Buddhism’s main organizational advantage was that it was always centered
on full-time specialists cut loose from family ties, which is to say, monks. Taoist
monasticism, which developed in imitation of the Buddhists, was never as
thoroughgoing or as successful. In its initial growth during the period of
dynastic division, the Taoist church was in the hands of families of southern
aristocrats who used it to further their political interests; and later Taoism
tended to center on small temples catering to the peasantry. Buddhist monas-
ticism, by contrast, had achieved a spectacular success already in the period of
post-Han disintegration. Its success was based on its material advantages in
transforming a society in which most resources were locked up in patrimonial
households. Because of their open recruitment and independence from family
inheritance of property, the monasteries provided a new organizational flexibil-
ity for structuring the economy. This in turn fostered the transformation of
China into an expanding market economy, the first real takeoff of proto-capi-
talism in world history.^2
The Buddhist temples became great landowners, if not quite on the scale
of the Christian monasteries and cathedrals, which held one third of the
cultivated land in medieval Europe. Especially during the period of the ethni-
cally alien northern dynasties, the monasteries were centers for cultivating
conquered and devastated territories under the patronage of the kings; in much
the same way early Christian monasteries and crusading orders were frontier
outposts for royal power in northern and eastern Europe. When the Toba rulers
of the Northern Wei conquered Shantung in 467 c.e., they enslaved part of
the population and put them to work cultivating fields given to the Buddhist
monasteries and doing manual labor on the monastery grounds. Local families
were organized into Sangha Households responsible for collecting grain to
be stored at the monastery for redistribution at times of famine (Ch’en, 1964:
154–157). Since land attached to the Sangha Households was free of taxa-
tion, other private families voluntarily attached themselves, and the institution
spread widely. Monasteries fostered economic expansion, increasing agricul-
tural production and opening up new agricultural lands. Monks used the
storehouses of grain to make loans at interest, thus turning to systematic
speculation and creating a financial marketplace.
In the absence of a money economy, or of a state machinery strong enough
to collect taxes reliably, the monasteries with their stores of wealth and their
system of trading were the banks and the long-distance commercial structure
of China. Buddhist monasteries, like their Christian counterparts in Europe,
provided the systematic cultivation, reinvestment of profits, and even the
beginnings of industrial production which laid the foundations for growth in
the secular economy in the later T’ang and the Sung. Monasteries established
“Inexhaustible Treasuries,” a kind of bank for goods donated by pious laypeo-
Revolutions: Buddhist and Neo-Confucian China • 277