The wheel-turning king and the lucky lottery: perspectives new and old on wealth and merriment within Buddhism

ABSTRACT

By placing a contemporary pilgrimage of Myanmar Buddhists to Bodh Gaya in India in conversation with early Buddhist doctrine and practice, this article argues that wealth, its redistribution and celebration, have provided, and continue to provide, non-peripheral avenues for advancement within Buddhist societies. Through lavish gift-giving and merry-making, the group of pilgrims that we encountered, led by a weikza-lam practitioner or wizard, bolstered their esteem in relation to authoritative institutions and individuals. Money—and the plentiful conviviality that it enabled—was crucial to the successful outcome of the pilgrimage. This article contextualises the donations and merriment of the group within the multi-layered context of a Vihār (resting place for pilgrims) in Bodh Gaya, with its religious hierarchies, local material inequalities, and historical context. By looking at the multiple directions in which money and merit were transferred, this article argues that demonstrations of wealth and revelry during pilgrimage can facilitate, rather than be a hindrance to, advancement within Buddhist praxis.

KEYWORDS:

• Buddhism
• Bodh Gaya
• pilgrimage
• weikza
• money
• Myanmar

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology for facilitating this collaboration as part of the research group “Buddhist Temple Economies in Urban Asia”. We are grateful to Christoph Brumann and Shultz Abrahms-Kavunenko for their advice during the editing process. We also thank Dana Maller, Kristina Jonutytė, Hannah Klepeis, and Beata Świtek. Many thanks go to staff and students at the “Buddhist Studies in India” programme in Bodh Gaya and to the wonderfully noisy and exuberant pilgrims from Myanmar who fed and befriended us and made us dance and sing.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. This is a resting place for either monastics or lay pilgrims. In this case the Vihār was a functioning monastery with residential monks, its own sacred relics, and temple and a popular place for pilgrims (mostly from Myanmar) to stay.

2. The prayers of the Hindu pilgrims, Bollywood dance parties, prayers and sermons in the local mosques, chanting by the Buddhists, and honking horns.

3. The Saffron Revolution refers to a series of political protests carried out in opposition to the ruling military government, which Buddhist monastics joined in August, September, and October 2007.

4. See Heim (2003) for a discussion of the importance of intentions within Buddhist morality.

5. See also Gombrich (1971), Rotman (2009), and Schopen (1996) for a discussion of the practice of merit transference.

6. This edition refers to that by the Pāli Text Society (PTS), translation from Horner and Bhikkhu Brahmali (2014, 537). The well-known PTS editions were originally published in multiple volumes and have recently been re-presented on www.suttacentral.net as one document. All PTS translations are considered to be the standard translations of Pāli texts in English.

7. The word is kārṣāpaṇa in Sanskrit (and Buddhist Hybrid Sanskrit) but kahāpaṇa in Pāli. Each refers to a coin which is equal in weight to a karṣa, which may have been weighed in gold, silver, cowries or copper. Etymologically, the root is linked to √kṛṣ, meaning ‘to plough’, thus giving it a deep association with what is produced from labour (grain, things mined from the earth, etc.). Later, in classical South Asia, the word refers to money as currency. However, during the Early Historic period, prior to the turn of the Common Era, kārṣāpaṇa is a unit of comparison or measurement only. Some Buddhist literature in Pāli hints at its value as alms offering (in the Jātakas) but other texts, e.g. legalistic Dharma literature such as Vasiṣṭha, state that it may be used to pay tolls. The Arthaśāstra—probably compiled in its final form by the second century CE (Olivelle 2013)—frequently uses the term paṇa to connote actual money as payments for fines and the like by violators of the law to the state.

8. Other rules from the Pāṭimokkha pertain to money. Nissaggiya Pācittiya 10 (Vin III 220) allows monks to use a veyyāvaccakara—a lay attendant who handles money instead of a monk—to assist in places like markets. Nissaggiya Pācittiya 19 (Vin III 241) forbids bartering and the exchange of goods.

9. Sanchi is not the only Buddhist pilgrimage site with donative inscriptions. Dozens of other sites from the Early Historic period (300 BCE–300 CE) onwards contain similar records. However, Sanchi presents the largest and most well-preserved corpus. While most other sites provide only a few dozen records or less, at Sanchi, there are over 600 relevant inscriptions, many of which are re-contextualised and analysed in a recent unpublished dissertation by Milligan (2016), based on extensive fieldwork to re-read the brāhmī inscriptions.

10. The Kharoṣṭhī graffiti, which are abundant in Pakistan, number in the thousands but mostly date to a later era and are scattered throughout a vast region (see Neelis 2011, 268). Substantial amounts of early epigraphic material may also be found in Sri Lanka at a number of sites. Senarat Paranavitana’s Inscriptions of Ceylon (1970) lists most of the earliest inscriptions.

11. The following two records, originally written in the Mauryan brāhmī script in the Prakrit language, are representative of the majority of early records.

12. The inscription numbers refer to the edition listed in Tsukamoto (1996). All translations are by Milligan.

13. There are few academic studies of Buddhist festivals in early Indian art and literature. For further reading, see van Kooij (1995) and Pagel (2007).

14. Schopen translated the Mūlasarvāstivāda-vinaya’s Kṣudrakavastu Tha 246v5–247r1. The Kṣudrakavastu is a small collection within the monastic legal textual corpus of the Mūlasarvāstivāda school.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Saskia Abrahms-Kavunenko

Saskia Abrahms-Kavunenko is an anthropologist and the author of Enlightenment and the Gaspng City. She has published extensively on the topics on shamanism, Buddhism, postsocialism, global warming and pollution, doubt, and materiality. She is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow at the University of Copenhagen and a Research Associate at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle, Germany.

CORRESPONDENCE: Saskia Abrahms-Kavunenko, Department of Cross-Cultural and Regional Studies, University of Copenhagen, Søndre Campus, Building: 10-2-53, Karen Blixens Plads 8, 2300 København S, Denmark.

Matthew D. Milligan

Matthew D. Milligan is an historian of Buddhism. He publishes on the socio-economic history of religions in South Asia. More recently, he has been working on Buddhist Economics in the United States and Asia. He is a Visiting Assistant Professor at Trinity University, San Antonio, TX, Research Associate at Chapman University, Orange, CA, and a Fellow at the American Institute for Economic Research, Great Barrington, MA, USA.