Was The Buddha Really A Businessman?

Normally I wouldn’t trust a man who wears a pink tie with green, yellow and white spots. But I make an exception when it’s Prof. Gregory Schopen, far and away the most eminent contemporary historian of Indian Buddhism. Schopen researches have given us a deeper, more detailed and more realistic picture of Buddhism, particularly Buddhist monasticism. In this video Schopen delivers a paper on monastic involvement in business and finance, together with his usual cheeky comments and humorous asides. I only take issue with a few things he says. Schopen is referring to Buddhist monasticism as it became at least 500 years after the Buddha. To say that ‘…the Buddha’s monastic community was not modeled…on a religious institution, but on a commercial one, the craft or mercantile guild’ is certainly true of fully developed monasticism, but not of early monasticism as depicted in the Pali Sutta and Vinaya Pitakas. These texts are unambiguously hostile to money, financial dealings and even barter. When Schopen says ‘The Buddha said…’ which Buddha is he talking about? He’s talking about of the Buddha as he came to be conceived in the post-first millennium period, not the Buddha of the Pali Sutta Pitaka. Most of what Schopen attributes to the Buddha actually comes from the Mulusarvastvadin Vinaya, a text dating from after the 1st cent CE and composed in north-west India – a long way in both time and space from the real Buddha.
All monasticism, Buddhist included, Theravadin and Mahayanist as well, ancient and modern, always ends up owning more wealth that it originally set out to renounce. By about the 1st cent BCE Buddhist monks were beginning to accumulate extensive properties and be involved mainly in worldly pursuits – as most still are today – academic studies, fund raising, catering to the needs of the laity, money lending and management, wealth-creating projects like festivals and pujas, etc. R. A. L. H. Gunawardana’s seminal Robe and Plough shows how Theravadin monks in Sri Lanka developed the accounting, bookkeeping, bills of credit and contracts needed to manage and increase their vast holdings – all while meticulously following the Vinaya. However, none of this, not even the germs of it, can be detected in the Pali Sutta Pitaka, a fact that Schopen neglects to mention. And this should be kept in mind while listening to his fascinating lecture. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3GeZGFvbDzo
The Pali Vinaya on the other hand, dating as parts of it do from two, perhaps even three hundred years after the Buddha, does contain the beginnings of this compromise with worldly values. I’ll give you but one example.

The Vinaya tells us that once some monks leased out their fields to a farmer who sowed it with his own seed, and on another occasion they leased out their seed to a farmer who sowed it in his own fields. The Buddha is represented as saying that in such cases the monks should take a percentage of the harvest, although what amount is not given (Vin.I,250). The commentary suggests 10%, quite a reasonable amount by usual feudal standards. This rule must have been composed at a time when monasteries owned land, when they had enough grain to be able to lease it out and when they collected rents in kind. It also implies that they entered into (written) contracts, that they kept records of their dealings with tenants, that they had granaries to store excess grain, and almost certainly that they had ways of enforcing agreements when they were broken. It’s only a few steps and a few hundred years from this to what Schopen is describing. But even in this case, the land, grain and the income from it was clearly the property of a corporate body, i.e. the monastery, and was owned jointly by all the monks. But we also have stories in the Vinaya showing that monks were starting to own private property apart from their eight requisites - land, villages, slaves, etc. Although Schopen is always reluctant to say so, working out a chronology of Buddhist texts is possible, and the Pali Sutta Pitaka is generally older than the Viniya Pitaka, and both are much older that even early Sanskrit Buddhist literature.