The Economy of
Gifts
An American monk looks at traditional Buddhist
economy.Thanissaro
Bhikkhu
According to the
Buddhist monastic code, monks and
nuns are not allowed to accept money or even to engage in barter or
trade with laypeople. They live entirely in an economy of gifts.
Lay supporters provide gifts of material requisites for the
monastics, while the monastics provide their supporters with the
gift of the teaching. Ideally—and to a great extent in actual
practice—this is an exchange that comes from the heart, something
totally voluntary. There are many stories in the texts emphasizing
the point that the returns in this economy depend not on the
material value of the object given, but on the purity of heart of
the donor and recipient. You give what is appropriate to the
occasion and to your means, when and wherever your heart feels
inspired. For the monastics, this means that you teach, out of
compassion, what should be taught, regardless of whether it will
sell. For the laity, this means that you give what you have to
spare and feel inclined to share. There is no price for the
teachings, nor even a “suggested donation.” You give because giving
is good for the heart and because the survival of the dharma as a
living principle depends on daily acts of generosity.
The primary symbol of this economy is the
alms bowl. If you are a monastic, it represents your dependence on
others, your need to accept generosity no matter what form it
takes. You may not get what you want in the bowl, but you realize
that you always get enough. Once a student of mine went to practice
in the mountains in northern Thailand. His hillside shack was an
ideal place to meditate, but he had to depend on a nearby hilltribe
village for alms, and the diet was mostly plain rice, occasionally
accompanied by some boiled vegetables. After two months on this
diet, he was in conflict over whether or not to stay. One rainy
morning, as he was on his alms round, a woman called out from a
shack asking him to wait while she got some rice from the pot. As
he waited, he couldn’t help grumbling inwardly about the fact that
there would be nothing to go with the rice. It so happened that the
woman’s infant son was sitting near the kitchen fire, crying from
hunger. So as she scooped some rice out of the pot, she stuck a
small lump in his mouth. Immediately, the boy stopped crying and
began to grin. “Here you are, complaining about what these people
are giving you for free,” my student told himself. “You’re no match
for this little kid.” That lesson gave him the strength to stay in
the mountains for another three years.
For a monastic, the bowl also represents
the opportunity one gives others to practice the dharma. In
Thailand, this is reflected in one of the idioms used to describe
going for alms: proad sat, doing a favor for living
beings. There were times on my alms round in rural Thailand when,
as I walked past a tiny grass shack, someone would come running out
to put rice in my bowl. Years earlier, as layperson, I would have
wished to give them some material help. Now I was offering them the
dignity that comes with being a donor.
For the donors, the monk’s bowl becomes a
symbol of the good they have done. On several occasions in Thailand
people told me they had dreamed of a monk standing before them,
opening the lid to his bowl. The details differed as to what the
dreamer saw in the bowl, but in each case the interpretation of the
dream was the same: the dreamer’s merit was about to bear
fruit.
The alms round itself is a gift that goes
both ways. Daily contact with lay donors reminds the monastics that
their practice is not just an individual matter. They are indebted
to others for the opportunity to practice, and should do their best
to practice diligently as a way of repaying that debt. Furthermore,
walking through a village early in the morning, passing by the
houses of the rich and poor, the happy and unhappy, gives plenty of
opportunities to reflect on the human condition and the need to
find a way out of the grinding cycle.
For the donors, the alms round is a
reminder that the monetary economy is not the only way to
happiness. It helps keep a society sane when there are monastics
infiltrating the towns every morning, embodying an ethos very
different from the dominant monetary economy. The gently subversive
quality of this custom helps people to keep their values
straight.
Above all, the economy of gifts allows for
specialization, a division of labor from which both sides benefit.
Those who are willing can give up many of the privileges of home
life in return for the opportunity to devote themselves fully to
dharma practice. Those who stay at home can benefit from having
full-time dharma practitioners around on a daily basis. The Buddha
began the monastic order on the first day of his teaching career
because he saw the benefits that come with specialization. Without
it, the practice tends to become diluted, negotiated into the
demands of the monetary economy. The dharma becomes limited to what
will sell and what will fit into a schedule dictated by the
requirements of family and job. In this sort of situation, everyone
ends up poorer in things of the heart.
The fact that tangible goods run only one way in the
economy of gifts means that the exchange is open to all sorts of
abuses. This is why there are so many rules in the monastic code to
keep the monastics from taking unfair advantage of the generosity
of lay donors. There are rules against asking for donations in
inappropriate circumstances, against making claims as to one’s
spiritual attainments, even against covering up any exceptional
morsels in one’s bowl with rice in hopes that donors will then feel
inclined to provide something more substantial. Most of the rules,
in fact, were instituted at the request of lay supporters or in
response to their complaints. They had made their investment in the
merit economy and were interested in protecting their
investment.
On their first contact with the sangha,
most Westerners tend to see little reason for the disciplinary
rules; they regard them as quaint holdovers from ancient Indian
prejudices. When, however, they come to see these rules in the
context of the economy of gifts, they too become advocates of the
rules. The arrangement may limit the freedom of the monastics in
certain ways, but it means that the lay supporters take an active
interest in how the monastic lives—a useful safeguard to make sure
that teachers walk their talk. This ensures that the practice
remains a communal concern. As the Buddha said,
Monks, householders are very helpful to
you, as they provide you with the requisites of robes, almsfood,
lodgings, and medicine. And you, monks, are very helpful to
householders, as you teach them the dharma admirable in the
beginning, admirable in the middle, and admirable in the end, as
you expound the holy life both in its particulars and in its
essence, entirely complete, surpassingly pure. In this way the holy
life is lived in mutual dependence, for the purpose of crossing
over the flood, for making a right end to suffering and
stress.
By its very nature,
the economy of gifts is something of a hothouse
creation that requires careful nurture and a sensitive discernment
of its benefits. I find it amazing that such an economy has lasted
for more than 2,600 years. It will never be more than an
alternative to the dominant monetary economy, largely because its
rewards are so intangible and require so much patience, trust, and
discipline in order to appreciate them. But then, there is no way
that the dharma can survive as a living principle unless it can be
offered and received as a gift, in an atmosphere where mutual
compassion and concern are the medium of exchange, and purity of
heart is the bottom line.
Thanissaro Bhikkhu is the Abbot of Metta Forest
Monastery in Valley Center, California. He is the author of the
forthcoming book The Wings to Awakening (Dhamma Dana
Publications).