at a distance by law and by universal revulsion, ringing a bell so that the healthy could avoid them. Francis had a particular horror of them; he says so himself. And riding one day he met one on the road, and instead of turning his horse he got down, and gave the man money, and kissed his hand.

He wrote about it at the end of his life, in the Testament, in the first sentence of his own account of his own conversion. What had been bitter to him, he said, was turned into sweetness of soul and body. He did not describe a vision. He described a change in what disgusted him.

Everything else follows from that. He began going to the lazar houses to nurse people. He began giving away his father’s cloth. And in a half-ruined chapel below the town called San Damiano, praying before a painted crucifix, he heard the sentence that organized the rest of his life: Go and repair my house, which as you see is falling into ruin.

He took it literally, which was correct and also, as it turned out, much too small. He sold a horse and a bale of his father’s cloth and offered the money to the priest of San Damiano to fix the roof. The priest, sensibly, refused to take it.

Chapter XV

The Stripping

Pietro di Bernardone did what any father in his position would do. He hunted his son down, brought him home, and — by one account — locked him in a storeroom until he came to his senses. Then he took him to law.

The case was heard before the bishop of Assisi in the public square in 1206. The father demanded restitution of the money and formal renunciation of the inheritance. The bishop, who understood both piety and property, told Francis to give back what was not his.

Francis went into an inner room and came out carrying his clothes, and the money on top of them, and put the bundle down in front of his father. Then he said, in front of the whole town, that until now he had called Pietro di Bernardone his father, and that henceforth he would say Our Father who art in heaven. He was standing naked in the square. The bishop covered him with his own cloak.

That gesture is the hinge of the whole story, and it is worth being precise about what it means. It was not a rejection of family, and it was not theatre for its own sake. It was a public and legally intelligible act: he was returning the entirety of what he had received from his class, and thereby placing himself outside the economy that had made him. In a commercial town, in front of merchants, a merchant’s son handed back the goods.

He went out in a borrowed tunic and began, with his own hands, to rebuild San Damiano — carrying stones, begging the stones, begging his food. He rebuilt two more ruined chapels after it. One of them was a small church in the plain below Assisi called the Portiuncula, the little portion, and it would become the heart of everything.

Two renunciations, compared

Mao Ziyuan’s poverty was inherited from a monastic tradition that assumed it; he took the vows and kept them strictly, and his radicalism lay elsewhere. Francis’s poverty was seized, publicly, against his family and his class, and it was the whole content of his radicalism. The difference is instructive. In China the ascetic option was ancient and honored, and the shocking act was giving religion to householders. In Europe the monastic option was ancient and honored, and the shocking act was a rich man refusing to be rich in the street. Each man committed the transgression his own civilization had left available.

Chapter XVI

The Gospel Without a Gloss

On the feast of St. Matthias in 1208, in the Portiuncula, Francis heard the Gospel read in which Christ sends out the disciples: take no gold, no silver, no bag for the journey, no second tunic, no sandals, no staff; go and proclaim the kingdom.

He asked the priest afterward to explain it. Then he said: this is what I want.

He threw away his shoes and his staff, put on a rough tunic tied with a rope, and began to preach. Within a year he had companions. A prosperous townsman named Bernard of Quintavalle sold everything and joined him. Then Peter Catanii. Then Giles. When they reached twelve, Francis wrote a rule.

It was a very short rule. It was, essentially, a handful of Gospel passages strung together with a few practical directions. It has not survived, but everyone who saw it agreed on its character: it did not organize an institution, it quoted Christ. That was the point. Francis’s entire theological position can be put in one sentence: the Gospel is not a metaphor and does not require a commentary; do what it says.

In 1209 or 1210 he took his eleven men to Rome to ask the Pope for approval.

This was audacious to the point of absurdity. Innocent III was the most powerful pope in the history of the office, the arbiter of European kings, presiding over a Church at the height of its wealth and legal reach, and here was a barefoot man from a hill town with a document consisting of Bible verses, asking permission to live by it. Movements of voluntary poverty were exactly what the curia had spent a generation condemning; the Waldensians had come the same way and been driven into heresy.

He was granted the audience, and the Rule was approved orally.

The tradition preserves the reason. Innocent dreamed that the Lateran basilica — the cathedral of Rome, the head of all churches — was leaning and about to fall, and that a small poor man came and put his shoulder under it and held it up. He woke and recognized the man in front of him.

Go and repair my house. The sentence at San Damiano had not been about a roof.

Chapter XVII

Brothers, and a Sister, and a Sultan

What happened next was faster than anyone was ready for.

The Order grew explosively. Men came in by the hundred, then the thousand. They went out barefoot in pairs across Italy and then across Europe, working with their hands for their food, begging when there was no work, preaching penance in the ordinary language of the marketplace instead of the Latin of the pulpit. Nothing like it had happened in Christian Europe. They were not monks, enclosed and stable in one house; they were friars, brothers, in the streets, in the towns, among the people, with nothing.

In 1212 a young noblewoman of Assisi named Clare ran away from her family’s house on Palm Sunday night, met Francis and the brothers at the Portiuncula by torchlight, and had her hair cut off. Her family came for her; she held onto the altar cloth and showed them her shorn head, and they left her. She founded the women’s branch, kept a stricter poverty than any of the men, refused for forty years every papal attempt to give her community an endowment, and finally obtained the Privilege of Poverty — the extraordinary document by which the papacy conceded that a religious house might own nothing at all. She outlived Francis by twenty-seven years and defended his intention longer and better than most of his brothers did.

In 1219, in the middle of the Fifth Crusade, Francis crossed the lines at Damietta and walked into the camp of the Sultan al-Kāmil.

He expected to be martyred. He was not. The Sultan received him, listened to him at length over several days, declined to convert, and sent him back through the lines under safe conduct with gifts. Nothing about that encounter fits the century it happened in. Two men whose armies were killing each other a mile away sat down and talked about God, and each let the other go. It is the single most astonishing hour in a life full of them, and the Abbey commends it to anyone who has been told that a serious faith cannot survive a conversation with someone else’s.

He also, on the way back, saw what was happening to his Order, and it broke his heart.

Chapter XVIII

The Third Order

Here is the innovation that makes Francis and Mao Ziyuan the same man in two languages.

From the beginning, ordinary people wanted in. Not merely to admire the brothers — to join them. Married men, women with children, tradesmen, farmers, people with obligations they could not simply walk away from, came to Francis and asked what they were supposed to do. He could not take them into the Order; they had households.

So he made them a rule of their own.

The Order of Penitents — later called the Third Order, the Tertiaries — was a form of the Franciscan life for people who stayed exactly where they were. They kept their marriages, their trades, their homes, their property. They were bound to a plain rule: simplicity of dress, fixed hours of prayer, fasting, frequent confession, generosity to the poor, reconciliation with enemies, honest dealing, and a refusal to bear arms or to swear the oaths that dragged men into their lords’ wars.

That last provision was not a devotional nicety. In a society organized around feudal oath and private war, a movement of laypeople who would not swear and would not fight was a structural fact, and lords noticed. The Third Order was, quietly, one of the most socially disruptive institutions of the thirteenth century, and it was disruptive precisely because it took ordinary people seriously as religious agents.

Set it beside Dianshan Lake and the resemblance stops being interesting and becomes uncanny. Two men, a hundred years and eight thousand miles apart, faced the same problem — a magnificent religion that had become the property of professionals — and reached the same solution, in the same form, with the same components: a short rule, in plain language, for people who keep their households; a daily office sized to a working day; a moral discipline centered on non-violence and honesty; a diet marked by fasting or abstention; a community obligated to its own poor; and lay leadership rising from within the congregation.

Neither had heard of the other. Neither could have. They were answering the same question, and the question has only one good answer.

Chapter XIX

Brother Sun

In September 1224, on Mount La Verna in the Apennines, keeping a fast of forty days, Francis received in his own flesh the wounds of the crucified Christ.

He tried to conceal them and could not entirely; his companions saw the hands and feet, and the wound in the side that stained his tunic. He lived two more years in continual pain, and by then he was also going blind, and the treatments applied to his eyes were worse than the disease.

And in that condition, at San Damiano, in a hut of reed matting, sick, nearly blind, and grieved by what was already happening to his Order, he composed the Canticle of the Creatures.

It is the first great poem in the Italian language, and it is a hymn of praise sung by a man in the ruins of his health to a world he could no longer see. He praised God for Brother Sun, who gives the day and bears the likeness of his Maker; for Sister Moon and the stars, clear and precious and fair; for Brother Wind, and for every kind of weather; for Sister Water, useful and humble and chaste; for Brother Fire, beautiful and strong; for Sister Mother Earth, who feeds us and brings forth fruit and flowers. Later he added a verse for those who forgive for love of God and endure in peace. And at the very end, when he was told he was dying, he added a verse praising God for Sister Bodily Death, from whom no living person escapes.

Nothing in the history of Christian devotion is quite like it. The world is not scenery in that poem, and it is not a temptation. It is family.

He died at the Portiuncula on the evening of the third of October, 1226, at about forty-four years old, having asked to be laid on the bare ground. He was canonized less than two years later, in July 1228, by Gregory IX.

Chapter XX

What Happened to His Order

Francis won, and it destroyed exactly what he had built.

He had wanted absolute poverty — not moderate simplicity, not corporate poverty with a decent endowment, but nothing: no property, no houses of their own, no money handled, no security of any kind. He wrote it into every version of the Rule and he said it again in his Testament with an insistence that reads, at this distance, like a man who could already see what was coming.

Within a generation of his death the Franciscans owned churches. Within two they held some of the finest libraries in Europe and staffed the great universities. The Order split over the question — the Spirituals holding to the strict rule, the Conventuals arguing for moderation and property — and the argument turned bitter, then theological, then juridical, and finally some of the strictest were burned by the Church that had canonized their founder. The humble beggar of Assisi became the patron of an institution of enormous wealth and power, and his own most faithful followers were persecuted for saying so.

That is the standard fate of successful reform. It is worth sitting with, because Mao Ziyuan’s movement suffered the mirror image of the same catastrophe: Francis’s vision was ruined by being embraced, and Mao’s was ruined by being outlawed. Both men wanted a simple, poor, lay, peaceable religion. One founder’s followers ended up rich and the other founder’s followers ended up in arms, and neither outcome had anything to do with what the founder taught.

The difference was not in the seed. It was entirely in the soil — which is the subject of the next book.

A practice from Francis

Go outside. Name five things aloud as brother or sister — the sun, the wind, the water in the tap, the earth under the pavement, the dog on the corner — and mean it as a family relation rather than a figure of speech. Then name one thing you are afraid of and call it sister too. This is not sentiment. It is the whole of the Canticle, and it was composed by a blind man in pain.

✦

Book Four — The Mirror of the Founders

In which the two lives are set against each other point by point: the same diagnosis, the same medicine, the same gentleness, the same betrayal — and one enormous difference, which explains everything that follows in this book.

Chapter XXI

The Same Sickness

Begin with what each man was looking at.

Mao Ziyuan looked at Song Buddhism. It was, by any measure, one of the great religious cultures of world history: monasteries with libraries and hospitals and mills and tea gardens; a scholastic tradition of extraordinary subtlety; printing presses turning out the canon; abbots who corresponded with ministers of state. Nothing about it was corrupt in the crude sense. It was simply enormous, and enormous things acquire their own gravity. The rites had grown long. The philosophy had grown deep. The institution had grown rich, and the people it was originally for had grown distant from it — near enough to see the tiled roofs from the fields, far enough that nothing inside was addressed to them.

Francis looked at the high medieval Church and saw the same thing, with more corruption mixed in but the same fundamental disease. Bishops living as princes because they were princes, holding fiefs and leading armies. Abbeys with vast estates. A liturgy in a language the congregation could not follow, celebrated by men whose training the congregation could not imagine affording. Money moving through the sacramental system in ways that everyone noticed and few could stop.

Both men made the same diagnosis, and it was not the obvious one. The obvious diagnosis is the clergy are wicked, and it produces angry preaching and very little else. Neither Mao nor Francis made it. Mao did not denounce the monasteries; he had been trained in them, and he never left the monastic life himself. Francis never questioned the Church’s authority, never attacked a bishop, and instructed his brothers to honor even unworthy priests for the sake of the sacrament they carried.

Their diagnosis was subtler and much more damaging. It was: the promise is true, and it is not being delivered. The scriptures say Amitābha’s vow is for all beings; the arrangement says it is for those with leisure. The Gospel says blessed are the poor; the arrangement says blessed are those who can endow a chantry. Neither man accused anyone of lying. Both of them pointed at the distance between what the tradition said about itself and what it was actually doing, and then walked into that gap and started living there.

That is a far more dangerous move than denunciation, and both institutions understood it. You can answer an accusation. You cannot answer a man who simply goes and does the thing you said was impossible.

Chapter XXII

The Same Medicine

Put the two prescriptions in a column and the effect is unsettling.

The two rules, side by side

| Mao Ziyuan, c. 1133 | Francis, c. 1221
Who it is for | householders — the fourfold assembly, laymen and laywomen included on the same terms | householders — the Order of Penitents, married men and women who keep their trades
Vows required | none monastic; the five precepts | none monastic; a rule of penance
Daily form | recitation of the Name, morning and evening; a short repentance rite sized to a working day | fixed hours of prayer, said at home; frequent confession
Diet | vegetarian abstention | prescribed fasts and abstinence
Ethic | no killing, stealing, lying, intoxication, sexual misconduct | honest dealing, reconciliation with enemies, no oath, no bearing of arms
Property | plain living; the community obliged to its own poor | simplicity of dress and household; alms to the poor
Teaching aid | a single wall chart, readable by the illiterate | preaching in the vernacular, in the marketplace
Leadership | lay teachers rising from within the congregation | lay tertiaries under their own local ministers

Two men who never heard each other’s names produced the same document.

It is worth being exact about why. This is not a coincidence and it is not mysticism. It is the shape of an answer forced by the shape of a problem. If you intend to give a demanding religion to people who work with their hands, certain things are simply determined for you. The practice must be short, because their time is not their own. It must be sayable, because they cannot read. It must be repeatable, because it has to survive fatigue. It must have a moral floor rather than a moral ceiling, because a rule that cannot be kept is not a rule. It must not require withdrawal, because they have children. It must be taught by one of their own, because a specialist will not stay in the village. And the community must feed its widows, because nobody else will.

Every one of those constraints is imposed by the people, not by the doctrine. Mao Ziyuan and Francis of Assisi arrived at the same rule because they were both listening to the same person: a poor, tired, illiterate adult with dependents, who wants God and cannot afford the professional route. That person exists in every century and on every continent, and when anyone actually attends to him, the answer comes out looking like this.

Chapter XXIII

The Same Gentleness

Neither man was a firebrand. This deserves emphasis, because the later history of both movements is so violent that it is easy to read the violence backward into the founders.

Mao Ziyuan never raised a hand against anyone or advocated that anyone else should. His radicalism was entirely a matter of who was allowed in the room. He kept the precepts, ate no meat, lived plainly among reed beds and fishing villages, taught for three decades, was honored and then exiled and then pardoned, and died at ninety-seven. There is nothing in his life or his writings that could be read as sedition by anyone reading in good faith. He was, by every account including those of his opponents, a mild man.

Francis was mild in a more strenuous way — he was doing extremely dramatic things, but never against a person. He stripped in the square, but he handed back the goods rather than seizing anything. He preached penance in the streets, but he told his brothers to be subject to everyone. He walked into a crusader war and crossed the lines, and when he got to the Sultan he talked. His rule for laypeople forbade them to carry weapons. When his own Order began going wrong he did not fight for control of it; he resigned the leadership and spent his last years praying and writing and grieving.

Both men had, in a technical sense, enormous power available to them and declined to use it. Mao had a mass following in a country where mass followings had historically toppled dynasties, and he used it to organize funerals. Francis had thousands of dedicated men and the ear of the most powerful pope in history, and he used it to nurse lepers.

This is not weakness and it should not be read as such. Both understood something the later centuries would forget on both continents: that a movement’s methods become its content. What you build with is what you end up having built. Mao built with recitation and neighborly obligation, and what he made was a network of households that could survive anything. Francis built with poverty and courtesy, and what he made was a form of Christian life that has never stopped producing saints. Neither built with force, and so neither, in his own lifetime, made anything that force could easily take.

Chapter XXIV

The Same Love of Creation

There is one more resemblance and it is the tenderest.

Francis is the more famous case, and rightly. He preached to birds. He is said to have made peace with a wolf that was terrorizing a town, on the terms that the town would feed it. He asked the brother gardener to leave a corner of the vegetable plot unplanted so that wild flowers could come up and praise God in their season. He would not let the brothers cut a whole tree, so that it might grow again. He called the sun and the moon and the wind and the water his brothers and sisters and meant the relation, not the metaphor. He is, by a papal decree of 1979, the patron saint of ecology, and no other candidate was ever seriously considered.

Mao Ziyuan’s case is quieter but it is present in everything he did. He put his congregation at a lake, in the water country, and lived there among the reeds and the fishermen. He required abstention from meat as ordinary practice for householders — not as an athletic feat for the elite but as the normal shape of a compassionate life, on the plain ground that the first precept forbids killing and a plate is a form of participation. The whole Buddhist frame he taught in assumes the moral continuity of all sentient life: the beings in the fields and the water are not resources, they are relatives at another stage of the same journey. And the emblem he chose is a plant. His tradition explains the human condition by pointing at a flower growing out of mud.

The restored Society has carried this forward deliberately. The Abbey’s herbalism is not an ornament on the tradition; it is the same instinct expressed in a discipline — the conviction that the green world is a teacher, a physician, and a kinsman, and that a religion which cannot say so has lost something it will need.

Both men, then, looked at creation and did not see raw material. They saw family, or they saw teachers, and in either case they saw something owed courtesy. In an age of extraction, that may be the part of their common witness with the most work left to do.

Chapter XXV

The Different Soil

Now the divergence, and it is total.

Francis went to Rome and was approved. Innocent III, having every reason to suspect him and every precedent for condemning him, dreamed of the leaning basilica and gave him the Order instead. Honorius III confirmed a fuller Rule in 1223. Gregory IX canonized him twenty-two months after his death and laid the first stone of the great basilica over his grave. The institution he had implicitly criticized reached out, took him in, blessed him, and made him one of the two or three most beloved figures in the history of Christianity.

Mao Ziyuan went before authority and was honored — and then denounced, charged with confusing the people and disturbing the social order, and banished. He was pardoned; the movement continued; and after his death the trajectory only worsened. Under the Yuan the White Lotus was alternately tolerated and proscribed. Under the Ming it was written into the legal code as a forbidden teaching. Under the Qing it was hunted with real ferocity. The name he had chosen out of reverence for Huiyuan became, in the language of the state, a term of criminal indictment.

Why the difference? Not because Mao was more dangerous. By any objective reading he was less so — he had no armed following, no international order, no ambitions, no theology of judgment on princes.

The difference is structural, and it is the master key to this entire book.

In the Latin West there were two powers, not one. Church and empire were genuinely distinct institutions with distinct laws, distinct courts, distinct armies, and eight centuries of unresolved conflict between them. That meant a reform movement had somewhere to go. Francis could appeal to Rome against the ordinary weight of the world, and Rome — which needed friends among the poor, and which had watched the Waldensians walk out the door and become enemies — had every incentive to say yes. The Church could absorb reform because the Church was an institution capable of granting a charter.

In China there was one power. The state was the sole source of legitimacy in every sphere, including the religious; the emperor held the Mandate of Heaven, and there was no second court to appeal to. A religious movement therefore had exactly two possible statuses: licensed, or illegal. There was no third category, no space outside the throne’s competence in which a large lay movement could stand and be safe. And an autonomous mass organization of poor people, whatever its intentions, was structurally the thing an imperial state fears most — because that is precisely what every dynasty in Chinese history had eventually been overthrown by.

So the Church could tame Francis by blessing him. The empire could not tame Mao Ziyuan at all; it could only license him or outlaw him, and in the long run it outlawed him. One system had a mechanism for converting reform into renewal. The other had a mechanism for converting reform into rebellion.

Neither founder chose his soil. Both planted the same seed.

Chapter XXVI

Two Betrayals, Facing Each Other

And so both visions were destroyed, in opposite directions, by forces neither man controlled.

Francis’s poverty was betrayed by success. The Order that bore his name accumulated exactly what he had forbidden it to touch, and it did so for reasons that were not wicked — thousands of brothers need housing, preaching requires books, universities require chairs — but the result was the negation of his central demand. The men who insisted on his actual words were marginalized, then condemned, and some of them died at the stake. The most radical poverty movement in Christian history became a wealthy international corporation within a century, and its founder’s Testament had to be explained away by papal decree.

Mao Ziyuan’s peace was betrayed by desperation. His name — the name of a chanting society for householders — became, over the following centuries, the label the imperial government used for insurrection, and eventually the label the insurgents themselves accepted. Han Shantong took the ancient expectation of the coming Buddha and made it a rallying cry against the Mongols. The Red Turbans marched under it and brought down a dynasty. In 1796 a rebellion carrying the White Lotus name burned across five provinces for eight years, killed millions, and came close to breaking the Qing treasury. Mao Ziyuan, who taught farmers not to kill so much as an animal, became the posthumous patriarch of the largest peasant insurrections in the world.

Look at the two failures together and the symmetry is almost unbearable.

Francis wanted his followers to have nothing, and they became rich. Mao wanted his followers to harm nothing, and they went to war.

In both cases the founder’s teaching was intact and the followers’ situation was impossible. The Franciscans grew rich because the world rewards a movement it admires, and there was no way to be admired by thirteenth-century Europe on that scale and stay poor. The White Lotus went to war because the world offered its people nothing else — when the dikes broke and the taxes came anyway and the magistrate was for sale and the granary was empty, the only organized body in the county was the congregation, and the only vocabulary anyone had for saying this cannot continue was the vocabulary of the coming age. They did not repurpose their religion cynically. It was the only language they had.

Neither betrayal is a judgment on the founder. Ideas do not stay where you put them. Once a teaching enters the bloodstream of a society it mutates to meet the survival needs of the people carrying it — and both of these teachings entered very deep, precisely because both men had succeeded at the thing they set out to do, which was to reach the poor.

Chapter XXVII

Two Drops of the Same Water

So what do we finally say about them?

That they were the same man in two languages. Born a century apart, dead within sixty years of each other, both of them peaceful, both of them ascetics, both of them in love with the created world, both of them fundamentally uninterested in power and fundamentally interested in the man in the field. Both convinced that the faith had grown too complicated, too costly, and too far away. Both convinced that the cure was to make it simple and hand it back. Both of them, in consequence, the founders of enormous lay movements they neither planned nor could control.

One became a saint whose basilica draws pilgrims from every country on earth. The other became a footnote, remembered mainly in connection with rebellions he would have wept over, his name a term of art in a criminal code.

The difference is entirely a matter of what happened around them. It is not a difference in the men, and it is not a difference in the medicine. If Mao Ziyuan had been born in Umbria and Francis in the lake country of Jiangsu, their lives would have swapped names and nothing else. The one would have knelt before a pope who dreamed of a falling church; the other would have been banished to a mountain and gone on teaching.

The Abbey holds them as brothers, and says so without qualification. They saw the same sickness. They wrote the same prescription. They were, across eight thousand miles and a hundred years, two quiet voices saying the same radical thing:

That God belongs to the poor, the simple, and the ordinary. That you do not need to be a specialist to be holy. That holiness belongs to everyone.

That, and not any rebellion, is what the White Lotus actually is. It is what the Abbey has restored. And the two men who said it first, in Chinese and in Umbrian, deserve to be read in the same breath.

An antiphon of the two founders

For the monk at the lake, who gave the Name to those who could not read: that we may not hoard what was given to be shared.

For the beggar of Assisi, who handed back his father’s cloth in the square: that we may not be owned by what we own.

For the fourfold assembly and the order of penitents, who kept their households and their vows together: that we may be holy where we actually live.

✦

Book Five — The Maid

The life of Joan of Arc, 1412–1431: a farmer’s daughter who heard voices at thirteen, broke a siege at seventeen, crowned a king, and was burned at nineteen by a court of churchmen.

[picture]

Plate III · Joan of Arc

The Maid riding at the head of the column, among the helmets, as devotion has pictured her since Orléans.

Chapter XXVIII

Domrémy

She was born about 1412 in Domrémy, a village of a few dozen households on the Meuse in the far east of France, on a frontier where the loyalties changed from one bank to the other.

Her father, Jacques d’Arc, farmed and held a minor position of trust in the village — a man of some standing among people who had very little. Her mother was Isabelle Romée, who had made a pilgrimage to Le Puy and who taught her daughter the Pater, the Ave, and the Credo, and nothing else. Joan could not read or write. She said so at her trial without embarrassment. She spun and sewed; she said she feared no woman in Rouen at either. She helped with the animals, though the later image of her as a shepherdess she partly disowned — she said she did not take the beasts to pasture much once she was older.

The village neighbors, testifying twenty-five years later at the nullification trial, remembered a girl who was pious past the local average and otherwise entirely ordinary: good-natured, hard-working, given to going into the church when nobody else was there, quick to give her bed to a beggar. They also remembered the war.

The war was the Hundred Years’ War, in its worst phase. The English held Normandy and Paris and, by treaty, the crown itself; the Duke of Burgundy was allied with them against the disinherited French heir; and between the armies moved the écorcheurs, the flayers, companies of soldiers who were paid nothing and therefore lived on whatever countryside they were standing in. Domrémy was burned during Joan’s childhood, and the villagers drove their animals to an island in the river and hid. That is the France she grew up in: not a war of front lines but a landscape of smoke, in which any given morning might bring men on horses who owed you nothing.

The Dauphin Charles had been repudiated by his own mother, had no coronation and therefore no unquestioned title, and held a diminished court at Chinon on the Loire. Orléans, the last great fortress on the river, was under siege. If Orléans fell, the south fell, and the war was over.

Chapter XXIX

The Voices

She was thirteen when it began — in her father’s garden, at midday, in summer, with a great light.

She said afterward that she was frightened the first time and that afterward she was not. She heard them two or three times a week and came to know them: Michael the Archangel, and Saint Catherine, and Saint Margaret. She said she saw them with her own eyes as clearly as she saw the men questioning her, that they spoke French and spoke well, and that she was sorry every time they left.

For three years they told her to be good and go to church. Then they told her to go into France and raise the siege of Orléans and take the Dauphin to Reims to be crowned.

Her whole subsequent life is contained in the way she reacted to that instruction. She said: I am a poor girl who knows nothing of riding or of war. And then she went.

There was no mechanism by which a seventeen-year-old peasant could reach the heir to the throne. She invented one. She walked to Vaucouleurs, the nearest loyalist garrison, and asked the captain, Robert de Baudricourt, for an escort to the Dauphin. He told her uncle to take her home and box her ears. She came back. She came back a third time, and by then she had said in the town that the Dauphin’s army would suffer a defeat near Orléans, and when news arrived that it had — the Battle of the Herrings — Baudricourt changed his mind. He gave her six men and a horse. She cut her hair short and put on men’s clothes, because she was about to ride five hundred kilometers through enemy country with soldiers, and the reasons for that decision were as practical as they were symbolic.

They rode eleven days, mostly at night, and forded rivers in winter, and arrived at Chinon in late February 1429.

Chapter XXX

Chinon and Poitiers

The court did not believe her, and the court was not foolish to hesitate. Prophetesses were not rare in fifteenth-century France, and backing the wrong one would be ruinous.

They tested her twice. The first test was a trick: the Dauphin hid himself among his courtiers and put another man on the throne. She went through the hall and knelt to the right one. Then she asked to speak with him alone, and told him something that nobody else knew — a sign, which he never disclosed and she never disclosed, and which visibly changed him. Those who watched said he came away from that conversation radiant.

The second test was serious theology. She was sent to Poitiers and examined for three weeks by a commission of clerics and doctors of the university. They probed her for heresy, for demonic influence, for the standard marks of false revelation. She answered them, sometimes sharply. When one learned doctor asked what dialect her voices spoke, she said a better one than his. When they told her God did not need soldiers if he wished to free France, she gave the answer that is the whole of her theology: The soldiers will fight, and God will give the victory.

They found nothing against her. Their conclusion was cautious and sufficient: in view of the king’s necessity, and finding in her no evil, he might make use of her. She was also examined physically by ladies of the court and found to be a virgin, which mattered enormously in the demonology of the period — a witch was assumed to have congress with devils, so her virginity was, in the logic of the day, evidence.

She was given armor, a household, and a standard. The standard she cared about. It was white, sown with lilies, painted with Christ in judgment between two angels, and bearing the names Jhesus Maria. Asked at her trial which she loved more, her sword or her banner, she said the banner, forty times more — because with the banner in her hands she need not kill anyone. She said she had never killed a man.

Chapter XXXI

Orléans

She reached Orléans on the twenty-ninth of April, 1429, riding in through the Burgundy Gate at night with a convoy of food.

The city had been under siege for seven months. The English had built a ring of bastilles around it and were starving it out, and the French commanders inside had settled into the professional pessimism of men who had been losing for ninety years. They had a plan for managing the siege. They did not have a plan for lifting it, and they had no intention of letting a farm girl near the fighting.

She overrode them by simply being there, in armor, in front of the soldiers, saying that God had sent her. The garrison believed her before the captains did. That is the mechanism, and it is worth stating plainly: her military effect was not tactical genius, it was the conversion of morale into a physical force. Men who had been certain they would lose became certain they would win, and behaved accordingly, and the enemy — who had been certain of the same thing in reverse — felt it change.

She also fought. On the seventh of May the French assaulted Les Tourelles, the great fortified bridgehead on the south bank. Joan was hit in the shoulder by a crossbow bolt, the point coming through, and was carried out of the line. She wept — she was, everyone remembered, still a girl — and had the bolt pulled and a dressing put on it, and refused a charm that was offered for the pain. Then she went back.

By evening the assault had stalled and the commanders ordered a withdrawal. She asked for a little time, went aside to pray, came back, took her banner, and went to the ditch. When the point of the standard touched the wall, the army came behind her, and the fort fell. The next morning the English drew up in the field, waited, and marched away.

Nine days. A siege that had held for seven months, in a war that had run for ninety years, broke in nine days. Everything about her afterward — the belief, the hatred, the fear — dates from that week.

Why it worked

Nothing supernatural is required to see the mechanism, and nothing natural is sufficient to explain the origin. Armies are enormous engines of collective belief. In 1429 both armies in France believed the English would win, and that belief was doing more work than the artillery. Joan reversed it in a fortnight, and the reversal held for the rest of the war. Where the certainty came from is a separate question, and she gave the same answer to it for two years, under every kind of pressure, and never varied it.

Chapter XXXII

The Crown at Reims

She then did the thing that no professional would have done.

The obvious strategy after Orléans was to consolidate the Loire, take the fortified towns, and build a base. Joan wanted to march three hundred kilometers through enemy-held Champagne, without a siege train, to Reims, so that Charles could be anointed with the holy oil in the cathedral where French kings had been crowned for eight hundred years.

Her reasoning was not military and it was completely correct. The English claim rested on a treaty and a child king crowned in Paris. The French claim rested on inheritance and had never been consecrated. In a world where legitimacy was a sacramental fact, the anointing at Reims would convert Charles from a claimant into the king, and every waverer in France would have to choose in the light of that.

The Loire campaign went first, and it went perfectly: Jargeau, Meung, Beaugency, and then Patay on the eighteenth of June, where the French cavalry caught the English archers before they could plant their stakes and destroyed the army that had been unbeatable for a generation. Then the march. Town after town opened its gates as she came — Auxerre, Troyes, Châlons — some after negotiation, some after a show of force, most simply because the news of Orléans had arrived first.

On the seventeenth of July, 1429, Charles VII was crowned and anointed in Reims cathedral. Joan stood beside the altar with her banner. Asked later why her standard had been carried into the church, she gave the answer of a girl who had been mocked by clerks and had learned to answer them: it had borne the burden; it was right that it should have the honor.

Her father had come. The village of Domrémy was exempted from taxes.

She was seventeen years old, and she had done, in five months, the two things she had been told to do.

Chapter XXXIII

The Long Failure

Everything after Reims went wrong, and it went wrong for the most ordinary reason in politics: the man she had crowned no longer needed her.

Charles had what he wanted. His counselors, particularly Georges de La Trémoille, preferred negotiation with Burgundy to a war they might not win, and negotiation was easier without a girl in armor announcing God’s intentions. Joan wanted to march on Paris. She was permitted to try, late, with inadequate support, and the assault on the eighth of September failed; she was wounded in the thigh by a crossbow bolt at the ditch and had to be dragged away, still shouting that the city could be taken. The king ordered a withdrawal the next day. A truce was signed.

The winter was ceremonial and humiliating: ennoblement for her family, small skirmishes, a failed siege at La Charité with no money and no supplies. She had been a weapon, and the weapon had been set down.

In the spring of 1430 she went out on her own initiative, with a small company, to help towns that were being attacked during a truce nobody was keeping. On the twenty-third of May she rode out from Compiègne against a Burgundian force, was cut off when the drawbridge came up behind her, and was pulled off her horse in a field by an archer.

She was twenty-three days short of a year from Reims.

Chapter XXXIV

Rouen

She was sold.

That is the plain description. The Burgundians held her; the English paid ten thousand livres tournois; the French king did nothing — no ransom offered, no rescue attempted, no protest recorded. She was moved to Rouen, in English-held Normandy, and put on trial for heresy before an ecclesiastical court presided over by Pierre Cauchon, Bishop of Beauvais, a man who owed his career to the English and expected more from them.

The trial was a political operation in canonical dress, and its purpose was not to determine whether she had sinned. Charles VII had been crowned by a girl who said God sent her. If the girl could be shown to be a witch or a heretic, the crown was tainted at the root. The English did not need her dead nearly as much as they needed her discredited.

And yet the transcript is the reason we know her. Notaries recorded the sessions; a Latin version was compiled afterward, and the French minutes underlie it. Sixty and seventy men — theologians, canonists, university masters — questioned an illiterate nineteen-year-old, in irons, without counsel, without a single friend in the room, for three months. And the record shows her holding.

They asked whether she was in God’s grace — a trap, since to say yes is presumption and to say no is confession. She said: If I am not, may God put me there; and if I am, may God keep me there. The notary recorded that her examiners were stupefied. They asked why God should save France if he loved the English. She said God loved the English very well, in their own country. They asked whether Saint Michael came to her naked. She asked whether they thought God had nothing to clothe him with. They asked her to submit her revelations to the judgment of the Church on earth. She said she submitted to God, who sent her, and that she would not deny for anything what she had said and done at his command.

They condemned her. On the twenty-fourth of May, brought out to the cemetery of Saint-Ouen with the fire prepared and the executioner waiting, exhausted and terrified, she signed — or made a mark on — an abjuration she could not read, and was sentenced to perpetual imprisonment instead. Within days she had put the man’s clothes back on. She said her voices had reproached her for the abjuration and that she would rather die than remain as she was.

She was declared a relapsed heretic.

Chapter XXXV

The Fire

On the morning of the thirtieth of May, 1431, she was taken by cart to the Old Market Square in Rouen. She asked for a cross. An English soldier made her one out of two sticks and she put it in her dress; a friar was sent to the church to bring the processional crucifix and hold it up where she could see it while she burned.

She was chained to a tall plaster pillar so that the crowd could see. The executioner, Geoffroy Thérage, said afterward that he had been ordered to build the pyre high, which meant the fire could not reach her quickly and she would take longer to die.

She called on Saint Michael. Witnesses at the rehabilitation testified that she called on Christ repeatedly, and that her last word, spoken loudly as the smoke took her, was Jesus. An English soldier who had helped carry the wood said aloud that they were lost, they had burned a saint. Cauchon’s own secretary walked away weeping and said he wished his soul were where he believed that woman’s soul now was.

Her ashes were thrown into the Seine so that nothing could be gathered as a relic.

She was nineteen.

Chapter XXXVI

The Verdict Reversed

Twenty-two years later Charles VII took Rouen, and with it the trial documents. His position was intolerable: the king of France had been crowned by a convicted heretic. In 1455 the papacy authorized a rehabilitation inquiry, brought by Isabelle Romée — an old woman from a village, standing in Notre-Dame de Paris to demand justice for her daughter.

The court took testimony from a hundred and fifteen witnesses over the following year: the neighbors from Domrémy who had known her as a child, the men who had ridden from Vaucouleurs, the captains from Orléans, the clerks and notaries from Rouen who had watched the trial and were now free to describe it. The condemnation was annulled on the seventh of July, 1456, as procured by fraud and corruption, and the sentence declared null and void.

That verdict is why we have both records. The condemnation gives us her voice under attack; the nullification gives us the testimony of everyone who knew her. There is no other fifteenth-century peasant, and very few fifteenth-century kings, whom we can hear so directly.

She was beatified in 1909 and canonized on the sixteenth of May, 1920, by Benedict XV. She is a patron saint of France. The church that burned her declared her a saint, and the country that abandoned her made her its emblem, and the girl who said she was a poor girl who knew nothing of riding or of war is the single most recognizable figure of the French Middle Ages.

Joan of Arc, in brief

Born Domrémy c. 1412. Voices from 1425. Reached Chinon February 1429; examined at Poitiers; relieved Orléans 8 May 1429; victory at Patay 18 June; Charles VII crowned at Reims 17 July. Wounded at Paris 8 September 1429. Captured at Compiègne 23 May 1430; sold to the English; tried at Rouen; burned 30 May 1431, aged about nineteen. Condemnation annulled 7 July 1456. Canonized 16 May 1920.

✦

Book Six — The Woman of the Mountains

The life of Wang Cong’er, 1777–1798: a street performer’s daughter who took up her murdered husband’s banner, commanded a hundred thousand across four provinces, and went off a cliff at twenty-one rather than be taken alive.

[picture]

Plate IV · Wang Cong'er

The woman of the mountains, as the villages of Hubei and Sichuan remember her: young, in white, sword in hand under the spring blossom.

Chapter XXXVII

The Twilight of the High Qing

The empire she was born into was the richest and most populous state on earth, and it was rotting from the inside at a speed nobody at the top would name.

The Qianlong Emperor had reigned for more than forty years when Wang Cong’er was born, and his reign is remembered as the summit of the Qing: the frontiers pushed further than any Chinese dynasty had ever pushed them, the treasury full, the great literary projects underway, the population more than doubled in a century. That last fact was the problem. There were now three hundred million people on land that had fed half as many, and the extra people had gone where extra people go — into the hills, up the river valleys, into the marginal country along the borders of Hubei, Shaanxi, and Sichuan, where the soil was thin and the terraces washed out and nobody’s title to anything was clear.

Into that country, in the second half of the eighteenth century, poured migrants by the million: squatters, charcoal burners, iron workers, mountain farmers, people with no land, no lineage hall, no clan elders, and no local gentry to speak for them. They lived outside the ordinary structures by which the empire held its people, and they were poor in a way the officials in the county seats did not have to look at.

And above them, meanwhile, sat the most spectacular corruption in the dynasty’s history. Heshen, the emperor’s favorite, ran a network of extortion that reached every province; when he was finally brought down his personal fortune was reckoned at more than the state’s annual revenue. Corruption of that scale is not a moral failing at the top, it is a tax at the bottom. Every level of the administration had to pay upward, and every level therefore squeezed downward, and the squeezing landed on exactly the people who had nothing.

For those people there was one organized body in the world that was on their side. It met in houses. It taught that the Eternal Venerable Mother grieves for her lost children and will call them home; that the present age of darkness is ending; that the Buddha of the coming age is at the door. It fed the hungry, buried the dead, and asked nothing at the door but sincerity. Its people called each other brother and sister. The government called it the White Lotus and had made it a capital crime.

Chapter XXXVIII

The Performer’s Daughter

She was born about 1777 in the country around Xiangyang, in northern Hubei, into a family of traveling performers.

That single fact places her more precisely than a page of description would. Performers were jianghu people, the world of the rivers and lakes: entertainers, acrobats, boxers, medicine sellers, storytellers, who moved from market town to market town and set up in the open ground and passed a bowl. They were near the bottom of the social order — their profession was legally demeaned, their children barred from the examinations — and they were, in exchange for that contempt, free in a way settled villagers were not. They traveled. They knew a hundred towns and were beholden to none. They knew who in each place would give them a meal.

She grew up performing. She learned to ride, and to handle weapons — a girl in an acrobatic troupe learned the martial forms because the martial forms were the act — and she learned to stand up in front of a crowd of strangers and hold them. Everything the Qing armies would later find so difficult about her was in place before she was fifteen, learned in market squares for coppers.

She could not read. Her name in the government’s records is not even her own: the memorials call her Qi Wang-shi, the Qi wife, née Wang, which is the form used for a married woman of no account. The name Cong’er comes down through the people. The state that spent two years and an army chasing her never once wrote down what she was called.

Chapter XXXIX

Qi Lin and the Xiangyang Teaching

She married a man named Qi Lin, and the marriage put her at the center of everything that followed.

Qi Lin was a runner in the Xiangyang yamen — a clerk and constable in the county administration, one of the low-level functionaries through whom the empire actually touched the ground. He was also a teacher of the White Lotus, a disciple in the line of Liu Zhixie, and he had built one of the largest congregations in northern Hubei. The combination is not as strange as it sounds. Yamen runners were locals; they knew every household in the district; and they were themselves poor, despised by the officials above them, and perfectly placed to see how the machine worked from underneath.

The teaching he carried was the eighteenth-century form of the tradition, five hundred years downstream from Dianshan Lake, and it had grown a whole cosmology in the interval: the Eternal Venerable Mother who sent her children into the world of dust and weeps for their return; the three ages of the world, blue, red, and white, each with its own Buddha; the present age ending; Maitreya coming. But underneath the new mythology the practice was recognizably Mao Ziyuan’s. Householders. Vegetarian abstention. Recitation. Precepts against killing and lying and theft. Congregations that fed their own widows. A teacher who worked a job.

And there was a political sentence attached to it now, which had not been there in the Song. Overthrow the Qing, restore the Ming. The Qing were Manchus, conquerors, foreigners on the throne; the sentence had been circulating in the secret traditions for a century and a half. In good years it was liturgy. In bad years it was a plan.

By 1794 the government had decided to end the teaching in Hubei. The campaign of arrests that followed was the immediate cause of the war. Officials discovered that accusing a household of White Lotus membership was an inexhaustible source of income — pay, or be arrested — and they worked the seam until whole districts had been stripped. The phrase that came out of it, and that the rebels themselves used, was that the officials had forced the people to rebel: guan bi min fan.

Chapter XL

What They Actually Chanted

It is worth pausing here to say what the religion of Wang Cong’er’s people actually consisted of, because the government’s word for it — xiejiao, deviant teaching, conventionally rendered “evil cult” — has done two centuries of work to prevent anyone from asking.

They had scriptures, and they had made them themselves. The baojuan, the precious scrolls, are one of the great vernacular literatures of China and almost nobody outside the field has heard of them. They were composed by the congregations, in ordinary spoken language, in alternating passages of prose and verse, and they were meant to be chanted aloud in a room full of people, one voice leading and the rest coming in on the refrain. They were copied by hand, because printing them would have been evidence. A household that owned one owned a capital offense.

The story they told is the tenderest in Chinese religion, and it is worth telling plainly, in its own voice, because it is the thing a hundred thousand people were willing to die for.

In the beginning the Eternal Venerable Mother sent her children out into the world of dust — ninety-six myriads of them, all of us — so that they might learn what she had to teach. And they came into the dust and they forgot. They forgot her, and they forgot each other, and they forgot where they had come from, and they set about the business of the world: getting, quarreling, fearing, dying, being born again into the same forgetting. And the Mother in her home has been weeping ever since, because her children are lost and will not come; and she sends messenger after messenger down into the dust to call them, and most of them do not hear. But the age is turning. The lamp of the red age is guttering and the white age is coming, and the last messenger is on the road, and when he comes the children will remember, and they will go home, and she will have them all back.

That is the whole of it. Strip away the numbering of the ages and the names of the Buddhas and what remains is a story about a mother who lost her children and cannot stop crying, and children who cannot remember their own house. It is not a doctrine of conquest. It is a doctrine of homesickness.

And underneath the mythology, unchanged, sat Mao Ziyuan’s practice: the recitation, the vegetarian household, the precepts against killing and lying and theft, the morning devotion, the burial society, the obligation to the widow and the orphan. Six hundred years and a thousand miles from Dianshan Lake, in a mountain village with a hand-copied scroll hidden in the rafters, people were still doing exactly what the monk at the lake had told them to do.

These were the people the Qing code called an evil cult. This is what they were chanting when the arrests began.

On the word “cult”

The Ming and Qing statutes proscribed the White Lotus by name under the heading of xiejiao, and the label has traveled into modern languages with all its original prejudice intact. It was never a description. It was a legal instrument, applied to any organized religious body outside the state’s licensing, and applied with particular energy to congregations of the poor. The scholarship has established what the tradition always knew: the vast conspiracy the label named did not exist, and what did exist was a lay devotional religion living in households. The Abbey uses the word only in quotation, and never as anything but an accusation someone once made.

Chapter XLI

The Lantern Festival

Qi Lin and the Xiangyang congregations set a date. The rising would begin at the Lantern Festival — the fifteenth night of the first month, the full moon that closes the New Year, when whole towns are out in the streets with lanterns and nobody looks twice at a crowd.

They were betrayed before the moon rose.

The government took Qi Lin and executed him, and with him more than a hundred of the Xiangyang teachers and their families. It was 1796, the first year of the Jiaqing reign.

That was the moment the empire made its mistake. It had removed the leadership of the largest congregation in Hubei and it believed it had ended the matter. What it had actually done was to take a religious network of tens of thousands of people, which had been debating whether to rise, and settle the debate.

Wang Cong’er was nineteen years old and a widow.

Chapter XLII

She Takes the Banner

In the third month of 1796, in the hills outside Xiangyang, the congregations rose. They wore white and they raised their banners and they began, with almost no weapons, to fight the largest empire in the world.

They chose Wang Cong’er to lead them.

This deserves to be stared at for a moment, because the reflex is to explain it away — to say she inherited her husband’s position, or was a figurehead for Yao Zhifu, the teacher who rose with her. Neither explanation survives the record. Qing officers, who had no reason to flatter her and every reason to minimize a woman, wrote to the throne about her as the commander. Their memorials track her movements as the movements of the enemy’s center. The rebels called her the chief instructor, and where she went the columns went.

The truth is simpler and more interesting than either explanation. They chose her because of what she was: a performer’s daughter who could ride, who could fight, who had spent her childhood holding the attention of crowds of strangers, who knew the roads and the market towns of four counties because her family had walked them, and who had just watched the state kill her husband. She was young, she was fearless, she was known, and she was owed.

What they were fighting for

The Qing called it rebellion, which is accurate and incomplete. The people who rose in 1796 were not attempting to seize the empire; most of them had no conception of governing anything larger than a county. They were doing what people do when the granary is empty, the magistrate is for sale, the arresting officers are extorting the village, and there is exactly one organization in the district that has ever helped them. The teaching gave them a vocabulary for what was happening — this age is ending — and a body of people who would stand together. Everything else was necessity.

Chapter XLIII

The War of Movement

What she then did, militarily, was extraordinary, and it was not conventional in any sense the Qing were prepared for.

She did not take cities and hold them. She did not build a capital, proclaim a dynasty, or establish a court — the ordinary temptations of Chinese rebellion, and the ordinary reasons rebellions are destroyed. She did the opposite. She kept everything moving.

Her columns lived on the march. They took what they needed from government granaries and the estates of the rich, distributed the rest to whoever was standing there, and were gone before the response could form. They moved at night through the mountain country of the Hubei-Shaanxi-Sichuan border, terrain her people knew and the imperial army did not. They avoided battle when the odds were bad and forced it when they were good. When a Qing column got close they split into three and reformed a hundred kilometers away. Contemporary Qing accounts describe the difficulty with something close to despair: the rebels did not stand, could not be brought to a decisive engagement, and appeared in provinces the army had just left.

She linked up with the Sichuan and Shaanxi risings and at the height of it she was moving with a hundred thousand people — not an army in the professional sense but a nation in motion, fighters and families together, a mobile population at war.

Against her the empire deployed the finest army in Asia and it did not work. The Eight Banners had won at every frontier for a century and a half; they were trained for set-piece battle and campaigns of maneuver against other cavalry armies, and they were, by 1796, garrison troops who had not fought a serious war in a generation. They were also enormously expensive to move. Every mile they marched cost the treasury, and they marched, over the following years, an enormous number of miles behind a twenty-year-old woman who was never where they arrived.

The Qing spent something on the order of two hundred million taels on that war — more than five years of the empire’s total revenue. The high Qing never recovered. Historians of China mark the White Lotus Rebellion as the hinge on which the dynasty turned from its zenith toward its long decline, and the first eighteen months of it belong to her.

Chapter XLIV

Mao Mountain

They beat her in the end by changing the war.

The strategy that worked was not battle. It was strengthen the walls and clear the countryside: move the population into stockaded villages, burn what is left outside, arm local militias so that every valley is defended by men who live there, and build blockhouses at the passes until the country the rebels move through has nothing in it to eat and nobody in it to hide them. It was slow, expensive, and brutal to the people it was supposedly protecting, and it worked, because it attacked the only thing her kind of war depended on: the ground.

Through 1797 the columns were pushed north and west out of the good country. By early 1798 her force had been broken into fragments and driven into the mountains of Yunxi, in the far northwest corner of Hubei, and the imperial commanders had finally learned to move in coordination and close the passes behind her.

In the third month of 1798 she was cornered on Mao Mountain, at the place called Sanchahe — the three-fork river. The passes were held. The lower ground was held. There was nowhere to break out to, and she knew what capture meant: she would be taken alive to Beijing, displayed, interrogated, and executed by the slow method reserved for rebels, and the whole thing would be printed in the Peking Gazette as an instruction to the provinces.

She went to the edge with Yao Zhifu and the last of the company, and they went off it.

She was twenty-one years old.

Chapter XLV

The Woman the State Would Not Name

The war did not end with her. It ran another six years, guttering out in the mountains in 1804, and it took with it a hundred thousand lives at the lowest count and, by any honest reckoning, a great many more. But she was the one the memory kept.

The government did what governments do. It recorded the suppression, tallied the costs, rewarded the commanders, listed her among the dead under a name that was not hers, and moved on. In the official histories she is a bandit chief, an “evil cult” leader, one line in the register of a suppressed insurrection.

In the mountains of Hubei and Sichuan they told it differently, and they are telling it still.

They say she did not die. They say the cliff was a door. They say she rode up off the rock on a white crane and went into the mist and is waiting, and will come back when it is time. They say she was never really a woman at all but the Venerable Mother’s own daughter, sent down for a season. In some villages she is on the altar. In others she is simply the story you tell a girl who is being told she cannot do something.

Consider what the state actually accomplished at Mao Mountain. It intended to destroy a criminal. What it did was take a twenty-one-year-old and make her permanent — because a young woman who chooses the cliff over the cage does something to the people who hear about it that no proclamation can undo. The Qing dynasty is gone. Every general who chased her is a name in a list. She is still on the mountain, still on the crane, still coming back.

Wang Cong’er, in brief

Born c. 1777 near Xiangyang, Hubei, into a family of traveling performers. Married Qi Lin, yamen runner and White Lotus teacher of the Xiangyang congregations. Qi Lin executed with more than a hundred others when the Lantern Festival rising was betrayed, early 1796. The Xiangyang congregations rose in the third month of 1796 and made her their commander. Fought a war of movement across Hubei, Henan, Shaanxi, and Sichuan, at the height leading some hundred thousand. Cornered on Mao Mountain in Yunxi, Hubei; died by her own choice from the cliff, third month of 1798, aged twenty-one. The rebellion continued until 1804 and cost the Qing state something near two hundred million taels. Recorded by the government only as “Qi Wang-shi.” Remembered by the people under her own name.

✦

Book Seven — The Mirror of the Maidens

In which two girls who died three hundred and fifty years and ten thousand miles apart are set beside each other, and turn out to be the same person.

Chapter XLVI

The Humble Soil

Begin at the bottom, because that is where both of them begin.

Joan of Arc was the daughter of a farmer in a village of a few dozen households on a contested river frontier. Wang Cong’er was the daughter of traveling performers, a class the Chinese legal order held in formal contempt and barred from the examinations. Neither had land worth the name. Neither had a family that could open a door. Neither could read a word.

Both grew up inside a catastrophe. Joan’s childhood was the Hundred Years’ War in its worst decade — her own village burned, the animals driven onto an island in the river, the roads full of unpaid soldiers living off whatever countryside they stood in, the kingdom’s heir disinherited and the crown claimed by a foreign child. Wang’s was the collapse of the high Qing — the mountain migrants with no land, the tax that only went one direction, the officials who had discovered that accusing a household of the White Lotus was a business, and the phrase that came out of it: the officials forced the people to rebel.

Neither of them inherited a functioning world. Both of them inherited smoke.

And both were, in the eyes of everyone who could have predicted anything about them, entirely disposable. A peasant girl in Domrémy and a performer’s daughter in Xiangyang were the two least consequential kinds of person their respective civilizations produced. Nothing was expected of either. That is the first and most important thing they share, and everything else in this book depends on it: they came from the exact place where nobody looks.

Chapter XLVII

The Voice That Would Not Be Silenced

What turned them was, in both cases, a conviction of being addressed.

Joan’s came as voices, and she was specific about them for the rest of her life under every kind of pressure. Michael the Archangel, Catherine, Margaret; first at thirteen, in her father’s garden, at midday, with a great light; then two or three times a week for years. She said she saw them as clearly as she saw the men interrogating her. She said she was sorry each time they left. For three years they told her to be good and go to church, and then they told her to go into France and lift a siege and crown a king, and she said I am a poor girl who knows nothing of riding or of war and then went and did it.

Wang Cong’er’s came differently and weighed the same. She did not report visions; she inherited a prophecy and then had it confirmed in the worst way available. The teaching she had married into said that the age of darkness was ending, that the Venerable Mother grieves for her children and calls them home, that the Buddha of the coming age is at the door. It was liturgy. Then the state took her husband and a hundred of his brothers and killed them for saying it, and the liturgy became a description of her own life. When the congregations rose and asked her to lead, she was not making a career decision. She was answering.

Both convictions did the same work, which is worth naming exactly. They took a person whom the world had assigned no standing and gave her standing that the world had not issued and could not revoke. Joan did not out-argue Robert de Baudricourt; she out-lasted him, because she was not appealing to him for authority. Wang Cong’er did not campaign to be chosen; she was already sure, and everyone could see it.

That is the engine in both cases: a teenage girl, armed with nothing but certainty, persuading hardened adult men to follow her toward probable death — and the men, who had every reason not to, going.

Chapter XLVIII

The Unthinkable

And then the part nobody can quite account for: they won.

Joan reached Orléans on the twenty-ninth of April, 1429, and the siege broke on the eighth of May. Seven months of investment, in a war that had been running for ninety years and going one way, undone in nine days by a seventeen-year-old who had been in the field for a fortnight. She took a crossbow bolt through the shoulder at Les Tourelles, wept, had it pulled, and went back to the ditch with her banner. Six weeks later the English field army was destroyed at Patay. Ten weeks after that Charles VII was anointed at Reims and the war’s whole legitimacy had inverted.

Wang Cong’er’s victories were not single days and were harder to photograph, but they were larger. From the spring of 1796 she conducted, for two years, a war of movement across four provinces against the finest army in Asia, at the height of it moving with a hundred thousand people. She never gave the Qing the battle they wanted. She lived on the march, took the granaries, gave away what she did not need, split when pressed, reformed where they were not, and appeared in provinces the imperial columns had just finished clearing. The empire’s response cost something near two hundred million taels — more than five years of its entire revenue — and the Qing dynasty never financially recovered from it. Historians of China treat that war as the hinge on which the high Qing turned toward decline.

Neither of them won by material advantage; both were outnumbered, out-equipped, and out-financed at every hour. Both won by the same thing, which is the reason to put them in one book: they converted belief into a physical force and applied it against professionals.

Armies are enormous engines of collective conviction, and in both cases the conviction had been running the wrong way for a long time. The French had believed for three generations that the English won battles. The peasantry of Hubei had believed for a century and a half that the Qing could not be resisted. Each girl reversed that belief in her own theater within weeks, and the reversal held. The soldiers will fight, Joan told the doctors at Poitiers, and God will give the victory. That is a complete description of how both wars actually worked.

Chapter XLIX

The Inevitable Trap

Both were caught, and in both cases the mechanism was the same: the world got organized.

Improvised belief is devastating against an enemy who does not understand it and is nearly helpless against an enemy who has adapted. The English learned. After Orléans they stopped offering the field, dug in, waited, and let French politics do their work — and French politics obliged, because Charles had what he needed and his counselors preferred negotiation to a girl in armor announcing God’s intentions. Joan was given no support for Paris, wounded at the ditch, withdrawn, and set down. When she rode out from Compiègne on the twenty-third of May, 1430, she was operating almost freelance, and the drawbridge came up behind her, and an archer pulled her off her horse in a field.

The Qing learned too, and their adaptation was more systematic and more terrible. They stopped chasing her. They rebuilt the country instead: move the population into stockaded villages, burn what is outside, arm a militia in every valley, build blockhouses at every pass, until the ground itself would no longer carry a moving army. It took two years and it worked, because it attacked the only thing her war depended on. By the third month of 1798 the passes above Yunxi were held and there was nothing below her but soldiers.

There is a hard lesson here and both lives teach it. Neither girl was defeated by a better commander. Both were defeated by the state’s capacity to keep spending after it had stopped being clever — to build the blockhouses, to hold the fortifications, to wait, to absorb the losses and come again next season. Belief is faster than an empire. It is not more patient.

Chapter L

Two Deaths

And here the mirror shows its one asymmetry, which is also its sharpest point.

Joan was captured and did not die on the field. She was sold — the Burgundians held her, the English paid ten thousand livres, and the king she had crowned did nothing, offered nothing, attempted nothing. She was taken to Rouen and tried by a court of churchmen for three months, in irons, without counsel, without one friendly face, questioned by sixty and seventy university men who wanted her revelations discredited so that the coronation would be void. She held. She wavered once, in the cemetery with the fire built and the executioner waiting, and made a mark on a paper she could not read; and within days she took it back and put the man’s clothing on again and said she would rather die than remain as she was. They burned her in the market square on the thirtieth of May, 1431. She asked for a cross; a soldier made her one out of two sticks. Her last word was Jesus. She was nineteen. They threw her ashes in the Seine so there would be no relic.

Wang Cong’er was not captured, and that was a decision. She knew exactly what capture was: transport to Beijing, display, interrogation, and the slow execution reserved for rebels, printed afterward in the gazette as a lesson to every province. On Mao Mountain, with the passes held and nothing below, she went to the edge and stepped off it. She was twenty-one.

Joan was killed by the state. Wang killed herself to be out of the state’s hands. But look at what the two acts have in common, because it is more than it first appears. Both were, at the last, refusals. Joan refused to unsay what she had said, knowing precisely what the refusal cost, with the fire already laid. Wang refused to be made into a spectacle, and took from an empire the one thing it wanted most, which was her body on a scaffold in front of a crowd.

Both, in the last hour available to them, denied the state the surrender it had spent years and fortunes to obtain. The methods were opposite. The act was identical.

Chapter LI

Saints and Legends

Then both of them, having been comprehensively defeated, became permanent.

Joan’s rehabilitation began with her mother. Isabelle Romée, an old woman from a village of a few dozen households, stood in Notre-Dame de Paris in 1455 and demanded justice for her daughter, and a papal commission took testimony from a hundred and fifteen witnesses — the neighbors who had known the child, the men who had ridden from Vaucouleurs, the captains from Orléans, the notaries who had watched the trial and were free at last to describe what they had seen. On the seventh of July, 1456, the condemnation was annulled as procured by fraud. She was beatified in 1909 and canonized in 1920 by the Church that had burned her. She is a patron saint of France, and the single most recognizable person of the French Middle Ages.

Wang Cong’er received no commission and no canonization. What she received was better attested in its own way, because it was never organized by anybody. In the mountain villages of Hubei and Sichuan they simply refused the government’s version. They said she did not die on the rock. They said she went up off it on a white crane and into the mist. They said she is waiting and will come back when the time is right. They put her on altars. They named her the Venerable Mother’s own daughter. Two hundred years on, the Qing are gone, and Heshen is gone, and every general who chased her is a line in a list, and she is still on the crane.

Two civilizations produced the same afterlife by completely different machinery. France produced a canonization out of a rehabilitation trial out of a king’s political embarrassment. Central China produced a goddess out of nothing at all except people telling each other. Both processes took a defeated girl and made her the one thing her enemies could not tolerate: undefeated.

A necessary distinction

The two did not fight the same kind of war, and honesty requires saying so. Joan fought to restore a king she believed rightful, and she died with the Church’s condemnation on her and the Church’s own crucifix held up in front of her. Wang Cong’er fought against a throne, in a movement the state had criminalized, for people whose grievance was tax and hunger and extortion. One was a loyalist; the other was a rebel. That difference is real and this book does not dissolve it.

But it is a difference of which authority had failed, not of what the girl was doing. Both went out because the ordinary structures had stopped protecting the people they were built for, and no adult with standing would move. In France the failure was a foreign occupation and a crown with no consecration. In Hubei it was a magistrate for sale and a granary that was empty. In both places what actually arrived was a teenage girl with a conviction, and in both places the men followed her because there was nothing else left to follow.

Chapter LII

The Banner and the Name

There is one more resemblance between these two girls, and it is the most devotional thing in the book, so it has been kept for last.

Each of them carried, into the worst places a person can go, a small portable holy thing that was not a weapon.

Joan’s was the banner. It was white, sown with lilies, painted with Christ in judgment between two angels, and lettered Jhesus Maria. She had it made at Tours before she rode to Orléans and she was never without it. She carried it into the assault at Les Tourelles herself, and when the point of it touched the wall the army came behind her. Asked at Rouen which she loved better, her sword or her banner, she answered that she loved the banner forty times more — and then she gave the reason, which is the sentence that ought to be carved wherever her name appears: because with the banner I could avoid killing anyone. She said she had never killed a man. She was a soldier for two years and never took a life, and the thing she held instead of a sword was a picture of God with two names written under it.

Wang Cong’er’s was the Name. Her people had no images they could safely keep and no banner that meant anything before they made one; what they had was what Mao Ziyuan had given them six hundred years earlier — a few syllables that anyone could say, that cost nothing, that could not be confiscated, that worked in a house or on a road or in a mountain pass in the dark. Namo Amituofo. They said it in their morning devotions and they said it over their dead and they said it, we may be certain, on the march. When the state burned the scrolls and killed the teachers and forbade the meetings, it could not get at the Name, because the Name lived inside people.

Both girls, then, carried the same kind of object: something holy, weightless, and useless as a weapon, held in the hands that were not holding the weapon.

That is not decoration. It is the whole difference between a religious war and a war with a religion painted on it. An army that is fighting for plunder needs no banner it loves more than its sword. What Joan carried and what Wang Cong’er’s people carried was, in both cases, the thing the fighting was for — the reminder, held up where everyone could see it, that the point of the campaign was not the campaign.

And both objects outlasted everything around them. The banner was taken with her at Compiègne and burned or lost, and the image on it is now on ten thousand walls in France. The Name has not stopped being said for eight hundred years, in every province of China and in every country the Chinese went to, by people who never heard of Wang Cong’er and would be astonished to learn that an empire once sent an army after it.

Hold the two together and you have the tradition’s own summary of itself. The sword decides the battle. The banner and the Name decide what the battle meant. And of those three, the one that is still here is not the sword.

Chapter LIII

The Mirror’s Lesson

Why do these two lives match so closely? There was no contact. There could not have been. Wang Cong’er’s people had never heard of Rouen and would not have known what a saint was.

Three things produce the pattern, and all three are permanent features of human societies rather than accidents of France or China.

The first is that desperate people will accept miracles. A confident population wants a competent general with a map. A population that has been losing for ninety years, or starving for a decade, has already discovered that competence is not on offer. What it will follow is someone who is certain — and certainty of that kind, the kind that ignores the odds entirely, is far more likely to arrive in a person who has not been trained in the odds. Both armies followed a girl because a girl was the only thing available that still believed.

The second is that the disqualification is the weapon. Every structural reason these two should not have been able to lead was, on the ground, an advantage. Their youth meant no faction owned them. Their poverty meant they had no estate to protect and could not be bought. Their sex meant that men who would never have taken orders from a rival could take orders from her without loss of face, because she was outside the whole competition. And it meant the enemy laughed — and while the enemy was laughing, the enemy was losing. Being nobody, in the specific circumstances where the somebodies have failed, turns out to be a qualification.

The third is that the state’s victory is what makes the legend. This is the cruelest and most reliable part of the pattern. Had Joan been quietly ransomed and married off in Domrémy, or had Wang Cong’er surrendered on terms and lived out her life somewhere obscure, neither would be in this book. It was the fire and the cliff that did it. The English burned her to prove the coronation was void, and made her France. The Qing drove her onto the rock to end the rising, and made her a goddess. Power, at the moment it wins, keeps producing the one thing it cannot survive — a story about someone who would not stop.

So the archetype is not a coincidence and it is not an influence. It is what happens when a civilization fails badly enough, in a place where somebody’s daughter is paying attention.

The White Lotus and the Christian West each produced her once. There is no reason to assume either is finished.

An antiphon of the two maidens

For the girl in the garden at midday, who said she was poor and knew nothing of war, and went: that we may not wait to be qualified.

For the widow of nineteen who took up the banner in the third month: that grief in us may become courage and not only grief.

For the two of them at the end — the one at the stake who would not unsay it, and the one on the rock who would not be taken: that we may hold, in the last hour, what we said in the first.

✦

Book Eight — The Pattern and the Prayer

In which the four lives are gathered into one, the pattern behind them is named, and the reader is asked what he intends to do about it.

Chapter LIV

The Four Together

Set them in one room and look at them.

A Chinese monk of ninety-seven, mild, learned, twice honored and once exiled, who spent his life persuading farmers that the promise was for them. An Italian merchant’s son of forty-four, blind at the end and marked in his hands, who gave back his father’s cloth in a public square and never took anything again. A French farm girl of nineteen, in armor, holding a banner she loved more than her sword because it let her avoid killing. A Chinese performer’s daughter of twenty-one, on a mountain, with the passes held behind her.

Two men who would not fight and two girls who could not stop. Two of them died old or in their bed, honored and misunderstood; two of them died young and violently and were made into legends within a generation. Two of them built the thing; two of them defended it when it was all that was left. None of the four ever heard of any of the others.

And yet: the same religion of the poor runs through all four of them, and it runs in the same direction.

Mao Ziyuan says the Name is for anyone, including you. Francis says the Gospel means what it says, including for you. Joan says a poor girl who knows nothing of war can be sent, and was. Wang Cong’er says a widow of nineteen with no name in the records can be followed by a hundred thousand people. Each of the four is making, in his or her own idiom, exactly one claim — the claim that the tradition’s whole apparatus of qualification is not load-bearing, and that God addresses the person who is actually there.

The founders proved it by giving the faith away. The maidens proved it by being what the faith produced. That is why they belong in one volume: they are the two halves of a single argument about who counts.

Chapter LV

Why the Pattern Repeats

The Abbey’s comparative work has laid out five archetypes that appear in both traditions, and this book has given two of them at length. It is worth saying plainly why the list is not a curiosity.

The five, and what each one is

The peaceful founder — Mao Ziyuan; Francis of Assisi. The man who sees that the promise is not being kept and keeps it himself, in public, without accusing anyone. He arrives when an institution has become magnificent and remote.

The radical prophet — Han Shantong; Thomas Müntzer. The preacher who takes the tradition’s language about the coming age and applies it to next spring. He arrives when reform has been tried and refused.

The military organizer — Liu Futong; Jan Žižka. The commander who turns believers into an army and wins with them. He arrives after the prophet has been killed.

The martial heroine — Wang Cong’er; Joan of Arc. The young woman with no standing whose certainty succeeds where professional competence has failed. She arrives when the ordinary structures have collapsed and no qualified adult will move.

The betrayed negotiator — Wang Sanhuai; Gaspard de Coligny. The leader who accepts an offer of talks in good faith and is killed at the table. He arrives when the war has lasted long enough for everyone to want it over.

These are not five personality types. They are five positions in a sequence, and the sequence is generated by the situation rather than by the doctrine. That is the whole thesis of this book and it can be stated in a paragraph.

When a religion successfully reaches the poor, it acquires organization among people who have no other organization. That organization is immediately useful for things other than prayer — feeding the hungry, burying the dead, holding a village together — and so it grows in exactly the places where the state has stopped working. This makes it, without anyone intending it, a rival center of gravity. Governments notice. Pressure follows. Under pressure, the tradition’s ordinary language about a coming renewal begins to be heard as a timetable. If reform is possible, you get a founder and then a saint. If reform is refused, you get a prophet and then a war. If the war lasts, you get a general, and then a girl, and then a betrayal at a peace table.

Nothing in that chain requires Buddhism or Christianity. It requires only that a religion have succeeded at reaching people who are poor, and that the arrangement above them fail. Both of these traditions succeeded at the first, and both of them lived through the second more than once, and so both of them produced the whole sequence — twice, independently, without contact.

Which means the pattern is not a fact about the White Lotus or about the Church. It is a fact about us.

Chapter LVI

The Gentle and the Fierce Are One Vocation

There is a temptation to sort these four into two kinds of person and to choose one. Most readers will feel it. The gentle founders are more comfortable to admire; the fierce girls are more thrilling. Neither preference survives contact with the material.

Consider what the gentleness of the founders actually was. Mao Ziyuan stood against the entire weight of institutional Buddhism and the civil authority of the Song and said that householders were owed the same salvation as monks, and he kept saying it after they exiled him for it. Francis took off his clothes in front of his father and his town and his bishop, walked into a crusader camp, crossed the lines to the Sultan, and spent his last two years in agony insisting on a Rule that his own successors were dismantling around him. Neither man was mild in the sense of being pliable. Both were immovable. They simply refused to be immovable by force.

And consider what the ferocity of the girls actually was. Joan loved her banner forty times more than her sword and said she had never killed a man. She wept when she was wounded and wept over the dead English. She asked for a cross at the stake and got two sticks from a soldier who felt sorry for her. Wang Cong’er was not a warlord; she was a nineteen-year-old widow who was asked by frightened people to lead them and did, and who fed the villages she passed out of the granaries she took. Neither girl was a soldier by temperament. Both were people who would not leave others to it.

Set that way, the four converge. The founders were gentle and would not yield. The maidens fought and did not want to. What all four actually share is not a temperament but a refusal — the refusal to accept that the people in front of them did not matter.

That refusal is the vocation. It arrives in whatever form the century requires. In a rich and settled age it looks like a monk at a lake writing a short liturgy for people who cannot read. In an age of famine and occupation it looks like a girl on a horse. The vocation has not changed. Only the emergency has.

Chapter LVII

What the Founders Ask of Us

Read as teachers rather than as subjects, Mao Ziyuan and Francis put four questions to anyone who takes them seriously.

What have you made complicated that was given simple? Both men found their traditions elaborated past the reach of the people the traditions were for. The elaboration was not malicious; it was the natural sediment of centuries of intelligent people doing good work. But it had become a wall. The question for us is the same one: what have we surrounded with prerequisites — reading, leisure, money, credentials, the right vocabulary — that was originally handed out free at the door?

Who is not in the room? Mao’s answer was householders; Francis’s was the poor of the towns and then, through the Third Order, married people with trades. In both cases the founder’s whole achievement consisted in noticing an absence that everyone else had stopped seeing. Every congregation in the world has such an absence. It is almost never a deliberate exclusion. It is almost always invisible from inside.

What would you hand back? Francis handed back the cloth. Mao handed back the authority of the specialist, and gave teaching to laymen who would rise from the congregation and could not be controlled from above. Both gave up the thing that made them secure. It is worth asking, without answering too quickly, what the corresponding item is in one’s own life.

Can you be gentle and immovable at once? This is the hardest, and it is the one the modern world is worst at. We have plenty of people who are immovable and not gentle, and plenty who are gentle and move whenever pushed. The founders were both, for decades, at real cost, and neither of them ever raised a hand.

Chapter LVIII

What the Maidens Ask of Us

Joan and Wang Cong’er put three questions, and they are sharper.

What are you waiting to be qualified for? Neither girl was qualified. Both said so. Joan told the doctors of Poitiers that she was a poor girl who knew nothing of riding or of war, and this was true, and she went anyway. Wang Cong’er had no rank, no name in the records, no education, and no permission, and a hundred thousand people followed her. The lesson is not that qualifications are worthless. It is that the world’s failure does not wait for the qualified, and that in the interval somebody has to move.

Will grief make you smaller or larger? Wang Cong’er’s husband was killed by the state along with a hundred of his brothers. What she did with that is the entire second half of her life. Grief has two available directions and the choice is genuinely available; the tradition’s word for choosing the second is compassion, which means, literally, to suffer along with — to let what happened to you become the reason you will not let it happen to someone else.

Will you hold at the end what you said at the beginning? This is what the fire and the cliff are for. Both girls had, in the last hour, a way out. Joan’s was to unsay it; she signed once under the shadow of the pyre and then took it back within days and went to the stake for it. Wang’s was surrender, and she chose the rock. Neither was heroic in the moment; both were frightened, and the sources say so. The point is not that they felt no fear. The point is that they were the same person at the end that they had been at the start, and that this — rather than any victory — is what made them permanent.

Chapter LIX

The Lotus That Would Not Die

Now the long view, because the four lives sit inside a history that is still running.

The White Lotus was declared dead by every dynasty that fought it. The Ming wrote it into the legal code as a forbidden teaching and executed its adherents. The Qing hunted it for two centuries, and after 1804 the official position was that the matter had been settled. It had not been settled. It had dispersed — which is not the same as dying, and which the tradition had learned to do from the very beginning.

The mechanism was Mao Ziyuan’s own. A movement made of households, with lay teachers rising from within, has no center to destroy. Under proscription it did what such movements always do: it shed the dangerous name and kept the practice. The congregations reappeared under other names — the Luo, the Yellow Heaven, the Dragon Flower, the Way of Former Heaven, dozens more — each with its own precious scrolls and its own local teacher, and all of them recognizably descended from the same root: the Venerable Mother, the coming age, the recitation, the vegetarian household, the burial society, the obligation to the poor.

The Christian West did exactly the same thing whenever it found itself on the wrong side of power. The early Church went into the houses and the catacombs and marked its own with a fish and an anchor. The dissenting movements of the Middle Ages and the Reformation — Lollards, Hussites, Anabaptists — were hunted, went quiet, scattered, and survived in small communities that the great powers eventually stopped noticing. The Mennonites and the Amish are living descendants of that strategy. When the state offers a charter, faith becomes an institution; when the state offers only the sword, faith becomes a household.

Both traditions, in other words, knew the same secret: that what cannot be centralized cannot be killed, and that the flower which rises out of the mud can also, when the season is wrong, go back down and wait.

Chapter LX

The Golden Flower

And then, in its own time, it rises again.

The Golden Flower Abbey exists as the restored form of the White Lotus Society, and the name it has taken is not an evasion of the old one but a translation of it. The tradition has always said so plainly: what India called the thousand-petalled lotus, China called the golden flower. They are two names for the same thing — the bloom of spiritual perfection opening at the crown, the flower rising out of the dark water into the light. To call the house Golden Flower is to say that this is the same plant in a different season.

What the Abbey carries forward is what Mao Ziyuan actually founded, which is what this book has been at pains to describe: a lay tradition, centered on compassion, herbalism, spiritual awakening, and the Golden Rule; open to householders on the same terms as anyone; requiring no ordination and no wealth; obligated to the poor and to the sick; devoted to reading and to shared wisdom; and inclusive by design rather than by concession. It has set down the violent inheritance that the eighteenth century forced on the name, without disowning the people who were forced into it. It keeps the practice and it keeps the memory.

This is precisely the pattern by which Christianity has renewed itself again and again. Every reform in the West has claimed to be a restoration — the Franciscans returning to the Gospel, the reformers returning to the apostles, each generation insisting it was not inventing but recovering. The Abbey makes the identical claim and makes it in the same spirit. This is not a new religion. It is the old one, cleaned, brought forward, and made usable again.

The lotus has spent eight centuries in the mud. It has been banned, hunted, renamed, misdescribed, and pronounced extinct by better-armed people than any now living. And here it is.

Chapter LXI

The Invitation

So the book ends where the four lives point, which is at the reader.

None of these four is a curiosity. They are not offered here as historical figures to be admired at a distance. Every one of them did something that is still available.

Mao Ziyuan wrote a short prayer that a working household could actually say, and hung a chart on a wall so that people who could not read could see the whole road. Anyone can simplify something for someone who is being kept out by complexity. Francis handed back what he had been given and went and sat with the people everyone else crossed the road to avoid. Anyone can do a version of that this week. Joan did not wait to be qualified and did not unsay it at the end. Wang Cong’er took the worst thing that ever happened to her and turned it outward, toward the people it was still happening to.

The Abbey asks nothing of the reader that these four did not ask of themselves, and it asks nothing that requires ordination, wealth, leisure, or a change of religion. It asks for the fourfold assembly’s own rule, which is also, in its own grammar, the rule of the Order of Penitents: harm nothing you can avoid harming; deal honestly; keep something like a morning; feed whoever is in front of you; and do not accept, from anyone, the doctrine that you are not the sort of person this was meant for.

That last clause is the whole inheritance. It is what the monk at the lake spent his life saying, and what the beggar of Assisi said in the square with nothing on, and what a farm girl said to a room full of doctors of theology, and what a widow of nineteen said by simply getting on the horse.

The lotus rises out of the mud. It has never needed permission, and neither do you.

The closing rite of the four

For Mao Ziyuan at the lake, who would not keep it for the specialists — teach us to give away what we were given.

For Francis in the square, who handed back the cloth — teach us to be free of what owns us.

For Joan in the garden, who was thirteen and said yes — teach us not to wait.

For Wang Cong’er in the mountains, who was owed and gave anyway — teach us to turn our grief outward.

For the four of them, who never met, and were one: that the flower may rise, in this mud, in us.

Appendix A — A Parallel Chronology

| The White Lotus | The Christian West
4th c. | 386 — Huiyuan settles on Mount Lu and founds Donglin Monastery | 313 — Constantine legalizes Christianity; 380 — Theodosius makes it the state religion
| 402 — the first White Lotus Assembly vows rebirth in the Pure Land | 386 — Augustine’s conversion at Milan
6th c. | Pure Land devotion spreads through the villages of China | c. 529 — Benedict founds Monte Cassino
9th c. | 845 — the great Tang suppression closes thousands of monasteries | Monasteries preserve learning through the post-Carolingian collapse
11th–12th c. | 1069 — Mao Ziyuan born | 1054 — the Great Schism between East and West
| c. 1133 — the White Lotus congregation founded at Dianshan Lake | 1181/82 — Francis of Assisi born
| Mao honored as Cizhao Zongzhu; later banished to Jiangzhou | 1206 — Francis renounces his inheritance before the bishop of Assisi
| 1166 — Mao Ziyuan dies, aged ninety-seven | 1209/10 — Innocent III approves the first Franciscan Rule
13th c. | 1279 — the Southern Song falls; the Yuan rules all China | 1212 — Clare founds the women’s branch
|  | c. 1221 — the Third Order of Penitents
|  | 1224 — the stigmata at La Verna; 1225 — the Canticle
|  | 1226 — Francis dies; 1228 — canonized
14th c. | 1351 — Han Shantong executed; the Red Turbans rise | 1381 — the English rising; John Ball and the Lollards
| 1368 — Zhu Yuanzhang founds the Ming; the White Lotus is outlawed | 1415 — Jan Hus burned at Constance under safe conduct
15th c. | 1420 — Tang Sai’er’s rising in Shandong; she vanishes | 1412 — Joan of Arc born; 1429 — Orléans and Reims
|  | 1431 — Joan burned at Rouen; 1456 — the condemnation annulled
16th c. | White Lotus offshoots multiply under many names | 1517 — the Reformation begins; 1525 — Müntzer and the Peasants’ War
|  | 1572 — Coligny assassinated; the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre
18th c. | 1774 — Wang Lun’s rising; 1777 — Wang Cong’er born | 1789 — the French Revolution
| 1796 — Qi Lin executed; the Xiangyang congregations rise |
| 1798 — Wang Cong’er dies on Mao Mountain; 1800 — Liu Zhixie executed |
| 1804 — the White Lotus Rebellion ends |
19th–20th c. | 1857–68 — Liu Yishun’s last rising in Guizhou | 1920 — Joan of Arc canonized
| The tradition disperses under many names and survives in households |
Now | The Golden Flower Abbey of the White Lotus Society |

Appendix B — The Persons

Amitābha (Ch. Amituofo). The Buddha of Infinite Light and Infinite Life. As the bodhisattva Dharmākara he made forty-eight vows, undertaking to establish a land in which awakening is certain and to receive there any being who calls on him in sincerity. The whole Pure Land tradition rests on those vows.

Huiyuan (334–416). Confucian-trained scholar, disciple of Dao’an, founder of Donglin Monastery on Mount Lu around 386. Convened the first White Lotus Assembly in 402. Author of the classic argument that monks honor the throne but owe their first allegiance to the Dharma.

Mao Ziyuan (1069–1166). Tiantai-trained monk; founder of the White Lotus congregation at Dianshan Lake c. 1133. Composed a lay morning liturgy of repentance and the Chart for the Selection of Buddhas. Honored by the throne as Cizhao Zongzhu, Patriarch of Compassionate Illumination; later banished to Jiangzhou, then pardoned.

Francis of Assisi (1181/82–1226). Son of a cloth merchant; renounced his inheritance in 1206; founded the Friars Minor, approved orally by Innocent III in 1209/10 and by bull in 1223; founded the Third Order of Penitents c. 1221; received the stigmata at La Verna in 1224; composed the Canticle of the Creatures in 1225. Canonized 1228. Patron of ecology.

Clare of Assisi (1194–1253). Founder of the women’s branch; obtained the Privilege of Poverty, by which a religious house was permitted to own nothing.

Han Shantong (d. 1351). Hereditary White Lotus teacher who read the collapse of the Yuan through the expectation of Maitreya. Betrayed and executed before the rising matured; his death made the movement rather than ending it.

Liu Futong (d. 1363). Han Shantong’s lieutenant; organized the scattered risings into the Red Turban armies and raised Han’s son Han Lin’er as figurehead. Died in battle.

Zhu Yuanzhang (1328–1398). Orphan, novice monk, Red Turban commander; founder of the Ming as the Hongwu Emperor. Having risen through the movement, he outlawed it.

Tang Sai’er (b. 1399). Leader of a White Lotus rising in Shandong in 1420 against the forced labor of the early Ming. Destroyed a much larger government force, then disappeared and was never found.

Liu Zhixie (1740–1800). Teacher of the Mixed Origin line; spiritual center of the 1796 rebellion, honored by the scattered armies as Heavenly King. Escaped from prison, was betrayed, captured, and executed.

Qi Lin (d. 1796). Yamen runner at Xiangyang and teacher of the largest White Lotus congregation in northern Hubei; husband of Wang Cong’er. Executed with more than a hundred others when the Lantern Festival rising was betrayed.

Wang Cong’er (1777–1798). Performer’s daughter; commander of the Xiangyang forces in the White Lotus Rebellion; fought a war of movement across four provinces; died from the cliff on Mao Mountain rather than be taken. Recorded by the state only as Qi Wang-shi.

Yao Zhifu (d. 1798). Teacher of the Xiangyang line who rose with Wang Cong’er and died beside her.

Wang Sanhuai (d. 1799). Sichuan commander who entered peace negotiations in good faith, was arrested, taken to Beijing, and publicly executed.

Liu Yishun (1778–1868). Leader of the Lamp Flower line; raised the last major White Lotus rising in the mountains of Guizhou in 1857, held out eleven years, and was executed in 1868.

Joan of Arc (c. 1412–1431). Farmer’s daughter of Domrémy; heard Michael, Catherine, and Margaret from the age of thirteen; relieved Orléans in May 1429 and had Charles VII crowned at Reims in July; captured at Compiègne in 1430, sold to the English, tried at Rouen, burned 30 May 1431. Condemnation annulled 1456; canonized 1920.

Isabelle Romée (d. 1458). Joan’s mother, who brought the petition that opened the rehabilitation inquiry.

Appendix C — The Full Table of Archetypes

The Abbey’s comparative work identifies nine pairings. Two of them are the subject of this book; the remainder are given here for the reader who wishes to follow the pattern further.

Archetype | White Lotus | Western Christian
The peaceful founder | Mao Ziyuan (1069–1166) | Francis of Assisi (1181–1226)
The prophetic martyr | Han Shantong (d. 1351) | Thomas Müntzer (1489–1525)
The military organizer | Liu Futong (d. 1363) | Jan Žižka (c. 1360–1424)
The vanished heroine | Tang Sai’er (b. 1399) | Deborah, prophetess and judge
The minor local rising | Wang Lun (d. 1774) | Sir John Oldcastle (d. 1417)
The spiritual figurehead betrayed | Liu Zhixie (1740–1800) | Jan Hus (1372–1415)
The young martial heroine | Wang Cong’er (1777–1798) | Joan of Arc (1412–1431)
The leader tricked at the table | Wang Sanhuai (d. 1799) | Gaspard de Coligny (1519–1572)
The last survivor | Liu Yishun (1778–1868) | Prokop the Great (c. 1380–1434)

The pairs that recur most instructively are the ones involving safe conduct. Jan Hus went to the Council of Constance under an imperial guarantee of safety, was arrested, tried, and burned in 1415. Liu Zhixie was taken by betrayal. Wang Sanhuai walked into a Qing camp on a promise of negotiation and was executed in Beijing. Gaspard de Coligny accepted reconciliation with the French crown and was murdered in his bed at the opening of the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre. Four men, two civilizations, four centuries, one lesson — which their followers on both sides of Eurasia learned and did not forget, and which is why both movements became so extraordinarily difficult to end by negotiation.

Appendix D — A Short Glossary

Bailianjiao — “White Lotus teaching.” The name used from the Ming onward, primarily by the state, for a wide family of lay congregations descended from or associated with Mao Ziyuan’s movement.

Baojuan — “precious scrolls.” The vernacular scriptures composed by the various congregations, chanted aloud in meetings and copied by hand.

Cizhao Zongzhu — “Patriarch of Compassionate Illumination.” The honorific conferred on Mao Ziyuan by the Song throne.

Donglin — “Eastern Forest.” Huiyuan’s monastery on Mount Lu, founded c. 386; the home of the first White Lotus Assembly.

Fourfold assembly — the classical Buddhist community in its complete form: monks, nuns, laymen, laywomen. Mao Ziyuan’s rule was addressed to all four.

Jianghu — “rivers and lakes.” The itinerant world of performers, martial artists, boxers, healers, and traveling people, outside the settled order of village and lineage. Wang Cong’er’s world.

Mandate of Heaven — the Chinese doctrine that the emperor rules by Heaven’s commission and forfeits it through misrule; disaster and rebellion are read as evidence of withdrawal.

Nianfo — the recitation of the Buddha’s name, Namo Amituofo. The central practice of Pure Land devotion and of the White Lotus.

Other Power — reliance on Amitābha’s vows rather than on one’s own spiritual capacity alone; the Pure Land counterpart to the Christian doctrine of grace.

Portiuncula — “the little portion.” The small church in the plain below Assisi that Francis rebuilt with his hands and made the heart of the Order; he died there.

Pure Land (Sukhāvatī) — the realm established by Amitābha’s vows, in which conditions are perfect for the completion of awakening. Not a final destination but an ideal one.

Tertiary — a member of the Third Order; a layperson living the Franciscan rule while keeping household, trade, and property.

Wusheng Laomu — the Eternal or Unborn Venerable Mother, the compassionate mother-deity of the later White Lotus congregations, who grieves for her children scattered in the world of dust and calls them home.

Xiejiao — “deviant teaching,” conventionally rendered “evil cult.” The legal category under which the Ming and Qing codes proscribed the White Lotus.

Yamen — the office and residence of a local magistrate; by extension the local administration, including the runners and clerks through whom it touched ordinary people.

Appendix E — A Rule for the Reader

What follows is not a new rule. It is Mao Ziyuan’s ordinance for the fourfold assembly and the rule of the Order of Penitents, set down together, in the form a modern household can keep. It requires no ordination, no expenditure, and no change of religion.

In the morning. Rise and give the first minutes of the day to something other than the day. Name, without dwelling, whatever you did yesterday that you would not want done to you. Say the Name, or the prayer of your own tradition, ten times slowly, letting the breath carry it. Then ask once that whatever good is in the act go to someone else — a neighbor, a stranger, the dead.

In eating. Take less life than you can. Where abstention is possible, abstain; where it is not, eat with attention and gratitude rather than indifference. The first precept and the first table blessing are the same instruction.

In dealing. Do not lie, and do not take what is not offered. Deal honestly in small amounts as well as large; the discipline is built entirely out of small amounts.

In company. Feed whoever is in front of you. Visit the sick. Sit with the dying. Bury the dead, or help those who must. This is not charity added on to the religion; in both traditions it is the religion, and the congregations that survived every persecution were the ones that did it.

In the world. Harm nothing you can avoid harming. Refuse the quarrel where refusing is possible. Where it is not possible, stand where Joan stood: carry the banner rather than the sword, if the choice is yours.

In the evening. Consider the day honestly, without self-hatred, which is only vanity turned around. Forgive what you can. Then let it go and sleep.

Always. Do not accept from anyone, including yourself, the doctrine that you are not the kind of person this was meant for.

The Abbey’s blessing

May the mud be forgiven, that fed you. May the water be kind, that you rose through. May the light find you open when you reach it. And may whatever opens in you open for someone else.

The Lotus and the Lily
Four Lives, One Light

Published by White Lotus Society Publishing
for the Golden Flower Abbey of the White Lotus Society

2026

Set in Cormorant Garamond and Josefin Sans.

This volume continues the Abbey’s comparative studies of the White Lotus Society and the history of Christianity in the West. It may be freely copied and shared for devotional and educational use.