This is how Buddhist
monks live without money
Tree Watson 15 April
2017 Economy Explores
Laypeople and the monastic community have a
relationship of mutual dependence. It's called 'gift
economics'
"Take money, for example. In the past there
wasn’t any paper money. Paper was just paper, without any value.
Then people decided that silver money was hard to store, so they
turned paper into money. And so it serves as money."
"Maybe someday in the future a new king will
arise who doesn’t like paper money. He’ll have us use wax droppings
instead—take sealing wax, melt it, stamp it into lumps, and suppose
it to be money. We’ll be using wax droppings all over the country,
getting into debt all because of wax droppings. Let alone wax
droppings, we could take chicken droppings and turn them into
money! It could happen. All our chicken droppings would be cash.
We’d be fighting and killing one another over chicken
droppings."
Ajahn Chah, monk, founder of two major
monasteries in the Thai Forest Tradition, & instrumental
figure in the establishment of Theravada Buddhism in the
West
Why do Buddhist monks reject the idea of
money?
Practicing Buddhists make five promises – not
to lie, not to steal, not to engage in sexual misconduct, not to
harm any living creature and not to take intoxicating substances
which lead to carelessness. These are called the ‘5
precepts’.
When Buddhist monks and nuns ordain – don the
robes, shave their heads, and start their training – they make all
of the same promises that lay Buddhists (practicing Buddhists who
aren’t monks) do, but also promise to let go of their attachments
to all social conventions. It’s what the Buddha did on his path to
enlightenment, so the Vinaya – the rules he put together for monks
to follow – say they should do the same.
To Buddhists (and a lot of economists), money
counts as a social convention. Coins are only valuable because
we’ve decided that they are, and the same goes for paper banknotes.
So like other social conventions, Buddhist monks give it up. They
can’t buy or sell anything, get cash out of the bank or even give
or accept charitable donations.
Without money, how do monks get
by?
Buddhist monks and nuns are completely reliant
on the lay community to provide them with the material things they
need to survive. In warmer Buddhist countries, monks will walk
around their local village at mealtimes in what’s called an ‘alms
round’, holding a bowl for locals to put food into. In the West,
food often gets donated to monasteries in bulk, and volunteers then
use it to prepare meals for the monks.
The lay community provides the money and the
labor to build shelter for monks, make them clothes and buy them
the technology they need to keep up with the world outside the
monastery, from computers to iPads. Some monastic communities like
the Forest Sangha even have a Twitter account.
Once a year, during the autumn festival of
Kathina, families offer monks and nuns all the cloth they need for
robes to get them through the winter months. Lay Buddhists club
together to provide them with the basics in what’s known as an
annual celebration of giving.
What do lay Buddhists get in
return?
The lay community provides the monastic
community with material support in exchange for the spiritual
support they receive from them, in the form of ceremonies, guided
meditation, or ad-hoc advice. It’s not a tit-for-tat kind of
exchange – you don’t get a passage from the scriptures every time
you donate a tin of tomatoes – but more of a relationship of mutual
interdependence, or ‘gift economics’.
Surely people take advantage of the
system?
Things don’t always go smoothly. Like
anything, people interpret the rules in different ways, and some
bend them a little too far. Monks are obliged to graciously accept
anything that’s offered to them, whatever it may be. It’s not
uncommon to see monasteries in Thailand overrun with dogs, donated
by people who can’t look after them and know the monks can’t turn
them away.
And the monks have been known to bend the
rules as well. A small sect of Western Buddhists called the New
Kampada Tradition admitted to receiving rental income from people
in receipt of housing benefit. Given the British taxpayer, who
would be funding those benefits, definitely isn’t spiritually
dependent on them, it goes against the ‘gift economics’ principle
of the monk-to-layperson relationship, as well as counting as
benefit fraud.
Technically, as long as it’s the lay community
and not the monks who collect the funds, then they’re not breaking
any Buddhist rules by passing that cash on to the monks if they
want to. A number of Buddhist groups use this justification to get
other things like meditation classes, books and so on.
But a lot of Buddhists might take issue with
this - whilst the monks aren’t actually handling any money, they
are securing their material well-being by profiting from the lay
community’s need for shelter and spiritual guidance. We end up with
a situation where the Buddha’s teachings become a commodity, being
sold to those who can afford it rather than offered to those who
need it. That’s not gift economics anymore – it’s just standard
market exchange.
Why stick to 'gift economics' if it's a flawed
way of doing things?
People who break the rules will always exist –
but for hundreds of Buddhist communities around the world, the
system of mutual dependence is a really important part of Buddhist
spirituality. Buddhists often refer to themselves as ‘practicing’
because living morally is a question of practice – something you
get better at with time. No economic model is perfect, but this
system at least allows both the monastic and the lay community to
meet their spiritual and material needs.