AAR Centennial Roundtable: Liberation Is Only for Those Already Free: Reflections on Debts to Slavery and Enslavement to Debt in an Early Indian Buddhist Monasticism
Gregory Schopen, Department of Asian Languages and Cultures, UCLA.
摘要
—For my old friend John Thiel—
Although it appears that all surviving Indian Buddhist monastic codes, or Vinayas, have explicit rules barring admittance into the religious life of slaves and debtors, this fact has been largely avoided. Equally avoided, it seems, is the additional fact that a wide range of other monastic groups who had very different anthropologies and formal doctrines had the same restrictive rules. Moreover, these rules sit—at first sight oddly—with good historical evidence suggesting that monastic groups were, more often than not, heavily dependent on forms of unfree labor and engaged in creating debt in others, as well as incurring it themselves. By looking at one of the Buddhist codes in particular, and noting some of the parallels elsewhere, these issues come more clearly into focus, as do the problems involved—not the least of which would seem to be the limited reach of formal doctrine.
