Giving while keeping: inexhaustible treasuries and inalienable wealth in medieval China

ABSTRACT Inexhaustible storehouses and permanent assets of monasteries become fundamental strategies through which Chinese Buddhism flourishes economically during the medieval period. At the center of these linked phenomena is the act of donation that enmeshes donors in a network of transcendent human-divine relations secured in the stasis of inalienability. Although research has explored how these institutions impacted the economic development of Chinese Buddhism, little work exists on how they function as strategies for creating social capital and negotiating identities. This article examines types of donor goods together with contracts and deeds from Dunhuang that detail the exchange of possessions which at once furthered economic gains for monasteries while creating karmic and social capital for the donors in the form of sacralized networks and renegotiated identities. At the crux of the exchange are inalienable objects, such as paintings on silk, that engender prestige and social memory, and thereby valorize newly established collective and individual identities. Through these objects and their ritual transformation, the patrons, their associates and the divinities invoked share a now-transfigured status grounded in a rearticulated and invariable past set within a reified future, most clearly depicted in the Pure land spaces of the Mogao Caves themselves.