This article examines the process in which Chinese Buddhists gradually came to embrace the concept of money, from prohibiting the handling of gold and silver in the Indian vinaya tradition, indirectly mentioning money using euphemisms in Buddhist texts, highlighting examples of poor and wealthy monks in Dunhuang materials, to eventually referring to money directly and using money to define and calculate sins in pure rules (qinggui) texts. The regulations on auctions in monastic pure rules also showcase how the compilers of these materials followed up with the external world, and how Chan Buddhists dealt with “this worldly” secular affairs. The Chan discourse on money is presented in how pure rules used monetary fines as a way to punish one’s misconduct. Late Ming monk Zhuhong (1535-1615) combined the concepts of money and the popular “merit and demerit ledgers,” producing a Buddhist style ledger for lay people and another set of pure rules for the samgha in which the degree of sins are distinctly defined with money or repentance rituals. Based upon this, Qing period pure rules moved forward and focused more on imposing penalty with money rather than enforcing repentance rituals. This development underscores the fact that to the samgha who were tacitly permitted to keep private property by the Song period, charging a penalty was ironically more effective than other punishment methods. Republican period monastic pure rules returned to punishing disobedient monks using corporal punishment as penalty than imposing a fi ne due to currency instability caused by hyperinfl ation.
