Debt

by David Graeber

  Let this impure and sinful body,

  Turn into something like a diamond.33

  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.”34 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.35 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.

  Some use their power and authority as officials in order to bend the law and seize wealth. Some prosper in the marketplace … They engage in an excess of lies and cheat and extort profits from others. Still others, farmers, burn the mountains and marshes, flood the fields, plough and mill, destroying the nests and burrows of animals …

  There is no avoiding the fact of our past debts, and it is difficult to comprehend the number of separate lives it would require if you wanted to pay them one by one.36

  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?

  Answer: In a parable it is like a poor man burdened by a debt of one thousand strings of coins to another person. He always suffers from his debt, and the poor man is afraid whenever the debt-master comes to collect.

  He visits the rich man’s house and confesses he is beyond the time-limit and begs forgiveness for his offense—he is poor and without a station in life. He tells him that each day he makes a single coin he will return it to the rich man. On hearing this, the rich man is very pleased and forgives him for being overdue; moreover, the poor man is not dragged away to jail.

  Giving to the Inexhaustible Storehouse is also like this.37

  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.38 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.39

  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.40 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.41 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.42

  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 gen
erous land grants and provided with convict laborers to reclaim forests and marshes, and tax-exempt status for their business enterprises.43 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.44 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:

  The great repressions of Buddhism under the Chou emperor Wu between 574 and 577, under Wu-tsung in 842–845, and finally in 955, presented themselves primarily as measures of economic recovery: each of them provided an opportunity for the imperial government to procure the necessary copper for the minting of new coins.45

  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.

  Recall an idea from earlier in the book: exchange, unless it’s an instantaneous cash transaction, creates debts. Debts linger over time. If you imagine all human relations as exchange, then insofar as people do have ongoing relations with one another, those relations are laced with debt and sin. The only way out is to annihilate the debt, but then social relations vanish too. This is quite in accord with Buddhism, whose ultimate aim is indeed the attainment of “emptiness,” absolute liberation, the annihilation of all human and material attachments, since these are all ultimately causes of suffering. For Mahayana Buddhists, however, absolute liberation cannot be achieved by any one being independently; the liberation of each depends on all the others; therefore, until the end of time, such matters are in a certain sense always in suspension.

  In the meantime, exchange dominates: “One purchases felicity, and sells one’s sins, just as in commercial operations.” Even acts of charity and self-sacrifice are not purely generous; one is purchasing “merit” from the bodhisattvas.46 The notion of infinite debt comes in when this logic slams up against the Absolute, or, one might perhaps better say, against something that utterly defies the logic of exchange. Because there are things that do. This would explain, for instance, the odd urge to first quantify the exact amount of milk one has absorbed at one’s mother’s breast, and then to say that there is no conceivable way to repay it. Exchange implies interaction between equivalent beings. Your mother, on the other hand, is not an equivalent being. She created you out of her own flesh. This is exactly the point that I suggested the Vedic authors were subtly trying to make when they talked about “debts” to the gods: of course you cannot really “pay your debt to the universe”—that would imply that (1) you and (2) everything that exists (including you) are in some sense equivalent entities. This is clearly absurd. The closest you can come to repayment is to simply recognize that fact. Such recognition is the true meaning of sacrifice. Like Rospabé’s original money, a sacrificial offering is not a way to pay a debt, but a way to acknowledge the impossibility of the idea that there could ever be repayment:

  The parallel was not missed in certain mythological traditions. According to one famous Hindu myth, two gods, the brothers Kartikeya and Ganesha, had a quarrel over who should be the first to marry. Their mother Parvati suggested a contest: the winner would be the one to most quickly circle the entire universe. Kartikeya set off on the back of a giant peacock. It took him three years to transverse the limits of the cosmos. Ganesha bided his time, then, finally, walked in a circle around his mother, remarking, “You are the universe to me.”

  I’ve also argued that any system of exchange is always necessarily founded on something else, something that, in its social manifestation at least, is ultimately communism. With all those things that we treat as eternal, that we assume will always be there—our mother’s love, true friendship, sociality, humanity, belonging, the existence of the cosmos—no calculation is necessary, or even ultimately possible; insofar as there is give and take, they follow completely different principles. What, then, happens to such absolute and unlimited phenomena when one tries to imagine the world as a set of transactions—as exchange? Generally, one of two things. We either ignore or deify them. (Mothers, and caregiving women in general, are a classic case in point.) Or we do both. What we treat as eternal in our actual relations with one another vanishes and reappears as an abstraction, an absolute.47 In the case of Buddhism, this was framed as the inexhaustible merit of bodhisatt-vas, who exist, in a certain sense, outside of time. They are at once the model for the Inexhaustible Treasuries, and also their practical foundation: one can only repay one’s endless karmic debt, or one’s infinite milk-debt, by drawing on this equally infinite pool of redemption, which, in turn, becomes the basis for the actual material funds of the monasteries, which are equally eternal—a pragmatic form of communism, in fact, since they were vast pools of wealth collectively owned and collectively managed: the center of vast projects of human cooperation, which were assumed to be similarly eternal. Yet at the same time—here I think Gernet is right—this communism became the basis, in turn, of something very much like capitalism. The reason was, above all, the need for constant expansion. Everything—even charity—was an opportunity to proselytize; the Dharma had to grow, ultimately, to encompass everyone and everything, in order to effect the salvation of all living beings.

  The Middle Ages were marked by a general move toward abstraction: real gold and silver ended up largely in churches, monasteries, and temples, money became virtual again, and at the same time, the tendency everywhere was to set up overarching moral institutions meant to regulate the process and, in particular, to establish certain protections for debtors.

  China was unusual in that it was one place where an Axial Age empire managed to survive—though at first, only barely. Chinese governments did manage to keep coins in circulation in most places most of the time. This was made easier by their reliance exclusively on small-denomination coins made of bronze. Even so, it clearly took enormous efforts.

  As usual, we don’t know a lot about how everyday economic transactions took place, but wha
t we do know suggests that in small-scale transactions, coins were probably most often used in dealing with strangers. As elsewhere, local shopkeepers and merchants extended credit. Most accounts seem to have been kept through the use of tally sticks, strikingly similar to those used in England, except that rather than hazelwood they were usually made of a split piece of notched bamboo. Here, too, the creditor took one half, and the debtor held the other; they were joined at the moment of repayment, and often broken afterward to mark the cancellation of the debt.48 To what degree were they transferable? We don’t really know. Most of what we do know is from casual references in texts that are mainly about something else: anecdotes, jokes, and poetic allusions. The great collection of Taoist wisdom, the Leizi, probably written during the Han dynasty, contains one such:

  There was a man of Sung who was strolling in the street and picked up a half tally someone had lost. He took it home and stored it away, and secretly counted the indentations of the broken edge. He told a neighbor: “I shall be rich any day now.”49

  Rather like someone who finds a key and figures “just as soon as I can figure out which lock …”50 Another story tells of how Liu Bang, a bibulous local constable and future founder of the Han dynasty, used to go on all-night drinking binges, running up enormous tabs. Once, while he lay collapsed in a drunken stupor in a wine-shop, the owner saw a dragon hovering over his head—a sure sign of future greatness—and immediately “broke the tally,” forgiving him his accumulated drinking debts.51

  Tallies weren’t just used for loans, but for any sort of contract—which is why early paper contracts also had to be cut in half and one half kept by each party.52 With paper contracts, there was a definite tendency for the creditor’s half to function as an IOU and thus become transferable. By 806 ad, for instance, right around the apogee of Chinese Buddhism, merchants moving tea over long distances from the far south of the country and officials transporting tax payments to the capital, all of them concerned with the dangers of carrying bullion over long distances, began to deposit their money with bankers in the capital and devised a system of promissory notes. They were called “Flying Cash,” also divided in half, like tallies, and redeemable for cash in their branches in the provinces. They quickly started passing from hand to hand and operated something like currency. The government first tried to forbid their use, then a year or two later—and this became a familiar pattern in China—when it realized that it could not suppress them, switched gears and established a bureau empowered to issue such notes themselves.53