ECONOMICS

Before trying to determine whether it is possible to identify a specifically Buddhist approach to the economic realm, one must keep in mind that religions and the economic sphere interact at various levels. At the most elementary level, religions open up a space, both symbolic and physical, within which economic activities can take place. In the Buddhist world this has involved establishing through ritual means a space protected by Buddhist divinities or by the supernatural beings with whom these divinities coexist. Besides creating a space for agriculture, these ritual resources, generally labeled as "magic," have to be mobilized in order to ensure the fertility of the land. Practices that mobilize the ritual or magical component of religion can be found not just in agricultural societies, but also in industrial societies, such as that of Japan, the "common religion" of Japan being concerned above all with worldly benefits (genze riyaku), whose pursuit involves the mobilization of Buddhist doctrines, images, rituals, and sacred scriptures, such as the Lotus S?tra (Saddharmapu??ar?ka-s?tra).

Need, work, and religion

From the time of the nik?yas to the present, Buddhists have been concerned with the reality of the economic sphere, especially with the reality of work. This concern can already be seen in the Agañña-sutta of the d?ghanik?ya, in which the Buddha tells a story about the emergence of social order, political authority, and kingship. According to the Agañña-sutta, the greed of the primordial beings causes a process of coarsening and differentiation to take place, a process that results in the appearance of matter, food, unequally endowed bodies, stratification, sex, work, authority, and priests. As the story unfolds, a peculiar interaction between labor and the avoidance of labor develops. Gathering the primordial rice twice a day constitutes work of sorts, so much so that in order to avoid this labor, a being that is given to laziness engages in the work of storing foodstuffs. However, once rice for two meals is gathered there is no way to stop the process, and so the work of gathering increases. Laziness leads to work, work causes the scarcity of rice, laziness and work beget private property, theft, authority, and religion. We find moreover the recognition that in order to avoid chaos it is necessary to have kings, and in order to have kings and people who, by meditating, "put aside evil and unwholesome things," it is necessary to produce the surplus that will feed them. Work is therefore both curse and blessing, for without the disturbance brought about by work, it would not have been necessary to have kings and priests; whereas in order to support them, it is necessary to work even more.

Although in the Agañña-sutta we encounter a story of greed that causes an increase in materiality, sex, and rice, in stories collected in Laos, Thailand, and Cambodia we find that rice appears as the result of meritorious acts, then grows as long as Buddhism spreads. Despite the differences, the two myths involve a process of degeneration, both in terms of the length of the lives of the buddhas and the size of the grains of rice. In general, the two myths betray unease toward economic transactions; in fact, according to the Southeast Asian myth, storage and above all exchange—in other words, economic activities—lead to the disappearance of the personified rice. Eventually, the rice returns, only this time, instead of one variety of rice, there are many varieties. Desirable as the varieties of rice are, however, variety is difference, a loss of primordial unity, a unity that will be restored only when Maitreya, the future buddha, appears. When Maitreya returns, economic transactions will disappear, being replaced by abundance and leisure. Oneness will return as well: The body from which the rice emerged will recover its original form and the varieties of rice will be reunited.

It would be worthwhile to investigate the reasons for the Buddhist concern with explaining the mechanisms that give rise to the economic sphere. The causes may be found in the social changes that took place around the middle of the first millennium b.c.e. These involved the disappearance of the old tribal order, within which the Buddha himself was born, and its replacement by political centralization, taxation, professional armies, and urbanization. The economic and technological counterpart of these developments involved, between 600 and 500 b.c.e., the use of plow agriculture, the widespread cultivation of rice, and the introduction of coins. Cities were important in the spread of Buddhism as well. This is significant for two reasons. First, cities follow the abstract logic of commercial exchange and labor specialization, unlike the countryside, which is regulated by the rhythms of agriculture and thus by the seasons. On the other hand, given the morbidity that accompanies urbanization, a morbidity that would have been exacerbated by the conditions of the eastern Gangetic plain, the urban concentration of wealth and people must have led also to the sense of malaise articulated in the first two of the four noble truths (suffering and its origin).

Money and abstraction

The widespread use of money in north India since around 500 b.c.e. is also significant because of the connections between money and abstraction, as well as the affinities between money and asceticism. Because money dissolves qualitative differences into quantitative differences, it contributes to the flattening of reality, even while opening it up to analysis. Inasmuch as it serves as the common denominator of aspects of reality that otherwise would be seen as having nothing in common with one another, money contributes to a process of abstraction. It is through money that the qualitative differences among tasks and skills can be dissolved into quantity and can be bought and sold as commodities. Therefore, in a society in which certain forms of labor that are considered degrading are assigned to degraded people, this process of commodification can be considered liberating. In this respect, the economy of salvation underlying a community of religious virtuosi that is open in principle to everybody, as the Buddhist sa?gha claimed to be, can be regarded as the counterpart of the economy of more tangible goods.

Money, which is normally understood as that which makes possible the satisfaction of desire, is the condensation of deferred satisfaction if the money is not spent. But, generally, satisfaction is deferred for the sake of a greater satisfaction, and this fact makes it possible to understand the connection between money and sacrifice, on the one hand, and among ascetic practices, money, and capital accumulation, on the other. Early Buddhism can be understood, therefore, both as a commentary and critique on the process of deferral and on the new approach to labor. In this context, the behavior of the followers of the Buddha can be seen as the distillation of the new way of life. It is true that monks and nuns explicitly distanced themselves from the economy, but this happened only to a certain extent, and they engaged in elaborate ruses in order to participate in the economy without having to handle coins. In any case, the very existence of the community of mendicants allowed the new economy to show its strength, for it must be remembered that a degree of abundance is a prerequisite for asceticism. Indeed, increased production was required in order to support not just isolated renouncers, but groups that were sedentary for part of the year.

Money, asceticism, and accumulation

How can one understand, from an economic point of view, the coexistence of this economic growth, however unequal, and the most important prohibitions to which monks were subject, namely the ones against handling money and working? We can assume that these prohibitions rendered visible the autonomy of the economic realm, as well as the relatively new reality of money as the embodiment of labor. Indeed, while isolating the monks from the money economy, the P?li canon shows a high regard for merchants. It is significant that the first to offer food to the Buddha after the enlightenment were two merchants, both of whom are said to have attained enlightenment without having become monks. The Buddha reciprocated by mentioning a list of constellations and divinities that would protect merchants who undertook long journeys. This exchange seems to suggest the exchanges that were established between monks and their wealthy supporters: While the latter provided the monks the material goods without which they could not survive, the former reciprocated through their command of super-natural means. Among the early supporters of the san?gha were the gahapati, land-based controllers of property, who straddled the divide between the rural and the urban, and also between the castes. Networks were, in fact, crucial in the spread of Buddhism, and merchant groups can be seen as constituting networks that compensated for the disappearance of the democratic tribal political structures, which were being absorbed by the large political entities then emerging in northeastern India.

In terms of the affinity between asceticism and accumulation mentioned earlier one can say that the Buddha's misgivings about ritual, magical practices, and materiality in general led necessarily to the rejection of the expenditures associated with ritual activities, a rejection that freed capital for investment. An example of this rejection of ritual and its replacement by an internalized religion can be found in the Sig?laka-sutta of the D?ghanik?ya. When the Buddha sees Sig?laka engaging in ritual behavior, he tells him that instead of doing that he should abandon the four defilements, avoid doing evil from the four causes, and avoid following the six ways of wasting one's substance. Avoiding these fourteen evil ways involves essentially having an internalized approach to religion, as well as living a disciplined life, away from material and moral dissipation. We see this approach to religion in nineteenth-century Thailand, where King Mongkut sought to reform the sa?gha by purifying it from superstitious practices and promoting scriptural learning, thus becoming a proponent of a "protestant" approach to Buddhism. We find the same protestant ethos in the Vietnamese Hoa Hao movement's rejection of wasteful ritual and concomitant internalization of religion, as well as in the contemporary Thammakai movement, a Buddhist sect popular among the Thai middle class.

Entrepreneurship, worldly and otherworldly

Both as centers of entrepreneurship and innovation as well as of ritual expenditure Buddhist monasteries have functioned as loci of economic activity. In Tibet and in China, pawnshops, mutual financing associations, auctions, and the sale of lottery tickets originated or had close connections with monasteries. In addition, during the Tang dynasty (618–907) Buddhist monasteries engaged in oil production for cooking and for votive lamps, and in running water-powered stone rolling-mills. More directly related to economic expansion was the role of monasteries in bringing new land into cultivation, as well as in causing deforestation. Equally significant has been the role of Buddhist monasteries in the emergence of an autonomous economic domain, as well as the domain of the corporation, which were caused by the separation between the wealth of the institution and that of the individual. What the monasteries have had in common is their function as spaces for giving and receiving, d?na (giv-ing), a function that has been held in high regard throughout the history of Buddhism. Ultimately, d?na consists in giving oneself, as A?oka did during the great quinquennial festival, and as Emperor Wu of the Liang dynasty (502–557) in China did on more than one occasion, having to be rescued at great expense to the imperial treasury. In many cases, however, instead of functioning as the vehicle for the surrender of oneself, d?na served as conspicuous waste, a process whereby wealth and position could be both demonstrated and solidified. The consequences of this giving were most damaging in China, as the use of corvée labor to build extravagant monasteries inflicted misery on peasants. Analogous developments took place in Southeast Asia. In Cambodia, beginning around 800 c.e., rulers ordered the building of increasingly larger ceremonial complexes in Angkor; these originally served as centers for the management of irrigation until they reached its saturation point in the thirteenth century. In Myanmar (Burma) the construction of temples was initiated by both rulers and ordinary people, but the effects were similar: Vast amounts of wealth were diverted from productive to sumptuary uses, and the taxexempt status of ever increasing religious property had negative economic consequences, as ritual expenditures inhibited the accumulation of capital necessary for development.

Even when it did not reach the excesses of medieval China, Cambodia, or Myanmar, the ideology of d?na has generally had important economic consequences, as consumption by monks has hampered the process of internal differentiation and of capital accumulation. On the other hand, because of the fact that in a collective celebration merit is shared but prestige is not, the richest families, being able to contribute the most, accumulate the most prestige. This means that even though, from the point of view of merit and merit-making, we encounter a nonzero-sum game situation, in the context of prestige the monastery as recipient of dana legitimizes social differences, and renders them more visible. This can be seen among Thai peasants, among whom the two highest forms of merit-making—financing the construction of a monastery or becoming a monk—are open only to the rich. In fact, among Thai peasants, it was believed that the d?na of a rich person generated greater merit. Likewise, we find in Thai-Lao villages the belief that with good acts one moves up in the social hierarchy, either in a future life or in this one. The economic consequences of this belief is that poor Thai peasants spend a relatively larger portion of their income on merit-making.

The main consequence of d?na has been the accumulation of monastic wealth, a fact that has led to attempts at purifying the sa?gha. This can be seen in Myanmar, where since the eleventh century donations to the sa?gha have led to periods of monastic wealth and laxity, which have led eventually to reform of the order; the resulting community was deemed worthy of donations, until the wealth and laxness of the monks brought about a new reform. In any case, monks have sought to keep monastic wealth within their families, passing it mainly from uncle to nephew, in some cases through the manipulation of the rule of pupillary succession.

Giving and freedom from the degradation of need

In the context of giving and receiving it has been pointed out that living according to the precepts is not a possibility open to laypeople. In fact, in order for monks to live in the proper manner, laypeople have to break the precepts—for example, they must kill in order to feed the monks meat, and they must work, an activity forbidden to the monks. Does this mean, as S. J. Tambiah maintains, that the work of laypeople, insofar as it frees the monks for higher pursuits, is virtuous and deserving of merit, even though in principle it is polluting? Or is it rather that by accepting that which they, in theory, have not demanded, the monks allow the donors to live vicariously a life beyond necessity, while at the same time consuming and thus neutralizing the pollution inherent in all work? Going back to what was said about early Buddhism being a meditation on the process of deferral and on the new approach to labor, we can say that it is also in relation to labor that Buddhism seems to function as the means of transcending the degradation of being subject to need.

Another way of transcending that degradation requires functioning in the world in a manner that avoids engaging in a zero-sum game. This is achieved through the practice of merit transfer, that is, the practice of generating merit for the sake of somebody else. Rather than diminishing the merit, transfer multiplies it; in fact, anyone can partake of this merit without diminishing it in any way; instead, one's desire to partake of the merit generated by somebody else functions as a multiplier.

Having examined a range of Buddhist attitudes toward the economic realm, what seems to be specific to Buddhism in this regard is the extent to which it is concerned with the processes that underlie need and desire, production and work, giving and taking, hierarchy and equality, and coming into being and dissolution.

See also:Usury

Bibliography

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Gustavo Benavides