Making Punya Portable Draft From its earliest days, Indian Buddhism exhibits a decided elective affinity with

the mercantile community and its ideology.1 This affinity can be traced even in the old Pali literature, where the traders Trapusha and Bhallika, along with the wealthy donor Anathapindaka, are among the Buddhas most prominent lay-converts. [FIG 1]This affinity depended on an evolutionary symbiosis between the commodities in whose transmission each specialized punya or merit for the monastic community, and panya or trade goods for the mercantile community. In both cases, portability is crucial, for goods without trade cannot increase wealth, and merit without transmissibility ends in selfish solipsism. Punya, key product of Buddhist ritual activity, is one of the oldest and most minutely explored issues in the history of the tradition, and we know a good deal about how it was ritually generated and stored in holy persons, places, and things. What has been less thoroughly explored is its correlate, panya, the substance of mercantile activity. As we shall see, punya and panya are almost literally two sides of the same coin, expressing a powerful potential for the acculturation of Buddhism to mercantile contexts one that remains as vital in the 21st century as it was two thousand years ago in Gandhara, the birthplace of a form of Buddhism deeply influenced by mercantile metaphors. Etymologically, panya derives from the root pan, to weigh or measure. In a concrete sense, panya designates any kind of trade goods. In a more abstract extension of the term, panya will also designates any form of worldly wealth.2 In both senses, panya becomes pre-eminently what must be measured in terms of time, space and resources.3 Goods only become mercantile when traded; panya is only panya when it ceases to be fixed, and instead becomes both portable and translatable into other forms of value. Capital is the key catalyst of such translation. It is created when two items are in place 1) an undifferentiated matrix of ideally precious metal that resists decay 2) an authoritative seal to vouchsafe its value. Under these conditions, panya as wealth can be condensed into a coin. This happens when panya is translated into a karsha-pana, the punch-marked coins of the Mauryan era. Since these coins have no standardized weight or even shape, they had to be assayed to verify their genuineness. Accordingly, the karsha-pana bears the impress (mudra) of any number of mercantile guilds each of whom evidently tested and verified its value. In the first century, the Kushan emperors sought to further standardize and purify their coinage, evidently so that it might more efficiently serve as capital in their culture1 2

Weber, Liu ### The formulaic phrase panyam adaya, ubiquitous in the highly mercantile text from the northwest called the Divyavadana, means after assembling merchandise the first step in any kind of mercantile endeavor. 3 Parallel with the term maya ###

spanning, trade-driven empire,4 situated as it was on the so-called Grand Trunk Road. Taking as its model the early Imperial Roman denarii, the monarch Kanishka minted beautiful gold coins bearing the impress of two parallel authorities: the king himself, and the Boddo, the latter a kind sacred canopy guaranteeing the economic value of the capital upon which he appears. Indian sources refer to the stamping of images on an undifferentiated matrix as sealing, or mudra. An indispensable aspect of mercantile activity, mudra appears in a standard formula describing childhood education as the formal term for calculation, (32) a procedure allows for definitive ascertainment and tracking of value. In the first story from the Divyavadana, the lord of merit (punya-maheshakhya) named Purna stamps his mercantile goods with his own seal to indicate ownership (sva-mudra-lakshitam kritva, 130). In the story of Sudhana, the finger-seal (anguli-mudrika, 288) works as a manifest sign from which a hidden presence may be inferred, in this case revealing to the kinnara Manohara that her human husband Sudhana had unexpectedly arrived at her home. [FIG 5] Seals are also found sealed inside stupas, like this pyramidial seal from Gandhara. [FIG 7] Absent epigraphy from this cache, it is difficult to know precisely what the intent of this deposition may have been. Much later stupas from Ratnagiri in Orissa do contain clay tablets inscribed with the formula that condenses the essence of the Buddhas teachings into its most concise form, the ye dharma phrase. In this case, the deposition of the sealings was probably a method of consecrating the stupas in which they appear as containers of the Buddhas mentality. (1991 article, Debala Mitra) An important theme appearing in Gandhara art presents the stupa as the literal center of merit-making activity. From circumambulation to donation, it is likely that images of this type functioned simultaneously as models of and for mercantile involvement in Buddhist ritual activity. Just as importantly, the stupa performs the same epistemological function as a seal: allowing the inference of an invisible but decisive potency sealed inside. That stupas functioned in just this manner is clear from an episode from the Divyavadana. [FROM DISSERTATION Na nimittena vina punyam kartum shakyate,] Under these conditions, the stupa operates like the marks (nimitta) stamped (mudrita) on coinage. In addition to its epistemological function, the stupa also has a physical function: it is sealed, like a containment vessel, so as to prevent any disintegration of its contents. The term kshaya designates the phenomenon of disintegration. It appears in the Tripitaka as the key descriptor of Arhatship, which consiste pre-eminently in the disintegration of the projections (asrava-kshaya). The Ratnakuta treatises of the Mahayana Sutra literature introduce the kshaya-kala, an eschatologically-construed period in which the teaching of the Buddha is first debased and then disappears. The term is also used in mercantile contexts to refer to the diminution of wealth that occurs if one ceases working and instead seeks only enjoyment. The stock phrase 34 na cirad eva asmakam bhogas tanutvam
4

Begram hoard ### [if we need more text, we can pull this footnote up into the text]

parikshayam paryadanam gaccheyuh. Such formulae parallel important tenets of the Protestant ethic so crucial to the development of a Christianity acculturated to mercantile activity. The importance of maintaining a stupas seals intact may be inferred from the fact that their breaking constitutes the first root sin. Indeed, from the perspective of the tradition, the breaking of stupas is perhaps the most prominent sign of the onset of the Age of Disintegration. It is thus ironic that precisely such stupa-breakage, undertaken under the auspices of archaeological investigation, is the source of our most concrete knowledge regarding their operation. A definitive pattern emerges when we examine the contents of Taxilan stupas. Again and again, the stupa contains a casket or series of progressively smaller caskets. At their core lies a curious collocation of panya in the forms both of luxury trade-goods and coinage with calcined bones and ashes, presumably saturated (paribhavita) with punya or merit. In one of those rare confluences between art and text, an episode from the Vinaya reveals the dynamics behind this enigma. A wealthy householder conceives a desire to visit the solitary saint, but unfortunately arrives too late the Pratyekabuddha has already entered nirvana. The only thing that can be done is to perform the funerary rites. At their termination, the wealthy householder deposited the bones in an urn made of crystal after having mixed them with precious stones an action that involving the economic resources that would be available especially to wealthy merchants. After the deposition of bones and stones in a crystal urn, the bones shone brilliantly and uttered sound. Something about the deposition of the bones together with the precious stones had rendered them alive and active even to the extent of exercising a force perceptible with the sensory apparatus. The thangka entitled Death of the Buddha Shakyamuni depicts a similar light-and-sound show, which also occurs in the context of sealed stupas. It functions as a sign, which constitutes the basis upon which our wealthy householder transforms his deposition-generated merit into wealth through a resolution (pranidhana): as his bones mixed with precious stones shine excessively and utter sound, just so may I, through this root of merit, have an eye for the ascertainment of precious gems. The conjoint deposition of resource value and religious value, punya and panya, within a hermetically sealed environment creates a metaphorical fusion-reaction, whose energy may be applied to any number of ends through the pranidhana. Yet there is a limitation here for the inherently mobile mercantile community: the stupa ties the mechanism of punya-creation to a specific spot of earth (prthivi-pradesha). Portable stupas may have allowed access to punya absent a structural stupa; abundant reliquaries of just this type have appeared in the archaeological record. A millennium later, in the Pala era, models of the Mahabodhi temple were produced for a similar punya-generating purpose. But on dangerous trading voyages in ancient India, it would certainly be desirable to carry the circumstance-shaping force of punya with oneself. The Vinaya suggests that the earliest form of portable punya was the individual monk, whose symbiosis with the mercantile community is strikingly revealed in provisions that allow him to take the varsha with caravans and on ships. In the Divyavadana, however, a new

form of portable punya appears. This is the punya-maheshakhya, the lord of merit, a person who, stupa-like, combines within themselves both resource value and religious value.

Panya is the most important aspect of mercantile activity: trade goods themselves. It derives from pan, to weigh or measure. Punya, for its part, is generally translated by the obscure term merit, or less succinctly, positive karmic potency understood as a substance. Punya operates on two parallel levels. Soteriologically, punya generates a positive rebirth as is well known from both textual and epigraphic sources. What has been less thoroughly explored is how Indian Buddhists understood punya works economically generate positive experience in the here-and-now by catalyzing positive economic circumstances. To understand the relationship between punya and panya is to understand the evolutionary symbiosis between religious and economic spheres which allowed first century Buddhism to institutionalize effectively. This symbiosis retains a similar potential for institutionalization in the business-oriented world of the twenty-first century, and in particular for the sale of goods (panya) understood as bearers of the uniquely Buddhist form of religious charisma called punya. The key to the entire system lies in the mutual transmissibility of punya and panya. Certainly the shlesha was suggestive, and puns of this type occur throughout the Upanishads and Mahayana sutra literature. For the Indian Buddhists, plays on words can reveal a subtle unity between them. And in the present case, they are perhaps even literally, as we shall see, two sides of the same coin. In the mercantilized twenty-first century, it is probably self-evident why monks might benefit from association with the business community and its wealth, panya. But what benefit did donors derive from Certainly such wealth was responsible for the construction of vast monastic establishments of which Taxilas Dharmarajika complex is archetypal. Its archaeological remains reveal how this complex worked as a metaphorical worm-hole between sacred and secular, allowing the transmutation of money into merit. The sine qua non of merit-generation is an appropriate object to reverence. In ancient Indian Buddhism, the object in question is the stupa. The stupa works on two levels. First, it constitutes a sign (nimitta) whereby worshippers can recognize a sacred site. Without it, according to the Divy, one cannot generate merit (nimittena vina na shakyate punyam kartum). Here, the stupa allows access to relics and thus the experience-shaping merit (punya) their worship (puja) generates, even when they shall be occluded (antardhasyati). (Divy VI.78.10) The stupa thus becomes a manifest sign (nimitta) through which implicit presence of a hidden potency may be inferred, thus becoming a basis for merit-generating ritual action.

From a mercantile donors perspective, stupas provide an opportunity to generate merit by making a donation in its favor. This merit may then be applied to any number of goals through the device of a pranidhana or resolution. The pranidhana works like a funnel, focusing any merit generated from any given act on a specific object. Some pranidhanas involve specifically religious goals, such as the attainment of nirvana. Perhaps the bestknown example comes from the Chandrabhi inscription. Here, shares of merit are parceled out for different goals, one of them being applied to the lofty goal of nirvana for all beings. Indian Buddhists found this approach entirely acceptable, a point of view expressed in the fourth book of the Milinda Panha. Other pranidhanas, however, have specifically economic goals, such as the future acquisition of a talent for business. Pranidhanas of this type appear in both literary and epigraphic sources. Stupas, especially large ones such as the Dharmarajika at Taxila, are obviously quite fixed indeed. This presents both an opportunity for merit generation, and a problem for the inherently mobile mercantile community. Sealed within a stupa, The archetypal Buddhist text relating to the Gandhara region and its cultural ethos is the set of stories called the Divyavadana. Replete with guildsmen and caravan leaders, the Divy is overwhelmingly mercantile in its tenor. Perhaps its most instructive dramatis persona is the figure of the punya-maheshakhya, of whom Shrona Kotikarna is the prime example. His large store of punya allows him to successfully generate wealth. Moreover, this same punya allows him to save merchants in danger of drowning. The Vinaya suggests that traveling with merchants, perhaps for their protection, was so important as to allow monks to keep the varsha with a caravan or on a ship. Merit is generated by ritual interaction with items understood as saturated (paribhavita) with merit, in particular the relics of holy persons enshrined in a stupa. For the mercantile community, the stupa presents a problem as well as an opportunity. Merit generated through ritual activity at stupa sites Poses a problem for traveling merchants interested in both money and protection expressed in the story of Shrona For money and protection from chance disasters; its okay for monks to take the varsha with a caravan. Collections of money and merit both fade without maintenance root kshi i.e., stupas require repair, and wealth requires work Asrava kshaya, kshaya kala all this is when things disappear antardhasyati, as with the relics of Kashyapa Dushkuhuka Jambudvipakah but they do trust gold Term for accounting in Divy key feature is a mathematically-construed kind of certainty

Punya and panya convertible one can be expressed in terms of the other, using accounting metaphor Two kinds of universal equivalents whose sealings impress two kinds of otherwise abstract or symbolic value on the matrix Where sacred and secular are sealed together Buddha in both cases is the MARK of hidden value Under these conditions, you can navigate by nimitta Merit facilitates mercantile success concept of punya-maheshakhya as bridging both worlds, and possibly a good model for the development of the BSV image Mercantile success indicates merit Upananda MilPan with karma as its price Creates a kind of meta-economy that encompasses both merit and money Best place to observe is the cosmo-polis of Taxila where monks and merchants met and did business Tied to first century, Divy, Kushan The fusion happens at the time of dissolution at Mohra Moradu, stupas appear in cells (address this AFTER discussing the deposition pattern at the Dharmarajika)