Pāli RootsGiving in the ĀgamasThe Field of Merit in the VinayaFrom Giving to PāramitāThe Three Wheels EmptyThe Reverse Side of the ŚūraṅgamaThe LotusThe Huayan Dharma-RealmThe Modern Diagnosis, and a Coda
23
Part 3 · The Field of Merit in the Vinaya
Giving · 2 papers
The two parts before this both spoke from the giver's end—how the hand inside a person's heart loosens (Part One), and what that hand looks like when it reaches into the human worl[ from the book's part intro ]
論Study the papersfootnotes · abstracts
09The Saṅgha as a Field of MeritThe cātuddisa saṅgha — the vinaya-constituted legal recipient of every monastic real-property donation — is the structural form by which early Buddhism answered a specific temporal problem: how giving remains operative once it passes from the donor's present-moment cetanā into the community structure that receives it. This paper reads the structure through two interlocking moves: the donor-recipient asymmetry (the legal recipient is not the community the donor perceives but a class-beneficiary extending spatially across the four directions and temporally across āgatānāgata, arrived and not-yet-arrived) and the time-binding mechanism (the triple prohibition 不應分 · 不應自入 · 不應賣買, the suspension of present ownership, and the inter-class closure of the Upāli QA at T1435 fascicle 48). Together they produce the DĀNA volume's first institutional landing of ahaṁkāra-loosening: a release of the donor's "I give" performed by the vinaya's legal dative rather than by the donor's psychological cultivation. The asymmetry is performed, not described, in the three redirection episodes opening T1428's Senāsanakkhandhaka (Bimbisāra, an unnamed gṛhapati, Anāthapiṇḍika); the mechanism is codified in the four-class taxonomic definition of the same fascicle. Cross-disciplinary comparison with Mauss's Essai sur le don finds shared suspension of ownership but decisive divergence on reciprocity: a non-reciprocal gift-structure is possible, preserved across six independent Indian vinaya transmissions for 2,500 years, stabilized by the custodial assembly's self-binding rather than external fiduciary enforcement. Comparison with the common law charitable trust and biens de mainmorte shows class-beneficiary perpetuity and inalienability achieved without named trustee or external sovereign. The paper opens Part III, places the DĀNA volume's central thesis at its first institutional landing, and hands off to P10 Abhayādāna, which takes up the same problem for non-material giving through the sīla layer.10The Emergence of AbhayadānaWestern moral traditions classify "not killing" as a prohibition — a negative duty. Early Buddhism's mid-fifth-century Chinese translation window reclassifies the same act as a gift: abhayadāna. This paper argues the reclassification is neither extension nor accident but the product of two structural asymmetries. First, a millennium-long substance–name asymmetry: the substance of abhayadāna is already fully operative in the Nikāya/Āgama strata (the five precepts reframed as pañca mahādānāni in AN 9.20 and its direct Ekottara parallel at T0125 juan 20 Bhadrika the householder) and in the Vinaya institutions (the monastic vihāra idiomatically called "the city where fearlessness is given" thrice in T1442; the rain-retreat origin story grounded in non-harming to small creatures, preserved in four of the five Chinese vinayas as a pre-schismatic common ancestor), yet the name abhayadāna does not crystallize as a taxonomic category until Kumārajīva's T1509 (~405 CE) and Dharmakṣema's T1488 (~425 CE). Second, an axis-switch: the Nikāya dāna taxonomy is ordered by who receives (MN 142's fourteen recipients); the fifth-century triad is ordered by what is given; abhayadāna is the first specimen on the new axis, not an extension of the old. And the third slot is born at the śīla/dāna interface — T1509 places the triad not in the dāna-pāramitā chapter but in the śīla-pāramitā chapter (juan 14, T25.163b), showing that abhayadāna is precept-qua-gift reclassification. The paper closes by handing off to P11: if abhayadāna is the third slot, how does the triad get restructured by śūnyatā under the dāna-pāramitā system?Same part, two ways in — papers keep the scholarly apparatus; the book is continuous prose for reading. Same source.