Debt: The First 5000 Years - autonomous learning

262 DEBT
of the illusory nature of the self and all material attachments; yet others,
as the ultimate form of charity, the giving of that which can only
be most precious, one's very physical existence, as a sacrifice to the
benefit of all living things; a sentiment that one tenth-century biographer
expressed in the following verses:
To give away the thing that is difficult to part with,
Is the best offering amongst the alms.
Let this impure and sinful body,
Turn into something like a diamondY
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.31 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 . ..