1 Introduction

In premodern Japan, taxation on behalf of Buddhist monastic organizations included a number of economic transactions that today we would normally consider separate and distinct: taxes proper (mostly in goods and commodities), offerings, corvee labor, and even types of “slavery” (especially in the early stages of Japanese Buddhism).¹ Indeed, “taxes” to Buddhist temples are better understood in relation to the following categories: offerings to the Three Treasures, that is, the Buddha (initially, the founder of the religion, but later on, also Buddhas abiding in different cosmic realms and even icons enshrined in temples), the Sangha (i.e., the monastic community), and the Dharma (i.e., the Buddhist teachings); merit-making activities; and repayment of debt toward benefactors (rulers, parents, the Buddha and the clergy, etc.). In other words, Buddhist “taxes” were an integral part of what Georges Bataille defined the “general economy” of the sacred,² as part of the process of transformation/sublimation of material wealth into spiritual capital (good karma) and back (as Buddhistically sanctioned wealth and prosperity).

This paper will discuss a few moments in the intellectual history of the development of a system of taxes (and related economic interactions) in support of Buddhist organizations, their members, and their activities in premodern Japan. We will look at the concepts of debt toward benefactors (Jp. on 恩), with reference to an early scripture about social formation and primitive accumulation on the one hand and the early Japanese state’s taxation system on the other; of economic activity as merit-making (Jp. kudoku 功徳) (generating good karma); and the nature of offerings (Jp. kuyō 供養) as a later combination of the two. In particular, we will attempt to answer the following questions: How did the concepts of debt toward benefactors look like and how did they change over time? How did the idea of economic activity as merit-making develop? How and why were these two concepts combined in the form of offerings later on?

In order to address the problem of taxes in a Buddhist context, a few preliminary considerations might be necessary.

The first consideration is that “Buddhism” per se, as a unified and continuous institution, does not exist. Rather, there are (and have been) historically and regionally distinct Buddhist organizations, each with their systems of codes and rules, liturgies, and teachings.

Secondly, these distinct organizations were all operating under particular political regimes and institutions (until the modern period, these were all monarchies), which had different, and often complicated relations, to Buddhist organizations: some were supportive, others were inimical, still others were neutral; in some cases, polities’ attitudes toward Buddhism changed drastically over a relatively short time (depending on rulers’ personal affinity or distaste for Buddhism, political intrigue, economic consideration, etc.). And while some of these monarchical polities at times issued legal regulations for Buddhist monastical organizations (early Japan is an example), there did not exist in the Buddhist world an equivalent to Catholic canonical law. Buddhist temples also were subject to different legal regimes. Some were officially and directly supported by the state (or the king, or the court); others belonged to specific families, others were communal centers.

Thirdly, some monastic complexes had clearly spelled out systems of regulations, which were typically based on monastic precepts established in India in the first centuries of the Common Era (the Vinaya), but also included very localized provisions (and the Vinaya precepts are actually a multiplicity of texts with important differences among each other).

Fourthly, Buddhism initially emerges as the expression of groups of renunciants who had cut their ties (at least, ideally) with secular life; they were home-leavers (Jp. shukke 出家, i.e., they had literally abandoned their families) and set up organizations that functioned according to principles that were different from secular rules (in particular, they shared communal life inspired by ideals and practices of non-violence, structured along hierarchies based on seniority and learning and not on caste, family background and so forth); especially relevant for our theme here is the Buddhist non-reliance upon ordinary economic activities. In other words, Buddhist organizations were, at least in origin and for many centuries afterwards, utterly dependent upon the benevolence of the rulers on the one hand and the offerings from the communities with which they came in contact on the other hand. Benevolent rulers tended to grant Buddhist organizations a tax-exempt status, freeing them from the obligation to pay levies to the state (instead, they were required to provide ritual and conceptual support to the ruler and the polity), but at the same time making them rely on the goodwill of the state’s subjects.

Finally, some terminological considerations. The modern concept of tax (with its multiple tax forms and brackets and a systematic tax acquisition system controlled by the state, among other things) is hardly applicable to premodern Japan. In this paper, I will use the terms “tax” and “tributes” in a broad sense, to refer to the more or less forced extraction and requisition of wealth from people carried out in particular by, or in relation to, Buddhist monastic organizations.

In premodern East Asian polities (mostly corresponding to what today are China, Japan, Korea, and Vietnam),³ the rulers (emperors) were the supreme suzerains over the land and the sea, and had the exclusive right to impose and receive taxes from their subjects, mostly in the form of tributes in kind (Jp. nengu å¹´è²¢) and corvée labor. A similar arrangement seems to have existed in ancient India at the time of the spread of Buddhism in the first centuries of the Common Era.

This said, until the modern period, there was no income tax, no wealth tax, no inheritance tax, and no consumption tax; also, Buddhism never had a formal tithing system, in which all members of a congregation were required by law to provide a percentage of their income. Instead, residents in the countryside (peasants) were required to pay tributes in kind determined on the basis of the cultivable land they were responsible for (in other words, tributes were based on estimates about land productivity); later on, tributes were based on population (i.e., on estimated productivity of individual adults). There were also tributes that amounted to a sort of “produce tax” for people residing in non-cultivable lands (mountain areas, fishing villages, etc.).⁴ The revenues from tributes and corvées were used to support the state bureaucracy (the aristocracy), the military (the samurai), and public works; Buddhist temples, during the ancient period, were also supported by state revenues. Peasants were the only social category required to pay tributes; artisans and professional guilds were also required to provide corvée labor or specific services or tools (both to the state and to Buddhist temples). Residents in the capital cities were aristocrats with government appointments, who received stipends accordingly based on public tributes as described above (land rent etc.); samurai also received stipends based on land rents.

All temples also charged (and received) various kinds of fees: most often as a compensation for specific rituals requested by sponsors, but also transit fees (for going across regional boundaries or for crossing rivers) in lands they controlled. It is also worth noting that wealthy aristocrats, who were not required to pay taxes on their income,⁵ were nonetheless expected to disburse lavishly for Buddhist temples and rituals as part of the obligations that came with their elevated status. Professional guilds also contributed to Buddhist monastic organizations based on their own means. These “taxes” (tributes, fees, corvées, etc.) were de facto mandatory, but as we will see below, they were framed in terms of “offerings” to the temples and their buddhas.

This paper explores some of the ways in which some Buddhist monastic organizations dealt issues of taxation from within their specific conditions. And while the examples in this paper are mostly from premodern Japan, and therefore not automatically generalizable to other Buddhist contexts, it is hoped that they can provide some guidelines and perspectives to study issues of taxation in other Buddhist cultures as well.

2 The East Asian Context and Japanese Buddhism

The origin of taxes is narrated in an early Buddhist scripture, the Aggañña suttanta (which also exists in later versions, several of which are included in the East Asian Buddhist canons),⁶ as part of a gradual process of degeneration. In it, humans went from their original status as diaphanous and radiant angelic beings with no bodily concerns to morally corrupt and body-centered earthly denizens. This process led to the formation of private property, primitive accumulation, labor division and class/caste distinction, in a process that is described in an almost Marxian manner as a general decline. Private ownership of previously common land and ensuing wealth accumulation resulted in theft and violence. To put a stop to disorder, these early humans gathered in assembly and elected a leader, the first king/president, called Mahā-sammata or “great elected one,” with the specific and limited charge of “promoting goodness and punishing wickedness.”⁷ In exchange for that, the people who elected him would pay him a tribute (some versions of the scripture indicate that such tribute was equivalent to one tenth of one’s wealth). This is the Buddhist account of the origin of taxation. There is no time here to go into the complex discourses of Buddhist political thought and practice, but this early source indicates a clear desire to limit the prerogatives of rulers to the maintenance of social order in a corrupt world in exchange for a modest payment.

In East Asia, the arrival and subsequent adoption of Buddhism resulted in granting a special tax-exempt status to large monasteries that had received imperial or state authorization and sponsorship; in exchange for that exemption, monastics, freed from tributes and corvees, were supposed to dedicate themselves to the accumulation of religious virtue (in a process known in Buddhism as merit-making) to be used for the protection of the ruler and the state and the pacification of the subjects. In the Japanese version of this arrangement, the emperor would grant the Buddhist temples exclusive extractive rights (Jp. shiki 職) from specially designated estates (Jp. shōen 荘園) and control over the labor of their inhabitants (Jp. hyakushō 百姓). Thus, part of the taxes due to the state were diverted directly to the temples, which became largely autonomous, if not fully extra-territorial entities. This arrangement was adopted in Japan in the early eighth century and continued until the mid-tenth century, when the early Japanese government system based on the Chinese model collapsed.

Centuries before Buddhism was transmitted to Japan, Chinese Buddhist intellectuals legitimized this new politico-economic model, which also paid attention to the traditional East Asian emphasis on ancestors’ cults, with the doctrine of the “four types of indebtedness” (Jp. shion 四恩), which emerged around the time of the Tang Dynasty (seventh to tenth centuries), when Buddhism had a massive role in Chinese society. According to this doctrine, every human is “indebted” (and thus has specific obligations) to four agents: (i) one’s parents (for giving one birth and nourishment), (ii) all other sentient beings (since we are all reincarnation of each other, we are all related to each other), (iii) the ruler (for his peaceful and benevolent government), and (iv) the Three Treasures (i.e., the Buddha, Dharma, and the Sangha, for our salvation from the cycle of rebirths).⁸

Even though the Buddhist scriptures do not elaborate on details, this indebtedness – essentially unlimited in its nature – called for some kind of retribution/compensation (Jp. hōon 報恩). Specifically, one’s parents were compensated by filial obligations (which, in a Buddhist framework, included Buddhist rituals for the afterlife); the ruler was compensated by loyalty and tributes; sentient beings were compensated by mutual respect and affection (and by merit-making rituals at temples); and Buddhist organizations were compensated by devotion and support, which involved offerings of various kind. In this sense, at least, indebtedness was directly related to the soteriological concept of merit-making (the accumulation of positive karma that would influence positively one’s present live and one’s next reincarnation) on the one hand, and to economic matters on the other. Indeed, Buddhist economics, in traditional doctrinal terms, can be defined as a vast mechanism to transform material wealth and labor into “spiritual” value (i.e., good karma); this mechanism is circular, in that spiritual good karma is believed to produce worldly, material wealth, in a continuous and uninterrupted cycle.

Thus, it is not surprising that normative canonical texts do not offer any specific teachings about the economy beyond considerations about generosity, merit-making, and karmic retribution; in fact, Buddhist organizations were not for-profit corporations and largely operated outside of ordinary (non-sacred) economic principles. However, the lack of canonical sources on explicitly economic matters should not be interpreted as an indication that the latter were not relevant for monastic communities. Since Buddhist institutions were important economic hubs in medieval and early modern Japan, as in other Buddhist countries, much of Buddhist economic knowledge was developed in other sources and contexts, what Anne Blackburn has called the “practical canon” – a set of teachings, instructions, and rules about practical, everyday matters, that were not addressed in canonical sources but largely depended on local (and often, non-Buddhist) traditions.⁹ Therefore, one must look at specific economic practices and texts elucidating them (narratives, legal documents, etc.) – all materials that were part of the “practical canon” of Buddhism. There we see that at least some segments of premodern Japanese society tried to explain the origin of wealth in terms of the conceptual apparatus provided by Japanese vernacular Buddhist doctrines. According to them, agricultural production, financial interests, commercial profit, even gambling – all these activities involved the production of something out of nothing:¹⁰ this was explained in terms of the intervention of buddhas and kami (Japanese local gods) in the economic processes; divinities were thus at the center of productive and commercial activities.¹¹

In the following sections, I will first show in some detail how “taxes” and tributes and various kind were incorporated in the economic practices of Buddhist institutions in predemodern Japan. At first, in the middle ages (twelfth to sixteenth centuries), Buddhist religious institutions adopted earlier economic practices based on the Chinese Tang tax system and on Japanese indigenous practices of gift-giving or offerings and transformed them into a sacred economy based on the circulation of value between this world and the invisible realm of buddhas and kami (local gods) and the transformation of worldly wealth into salvific merit and viceversa. Later on, in the Edo period (seventeenth to nineteenth centuries), the development of a proto- or quasi-capitalist mode of production and system of exchange resulted in the accumulation of wealth in few hands and increased economic disparity; as a consequence, intellectuals produced economic discourses in which value and wealth were the outcomes of interactions with demons and evil spirits, thereby questioning the standard understanding proposed by religious institutions since the medieval period.

3 Buddhist Economic Practices

Contrary to received assumptions, Buddhism has never been a world-denying religion, unconcerned with, or clearly inimical to, economic activities. Rather, Buddhist practice has always been predicated upon a decent living, as is clear in the case of merit-making, with its goal of improving material life in the present as a way to gain security, peace of mind, and therefore the leisure to engage in Buddhist practice aimed at future salvation. In medieval and early modern Japan as well (early twelfth to mid-nineteenth centuries), Buddhist temples were hubs of innovative economic activities. They served as catalysts for market places, centers of professional guilds, places for entertainment and performing arts, entrepreneurial agencies involved in land reclamation and agricultural developments, technological and industrial innovation, financial activities, and trade (including foreign trade until the early seventeenth century). Large temples attracted workers and tradespeople in their areas, paid wages to them, and fostered a general diffusion of economic benefits in those areas. This is true even in the Edo period (1600–1868), a time generally considered as one of decline for Buddhism.¹²

Where are the historical roots of this economic prosperity? Economic issues became a primary concern for Buddhist institutions in Japan from the tenth century, when the centralized state modeled on the Chinese empire began to collapse as a consequence of social and political transformations; because of that, temples lost state support and thus needed to secure new forms of income in order to survive. Over a span of four hundred years, they focused on four main areas: real estate (with the acquisition of land-holdings and their revenues); finance (donations of various nature, investments, levies, and so forth); technology (the creation and control of professional guilds, engineering and infrastructures, transportation); and trade (with some temples hosting regular market places, and in some cases even financing risky but lucrative international trade with China). They also came up with marketing strategies and advertisement campaigns to promote themselves in competition with other sacred sites; for that purpose, they relied on a vast array of itinerant religious specialists (hijiri 聖, yamabushi 山伏, jinin 神人, oshi お師, etc.), who spread teachings and information about temples and shrines, promoted pilgrimages, and acquired donations in large areas of Japan. Some of these specialists (particularly the jinin, affiliated with the large temple-shrine complexes of Nara and Kyoto, and the yamabushi mountain ascetics) were also in charge of collecting taxes and fees and securing corvée services. Since a system of mandatory tithes based on personal income did not exist, Buddhist institutions relied upon tributes extracted from their landholdings (this type of “taxes” typically amounted to around 50% of the harvest, and was thus variable), fees derived from services of various kind (including religious rituals), corvée labor from their subjects and affiliated, and donations from wealthy patrons, commoners, and pilgrims.

Finally, we must emphasize a crucial point: Japanese Buddhist institutions relied heavily on their “Shinto” components for both theoretical aspects and practical dimensions of their economic activities; this aspect deserves some background explanation. Between the twelfth and mid-nineteenth centuries, what are now Shinto shrines were either full-fledged Buddhist temples (dedicated to Japanese deities such as Hachiman 八幡, Tenman Tenjin 天満天神, Konpira 金毘羅, and many others) or parts of institutions dominated by Buddhist temples, where a significant number of monastics and other religious personnel were in charge of matters pertaining to these gods (called kami in Japanese), such as theoretical discourses, rituals, administration, and proselytism.¹³ It was natural for such institutions to develop discourses about the economy centered on traditional, local practices and beliefs that also involved local deities and their cults.¹⁴

4 Sacred Properties and the Origin of Wealth

As explained above, from around the eleventh century, Japanese monastic institutions began to deal with the lack of state funding by accumulating land estates and by extracting wealth from them in form of “taxes” (tributes and corvée labor). By the late thirteenth century, a new legal principle had gained wide recognition, according to which land donated to buddhas and kami cannot be returned to human ownership (butsuda senyÅ« no chi kuikaesu-bekarazu 仏陀施入ノ地不可悔返).¹⁵ This principle was originally stressed by religious institutions, but later even donors recognized it explicitly.¹⁶ At the same time, temple administrators and wealthy donors alike came up with legal frameworks defining offerings to the temples, which came to be considered respectively, “properties of the Buddha” (butsumotsu 仏物) and “properties of the Kami” (local gods) (shinmotsu 神物). The former was further articulated in properties destined to the support of the buddha (the main icon at a specific temple), the clergy, and the Dharma; the idea behind this distinction is that some donors wanted to make sure that their gifts were not appropriated and misused by unscrupulous monks. This was made possible by the fact that a buddha (that is, the main icon of a temple) was considered as a legal person with rights and jurisdictions.¹⁷

Buddhist temples levied tributes from their estates – mostly rice, but depending on the area, also other products (salt, silk, cotton, metal, dried fish, and so forth). A portion of those tributes, known as hatsuho 初穂 (“first produce”) or jōbun 上分 (“superior portion” of the harvest), was offered directly to the main deity of the temple or shrine as a sign of gratitude for the harvest. This practice was probably connected to ancient customs of the Japanese archipelago, in which the first produce was offered to the gods (kami) and their emissaries – the local leaders – to thank them for their generosity and to secure their benevolence in the future. Particularly important in this respect were the nie 贄, first produces (rice and delicacies from the mountains and the sea) offered to the rulers since ancient times.¹⁸ First produces offered to the kami were stored in sacred storehouses managed by the leaders of the community or by special personnel (kugonin 供御人) at the imperial household. The following year, those rice grains were loaned to the peasants for sowing (tanemomi 種籾); after the harvest, the peasants would return the amount of grains they had borrowed with a fee – an additional offering to the kami as a sign of gratitude in the form of first produces.¹⁹ In this way, the kami were envisioned as the origin of rice – and therefore, as the source of both life and wealth – in a cyclical movement requiring human offerings to ensure a bountiful harvest and sustain life.²⁰ This cycle is the origin of the practice of lending grains known as suiko 出挙. Under the Ritsuryō 律令 legal system (early 700s–late 900s), suiko was mostly controlled by the state (kusuiko 公出挙 or “public suiko”), and provincial governors were responsible for the loan of seeds preserved in public storehouses; however, there were also private rice-lenders (shisuiko 私出挙).²¹

Around the early eleventh century, when the state, due to the above- mentioned collapse of its order, was no longer able to enforce public suiko lending, influential Buddho-Shinto religious institutions such as the Grand Shrines of Ise, Hie shrine, and Kumano took control over this ancient custom related to offering hatsuho to the kami, and gave it new meaning and social relevance. The rice they received as “superior portion” of the harvest (jōbun), as the “first produces” began to be called, were considered inalienable sacred properties belonging to kami and buddhas (respectively, shinmotsu 神物 and butsumotsu 仏物) of the temple or shrine owning the land. The “superior portion” was then loaned at an interest (kashiage 貸上) to farmers for sowing also located outside of these institutions’ own estates by itinerant specialists affiliated with them: yamabushi at Kumano, jinin at Hie, and oshi at Ise. After harvesting, the peasants would return to the temple or shrine, as part of the community’s annual tributes (nengu), the amount of rice they had received the previous year plus interests ranging from fifty percent to one hundred percent.

In this system, financial activity took the form of a loan of properties belonging to the buddhas and the kami which, after completion of the agricultural cycle, were returned to the divinities with an additional offering as a token of gratitude (which functioned in fact as interests). As a consequence, tributes and loan interests were considered as merit-making offerings, not only in the case of the buddhas and the temples, but also of the kami and their shrines. At this stage, the cycle connecting production, sacred offerings, and lending already existed at the intersection of several symbolic layers: ancient local practices related to production and offerings, centralized state taxation, and Buddhist appropriation in terms of merit-making; additionally, this cycle was implemented in practice by personnel affiliated with “Shinto” components of large monastic institutions.

Gradually, the concepts of “first produce” and “superior portion” was extended to other forms of taxation, such as levies and fees on commodities transported by merchants when passing through toll posts controlled by temples. Religious interests in the form of “superior portions” were collected not only in rice, but also in salt (jōbun’en 上分塩), silk, fish, and other products. From the thirteenth century onward, marketplace fees and transit fees (sekishoryō 関所料), which religious institutions charged to itinerant merchants, were also understood as a kind of “first produce” (hatsuho) of trade.²² Medieval historian Amino Yoshihiko 網野善彦 argued that such fees developed from offerings made to the deities when travelers crossed sacred thresholds, such as mountain passes, borders, fords, ports, and so forth, and when traveling by sea (in ancient folklore, the sea was often described as closely related to the other world). According to Amino, this might explain why the responsibility for collecting such fees fell on itinerant religious specialists such as kanjin shōnin 勧進上人, hijiri and jinin in general.

The language of agricultural production as part of a system of tributes was thus used, at least initially, to explain the production of surplus value in trade. However, the origin of wealth in trade could not be fully explained based on agriculture, which was normally conceptualized as a static source of an unchangeable amount of production. As we shall see below, many medieval tales describe the sudden origin of wealth as due to the intervention of some divinity after the protagonist’s visit to a marketplace, a temple/shrine, or along the road (which was considered at the time a no-man’s land and thus a potential site for supernatural encounters).

5 Structural Considerations: Taxes, Wealth, and the Sacred

At least some segments of medieval Japanese society tried to explain (or construct) the “mystery” of the production of wealth in terms of the conceptual apparatus provided by religious institutions and their doctrines – wealth amounted to the generation of something from nothing.²³ This was explained in terms of the intervention of buddhas and kami in the economic processes. The divinities were at the center of all productive and commercial activities: they generated the crops, and to them the first produce was returned; they generated interests; they enabled objects to be exchanged for profit; they even controlled the fortune of gamblers. In other words, the intellectual framework of medieval Japanese economy maintained that buddhas and kami bring wealth to this world by intervening directly in the generation of surplus (added value), in agriculture and in any other commercial and manufacturing activities. Part of the surplus the divinities generated was supposed to be returned to them (as donations) in order to keep the cycle of general economy functioning. In the realm of economics, as well as in the realm of religion, small investments (rice grains) could yield enormous profits when controlled by the deities.

According to numerous narratives circulating in premodern Japan, the accumulation and preservation of wealth results from the intervention of divinities, and wealth is usually described as a gift that rewards a long and continuing attitude (honesty, devotion, kindness). Even though some stories tell of deities giving a precious gift (gold or in other precious objects) to a poor person or family, that gift alone is still not sufficient to accumulate and preserve wealth. Abundance and fortune are directly related to religious virtue (toku å¾³) and merit-making (kudoku 功徳).²⁴ In other words, when a poor person (hinja 貧者) accumulates religious merit (toku, kudoku), the deities intervene to bestow upon him (or, less frequently, her) good fortune (fuku 福), which results in wealth (tomi 富). At that point, the protagonist has become rich (chōja 長者). According to these stories, then, merit-making generates economic profit; the language of religious virtue overlaps explicitly with that of economics. Wealth, however, is reversible. When the protagonists cease to accumulate religious merit, because of greed or other unethical behavior, their wealth also disappears. One should note that in this context, merit-making is a form of retribution for one’s indebtedness (on) to the Three Treasures (Buddhist institutions), and, in some cases, one’s parents and other beings. (See Fig. 1)

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Structure of the Buddhist sacred economy

Citation: Interdisciplinary Journal for Religion and Transformation in Contemporary Society 12, 1 (2026) ; 10.30965/23642807-bja10146

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In this sense, wealth is the result of one repaying their indebtedness to the various figures and agencies (parents, ruler, sentient beings, and Buddhism) we mentioned at the beginning of this article. If the protagonists of these stories are able to keep up the mechanism of sacred economy (merit – wealth – offerings – merit – wealth – offerings and so on), they will be able to join the ranks of quasi-capitalist social groups. If they fail to do so, they will return to the realm of subsistence and poverty. However, and interestingly, the acquisition of infinite wealth is almost unthinkable in this context – it would be a grotesque manifestation of greed, rather than the fulfillment of a divine promise; we see this especially during the Edo period (early seventeenth to mid nineteenth centuries), when many authors openly criticized merchants’ greed.

6 Concluding Remarks on the Buddho-Shinto General Economy

Let us go back to the question from the beginning of this article: How did the concepts of debt toward benefactors look like and how did they change over time? How did the idea of economic activity as merit-making develop? How and why were these two concepts combined in the nature of offerings later on? By now, it should be clear that religious institutions controlled, more or less directly, an enormous amount of wealth in medieval Japan, derived from various economic activities that were more or less all related to the modern concept of “tax”: wealth tax calculated on production estimates for the landholdings, voluntary contributions to temples and their activities (donations), fees, corvées. Part of this wealth was reinvested and kept circulating (suiko, kashiage, shidōsen, etc.), but another part was “unproductive”: used in countless rituals, consumed to maintain temples and clergy, stored away in the form of precious objects without obvious market value. Represented in this way, the medieval Buddhist economy does not seem to respond to any economic rationale. This is a case of what Georges Bataille, mentioned in the introduction of this article, called “general economy”, whose primary object is “the ‘expenditure’ (the ‘consumption’) of wealth, rather than production.”²⁵ Even though Bataille was not talking about Japanese Buddhism, some of his conclusions seem to be relevant for our discussion here.

The general economy of religious institutions was based on several orders of offerings gravitating, as we have seen, around the “superior portions” (jōbun) – the symbolic core of the entire system. The superior portions were donated in order to be eliminated from the secular market, an enormous mass of capital, accumulated by religious institutions and in part destroyed through ritual transfer to the metahuman of buddhas and kami. In this respect it follows the description of “general economy” provided by Georges Bataille. However, we find two important differences. First of all, not all the surplus collected by religious institutions was destroyed, as a certain amount of it was actually returned to the secular market as loans with the ultimate goal to increase the yield of religious profits; ideally, the more religious institutions loaned, the more they would acquire in an endless escalation of surplus and expenditure. Secondly, profit was infused back in society as wages for professionals and laborers and purchases for the temples and their residents. Rather than with an “accursed share,” Buddhist general economy seems to be dealing with a “blessed share,” whose expenditure would result in higher productivity and widespread wealth. In a sense, Buddhism (with the supporting role of Japanese divinities) gestures towards an alternative system of exchange in which value comes from giving things away rather than buying or taking them; this is the context in which “sacred taxation” took place, as taxes and corvees were envisioned as offerings, tokens of gratitude, repayment of existential debt.

Finally, Buddhist organizations were able to join economic activities with doctrinal principles (the concepts of debt, merit-making, karmic retribution, divine intervention, and so forth) through ritual action (offerings, devotional activities). Of course, they were only able to do so when political authorities allowed them to, and the history of Buddhism is also a history of state authorities trying to prevent Buddhist organizations to secure their autonomy by reducing their access to wealth and economic activities – or, in other words, by reducing the temples’ capacity to secure “taxes” in the broad sense we have discussed in this chapter.