Abstract

Monastic Investment Bootstrapping: An Economic Model for the Expansion of Early Buddhism

Highlights

  • Already more than twenty years ago, Gregory Schopen shed light on one fascinating historical conundrum as it relates to early Indian Buddhism: monastic Buddhists, as they self-identify in inscriptions from the last few centuries BCE, were listed, in multitudes, as frequent major donors to stūpa pilgrimage centers like Sanchi, Bharhut, and others.[1]

  • By Generation 2, the saṃgha did not need to draw upon its local resources to construct and expand on Sanchi. They drew funds mostly from non-local monastics, representing an extension of the immediate donation network. This model may be summarized as gradual material expansion from within, which is akin to modern-day venture capitalism ‘bootstrapping’, whereby a group of founders and co-founders of a company primarily utilize their own financial and donation resources to close the initial funding gap in order to give their company a firm standing from which to incorporate and produce goods

  • Material expansion from within— known as bootstrapping in my model—is primarily observable during the Early Historic period with a large amount of evidence from a single location examined over a set time frame

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Summary

Introduction

Already more than twenty years ago, Gregory Schopen shed light on one fascinating historical conundrum as it relates to early Indian Buddhism: monastic Buddhists, as they self-identify in inscriptions from the last few centuries BCE, were listed, in multitudes, as frequent major donors to stūpa pilgrimage centers like Sanchi, Bharhut, and others.[1] Schopen was not the first to notice this phenomenon whereby the premier ascetics from a śramaṇic tradition seemed to have a great deal of wealth, he was, to my knowledge, the first to recognize one very defining feature of these epigraphic records To use his own words—which seem to be first published in 1992, and again in 1994, 1995, and 1996 in articles for several leading journals—monk and nun donors were listed and described ‘exactly like laymen’ in extant epigraphic corpora.[2] What he observed was that, at least in these plentiful donative inscriptions, monastic donors seemed to possess substantial wealth with which to gift and self-identified their natal home residences instead of their home vihāras. Schopen’s significant observation has since been scarcely re-emphasized or

There are many examples throughout Gregory Schopen’s two collected volumes
Findings
Conclusion
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