Abstract: Th is article, based on the early documents of the Green Lotus Teaching asserts that by the tmie of Yuan Zhiqian,at the latest,the sect’s extant genealogy and the theory that its patriarchs were incarnations of gods and Buddhas had already taken form. Synthesizing the descriptions in the sect's patriarchal genealogy about the third patriarch, Pu An, I further argue that the source of the theory of “the origin and succession of the patriarchal line”was likely Wu Zixiang of Jiangxi province or Huang Dehui. The“origin and succession of the patriarchal line”, in addition to being a record of the sects patriarchs, also conveyed the concept of “the Dao descending to ordinary households” as well as the“end of Buddhism and the beginning of Confucianism”. The sect's own texts, together with government archives, sugges that the ninth patriarch, Huang Dehui, was the same person as Huang Tingchen.