Debt (48 page)

Historians differ over their meaning. Certainly the passions unleashed provided a dramatic alternative to the staid orthodoxy of the Confucian literati, but it’s also surprising, to say the least, to see this in a religion promoted above all by the commercial classes. The French Sinologist Jacques Gernet observes:

Gernet’s picture of dozens of Christ-like redeemers seems overstated, but the precise meaning of these suicides was unclear—and widely debated—even in the Middle Ages. Some contemporaries saw them as the ultimate expression of contempt for the body; others as recognition
of the illusory nature of the self and all material attachments; yet others, as the ultimate form of charity, the giving of that which can only be most precious, one’s very physical existence, as a sacrifice to the benefit of all living things; a sentiment that one tenth-century biographer expressed in the following verses:

That is, an object of eternal value, an investment that can bear fruit for all eternity.

I draw attention to this because this sentiment provides an elegant illustration of a problem that seems to have first appeared in the world with notions of pure charity that always seemed to accompany Axial Age religions, and which provided endless philosophical conundrums. In human economies, it does not appear to have occurred to anyone that any act
could
be either purely selfish or purely altruistic. As I noted in chapter five, an act of absolute selfless giving can only also be absolutely antisocial—hence in a way, inhuman. It is merely the mirror image of an act of theft or even murder; hence, it makes a certain sort of sense that suicide be conceived as the ultimate selfless gift. Yet this is the door that necessarily opens as soon as one develops a notion of “profit” and then tries to conceive its opposite.

This tension seems to hang over the economic life of Medieval Chinese Buddhism, which, true to its commercial origins, retained a striking tendency to employ the language of the marketplace. “One purchases felicity, and sells one’s sins,” wrote one monk, “just as in commercial operations.”
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Nowhere was this so true as in those schools, such as the School of the Three Stages, that adopted the notion of “karmic debt”—that each of the sins of one’s accumulated past lives continues as a debt needing to be discharged. An obscure and unusual view in classical Indian Buddhism, the notion of karmic debt took on a powerful new life in China.
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As one Three Stages text puts it, we all know that insolvent debtors will be reborn as animals or slaves; but in reality, we are all insolvent debtors, because acquiring the money to repay our temporal debts necessarily means acquire new, spiritual ones, since every means of acquiring wealth will necessarily involve exploiting, damaging, and causing suffering to other living beings.

As Gernet remarks, the idea of life as an endless burden of debt would surely have struck a chord with Chinese villagers, for whom this was all too often literally true; but, as he also points out, like their counterparts in ancient Israel, they were also familiar with that sense of sudden liberation that came with official amnesties. There was a way to achieve that too. All that was required was to make regular donations to some monastery’s Inexhaustible Treasury. The moment one does so, the debts from every one of one’s past lives are instantly blotted out. The author even provides a little parable, not unlike Jesus’s parable of the ungrateful servant, but far more optimistic. How, it might be asked, would a poor man’s tiny contribution possibly have such cosmic effects?

One might almost call this salvation on the installment plan—but the implication is that the payments shall be made, like the interest payments on the wealth when it is subsequently loaned out, for all eternity.

Other schools concentrated not on karmic debt, but on one’s debt to one’s parents. Where Confucians built their system of morality above all on filial piety to fathers, Chinese Buddhists were primarily concerned with mothers; with the care and suffering required in raising, feeding, and educating children. A mother’s kindness is unlimited, her selflessness absolute; this was seen to be embodied above all in the
act of breastfeeding, the fact that mothers transform their very flesh and blood into milk; they feed their children with their own bodies. In doing so, however, they allow unlimited love to be precisely quantified. One author calculated that the average infant absorbs precisely 180 pecks of mother’s milk in its first three years of life, and this constitutes its debt as an adult. The figure soon became canonical. To repay this milk debt, or indeed one’s debt to one’s parents more generally, was simply impossible. “If you stacked up jewels from the ground up to the twenty-eighth heaven,” wrote one Buddhist author, “it would not compare” with the value of your parent’s nurturance.
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Even if you were to “cut your own flesh to offer her three times a day for four billion years,” wrote another, “it would not pay back even a single day” of what your mother did for you.
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The solution, however, is the same: donating money to the Inexhaustible Treasuries. The result was an elaborate cycle of debts and forms of redemption. A man begins with an unpayable milk-debt. The only thing of comparable value is the Dharma, the Buddhist truth itself. One can thus repay one’s parents by bringing them to Buddhism; indeed, this can be done even after death, when one’s mother will otherwise wind up as a hungry ghost in hell. If one makes a donation to the Inexhaustible Treasuries in her name, sutras will be recited for her; she will be delivered; the money, in the meantime, will be put partly to work as charity, as pure gift, but partly, too, as in India, as interest-bearing loans, earmarked for specific purposes for the furtherance of Buddhist education, ritual, or monastic life.

The Chinese Buddhist approach to charity was nothing if not multifaceted. Festivals often led to vast outpourings of contributions, with wealthy adherents vying with one another in generosity, often driving their entire fortunes to the monasteries, in the forms of oxcarts laden with millions of strings of cash—a kind of economic self-immolation that paralleled the spectacular monastic suicides. Their contributions swelled the Inexhaustible Treasuries. Some would be given to the needy, particularly in times of hardship. Some would be loaned. One practice that hovered between charity and business was providing peasants with alternatives to the local moneylender. Most monasteries had attendant pawnshops where the local poor could place some valuable possession—a robe, a couch, a mirror—in hock in exchange for low-interest loans.
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Finally, there was the business of the monastery itself: that portion of the Inexhaustible Treasury turned over to the management of lay brothers, and either put out at loan or invested. Since monks were not allowed to eat the products of their own fields, the fruit or grain had to be put on the market, further swelling monastic revenues. Most
monasteries came to be surrounded not only by commercial farms but veritable industrial complexes of oil presses, flour mills, shops, and hostels, often with thousands of bonded workers.
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At the same time, the Treasuries themselves became—as Gernet was perhaps the first to point out—the world’s first genuine forms of concentrated finance capital. They were, after all, enormous concentrations of wealth managed by what were in effect monastic corporations, which were constantly seeking new opportunities for profitable investment. They even shared the quintessential capitalist imperative of continual growth; the Treasuries had to expand, since according to Mahayana doctrine, genuine liberation would not be possible until the whole world embraced the Dharma.
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This was precisely the situation—huge concentrations of capital interested in nothing more than profit—that Confucian economic policy was supposed to prevent. Still, it took some time for Chinese governments to recognize the threat. Government attitudes veered back and forth. At first, especially in the chaotic years of the early Middle Ages, monks were welcomed—even given generous land grants and provided with convict laborers to reclaim forests and marshes, and tax-exempt status for their business enterprises.
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A few emperors converted, and while most of the bureaucracy kept the monks at arm’s length, Buddhism became especially popular with court women, as well as with eunuchs and many scions of wealthy families. As time went on, though, administrators turned from seeing monks as a boon to rural society to its potential ruination. Already, by 511 ad, there were decrees condemning monks for diverting grain that was supposed to be used for charitable purposes to high-interest loans, and altering debt contracts—a government commission had to be appointed to review the accounts and nullify any loans in which interest was found to have exceeded principal. In 713 ad we have another decree, confiscating two Inexhaustible Treasuries of the Three Stages sect, whose members they accused of fraudulent solicitation.
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Before long there were major campaigns of government repression, at first often limited to certain regions, but over time, more often empire-wide. During the most severe, carried out in 845 ad, a total of 4,600 monasteries were razed along with their shops and mills, 260,000 monks and nuns forcibly defrocked and returned to their families—but at the same time, according to government reports, 150,000 temple serfs released from bondage.

Whatever the real reasons behind the waves of repression (and these were no doubt many), the official reason was always the same: a need to restore the money supply. The monasteries were becoming
so large, and so rich, administrators insisted, that China was simply running out of metal:

One reason is that monks appear to have been systematically melting down strings of coins, often hundreds of thousands at a time, to build colossal copper or even gilded copper statues of the Buddha—along with other objects such as bells and copper chimes, or even such extravagances as mirrored halls or gilded copper roof tiles. The result, according to official commissions of inquiry, was economically disastrous: the price of metals would soar, coinage disappear, and rural marketplaces cease to function, even as those rural people whose children had not become monks often fell deeper into debt to the monasteries.

It perhaps stands to reason that Chinese Buddhism, a religion of merchants that then took popular roots, should have developed in this direction: a genuine theology of debt, even perhaps a practice of absolute self-sacrifice, of abandoning everything, one’s fortune or even one’s life, that ultimately led to collectively managed finance capital. The reason that the result seems so weird, so full of paradoxes, is that it is again an attempt to apply the logic of exchange to questions of Eternity.