Monastic Buddhist asset capitalization in ancient Sri Lanka

ABSTRACT

This article examines asset accumulation and capitalization in early Sri Lankan Buddhism from the 1st c. BCE until the 5th c. CE using financial records inscribed into stone. The interplay between religious and economic practices shaped early Buddhist culture in Sri Lanka. The collected material corpus suggests that Buddhism's growth on the island was closely connected to its corporate monastic ability to fundraise and acquire non-fungible assets with resources that could be sold for profit. In the early centuries of this strategy – which monastics may have exploited to avoid censure for violating rules regarding voluntary poverty and moderation – haphazard and inconsistent linguistic expressions indicate an unfamiliarity with the practice. However, as the centuries passed, the Buddhist saṃgha developed coherent and consistent language to express the nuance of capitalization, including uniform terminologies for profit. Capitalizing assets like land became a standard way to supplement and perhaps supplant less efficient fundraising practices like door-to-door collections. As Buddhism spread to the rest of Asia, this phenomenon spread. This article demonstrates that tracing language development is a powerful method of exploring the early Buddhist corporate firm's deliberate and powerful economic engagement.

KEYWORDS:

• Buddhism
• Sri Lanka
• epigraphy
• history
• corporation
• economic history

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 On the corporate tendencies of Buddhism from its earliest phases more generally, see Milligan (2019).

2 There are two internally developed histories of Buddhism in Sri Lanka (called vaṁśa-s) that chronicle the growth and development of Buddhism on the Island. These are useful sources but cannot be strictly relied upon to reflect the earliest centuries with any kind of precision, mostly due to their late composition and reliance on whatever material was ‘handed down’ according to the Mahāvihāra tradition in Anuradhapura. The Mahāvaṃsa dates to approximately the 5th century CE while the Dīpavaṃsa to a slightly earlier period (perhaps the 3rd or 4th century).

3 The word śataḍa is strange and has no other attestations. It potentially just refers to the quantified amount referred to with dhanalaba, but could also be referring to a limit of the financial profits, as the editor of the inscription Paranavitana (1970) has assumed by translating it ‘up to śataḍa.’ Śata means one-hundred while śataḍa appears to mean half that figure.

4 Grammatically, the inscription is obfuscated because of the nature of the –śa genitive endings in Prakrit, which are frequently better rendered in the dative case (Schopen 1997, p. 170). Thus, the Old Sinhalese Prakrit in our inscription damagutateraśa leṇe could be rendered either ‘a cave of the elder monk Damaguta’ or ‘a cave for the elder monk Damaguta.’ Depending on the situation, either construction is valid. When these –śa genitive endings are multiple, as they are here with damagutateraśa and śagaśa and connected only to a single noun in the nominative (leṇe, ‘a cave’) by means of a past passive participle (din[n]e), the actual ownership of the cave is ambiguous and can only be understood through context. Past passive participles like the one seen here are usually translated using the instrumental case in Sanskrit (by/through) with a meaning like ‘a cave was gifted by Damaguta … ’ but there is no noun in the instrumental case in this inscription. Further, it is unlikely that the elder (thera) monk Damaguta is the originator of the donation given that he is indeed a confirmed monk who presumably does not possess much personal property. While in India there is much evidence to suggest that monks and nuns of this elite status were able to muster substantial financial resources for the sake of patronage (Milligan 2016, 2019), such a phenomenon is not observed in ancient Sri Lanka in the same way during this early period. Even more difficult is the word maharajhaya in the locative case. Dias (1991), the original translator, did not seem to recognize the locative given that she found rajha to be ‘the great king’ instead of what Paranavitana (1970, p. 120) had long ago argued could be rājya, or ‘reign,’ in Sanskrit. The locative makes sense here if rājya is the word and helps the inscription work grammatically. Dias’s version is rendered in the dative case ( = ‘to the great king’), but this fits neither grammatically nor contextually.

5 In Pāli texts like the Milindapañha and the Petavatthu-aṭṭhakathā, merit (puñña-kamma) can be ‘metaphorically heaped like coal, stored like gold, poured like water, passed like flame from candle to candle, [or] planted like a seed […] through the medium of the saṃgha’ (Main 2008, p. 301).

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Matthew D. Milligan

Matthew D. Milligan is an historian of Buddhist civilizations worldwide whose research focuses on the interplay of socio-economic phenomena like inequality, poverty, and bureaucracy. In addition to his position as Visiting Assistant Professor at Trinity University, he is also a Fellow at the American Institute for Economic Research and a Research Associate at Chapman University’s Institute for the Study of Religion, Economics, and Society.