Buddhist and Jain institutional economies

Chapter argument. Buddhist and Jain communities in the early eastern Ganga plain should be understood as institutions that reorganised material dependence rather than escaped the economy. Renunciants limited private possession and ordinary production, yet their food, robes, lodging, medicine, travel, buildings and teaching required durable support relationships. Vaiśālī and Campā provide regional anchors through canonical gift narratives, rains residence, monastic archaeology, a relic stupa containing portable valuables, and the Campā Vinaya chapter on hospitality and valid Saṅgha procedure. Jain evidence adds the fourfold community and rigorous lay–renunciant reciprocity. Comparative inscriptions are used to illuminate institutional possibilities, not to fill regional gaps by assumption; later landed and endowed monasteries are kept chronologically separate from the earlier support economy. 16.1 Institutional economy means organised material dependence, not a claim that religion was “really business” Buddhist and Jain renunciants defined themselves through restraint, non-possession and withdrawal from ordinary household accumulation, yet renunciation did not abolish material needs. Food, clothing, shelter, medicine, water, travel, maintenance and the care of the sick still had to be supplied. An institutional economy begins where those recurring needs are organised through durable relationships between renunciants, lay supporters, settlements and collective rules. The point is therefore not to reduce religion to commerce. It is to ask how a community that rejected ordinary accumulation could persist across seasons and generations. In the middle and eastern Ganga plain, this question is inseparable from urbanisation, merchant activity, political patronage and household surplus. The economic effect of a monastery or mendicant network could be substantial even when its normative ideal opposed private wealth. Conversely, the presence of donors or valuable gifts does not prove that an institution was profit-seeking. This chapter therefore treats economy as the organisation of resources, obligations, labour and exchange around religious communities. 16.2 Five evidence streams must be kept distinct before they are combined Institutional economies are unusually vulnerable to source confusion. Buddhist Vinaya texts prescribe rules and narrate cases; Jain disciplinary literature describes ideals of mendicancy and lay support; narrative texts preserve memorable donors, journeys and sacred places; archaeology reveals buildings, stupas, tanks, coins and occupation phases; inscriptions, especially from the early centuries BCE and CE outside the immediate region, identify donors and corporate recipients. Each source answers different questions. A rule against accepting money proves that money-handling was normatively regulated; it does not by itself measure how often money circulated through a monastery. A donated grove in a canonical narrative shows a remembered form of institutional patronage; it is not automatically a deed preserved from the event. An excavated monastery proves built institutional presence in the dated phase of that structure; it does not prove that the Buddha or Mahāvīra occupied that precise masonry. The method of this chapter is therefore convergent but controlled: similarities can reinforce a reconstruction only after chronology and genre have been stated. 169169 GAJENDRA THAKUR Figure 60 — Religious institutional economy redistributed resources through reciprocal but non-equivalent flows among donors, renunciants, material provision and social value. 16.3 Renunciation increased dependence on society rather than eliminating economic relations A householder normally meets material needs through ownership, production, wages, kinship claims or market exchange. A renunciant who gives up productive property and regular occupation transfers much of that burden to a support network. This is a profound economic reorganisation. The monk or nun becomes less tied to a household but more dependent on repeated acts of giving, hospitality and institutional provision. That dependence can create a dense field of reciprocal expectations without becoming a commercial contract. Donors receive teaching, ritual association, prestige, moral satisfaction and the religious value of giving; renunciants receive necessities that permit continued practice. In densely settled areas such as Vaiśālī and Campā, a larger population and more diversified economy could make such support easier to sustain. Yet the same logic also operated in villages, where a small group of mendicants might rely on a narrow circle of households. Institutional stability therefore depended not only on doctrine but on the depth, diversity and seasonality of the surrounding social economy. 16.4 The Buddhist “four requisites” reveal the material minimum of monastic life Buddhist disciplinary literature repeatedly organises permissible support around basic requisites: robe material, alms food, lodging and medicines or medical necessities. These categories are analytically valuable because they expose the material foundation beneath an ascetic ideal. Robes connect the Saṅgha to textile production, cleaning, dyeing and repair. Food connects it to cultivators, cooks, market provisioning and household surplus. Lodging connects it to land, timber, brick, carpentry, drainage and maintenance. Medicine connects it to plants, oils, ghee, containers and specialist knowledge. The categories are normative rather than a complete inventory of actual consumption, but they show that an enduring monastic community necessarily participated in a wider economy of goods and services. The scale of that participation changed with community size and permanence. A few itinerant monks carrying bowls and robes placed a different demand on local resources from a residential complex with cells, water facilities, paths and recurring repairs. Economic history must therefore distinguish the minimal mendicant package from the later built institution. HISTORY OF MITHILA, VAJJI & ANGA — VOLUME II Figure 61 — Buddhist support combined individual restrictions on money and property with recurring provision for monastic life and collective continuity. 16.5 Daily alms created a dispersed support system rather than a central tax Alms collection redistributed small portions of household production toward renunciant communities without requiring a central treasury. A meal given by one household, a handful of grain from another or cloth supplied by a patron could together sustain people who did not cultivate fields or run ordinary businesses. This dispersed mechanism reduced dependence on any single donor while embedding the Saṅgha in everyday settlement life. It also made religious institutions sensitive to harvests, prices, famine, political disorder and the density of sympathetic households. A prosperous city could offer many potential donors, but competition among mendicants and the high cost of urban food could matter as well. The Pāli sources often present giving as voluntary and meritorious, yet repeated dependence makes the relationship institutional even when no fixed assessment exists. From an economic perspective, alms transfer consumable surplus; from a social perspective, they create contact between households and renunciants. The same act therefore belongs simultaneously to subsistence, ethics, reputation and religious affiliation. 16.6 Hospitality to travelling monks shows the infrastructure behind mobility The Campā Khandhaka of the Mahāvagga begins with a resident monk, Kassapagotta, making extensive arrangements for visiting monks: seats, water for washing feet, assistance with bowls and robes, bathing, gruel and food. The narrative is primarily a disciplinary case, not an economic survey, but its incidental details are revealing. Religious mobility required hospitality infrastructure. A travelling monk did not move through empty space; he depended on residences, local knowledge, water, meals and the labour of hosts. Such provisioning could be supplied by other monks, by lay supporters or by both. The passage also assumes that a residence could “grow” and become attractive to incoming monks, which implies organisational continuity beyond a single charismatic teacher. Campā is therefore important not only because sermons are located there but because the Vinaya remembers it as a place where problems of resident communities, visitors and valid collective procedure required regulation. Institutional geography and material hospitality reinforce one another. 16.7 The rains retreat converted seasonal immobility into recurrent local economic relationships The annual rains residence reduced long-distance movement during the monsoon and concentrated renunciants for an extended period in particular settlements. This seasonal rhythm had economic 171171 GAJENDRA THAKUR consequences. Food had to be supplied repeatedly rather than once; lodging had to remain usable through wet conditions; robes and medicines required storage and distribution; ties with nearby households became more regular. The Mahāparinibbāna Sutta places the Buddha’s final rains near Vaiśālī at Beluva and has monks seek residence in the surrounding area among people with whom they had connections. Whatever the narrative’s redactional history, the institutional logic is clear: monsoon residence relied on social networks and available shelter. The rains retreat also encouraged the transition from purely itinerant mendicancy toward recurring residence at known groves and compounds. That did not automatically create large monasteries, but it made durable places economically useful. The religious calendar thus structured demand, mobility and the intensity of lay–monastic contact. 16.8 Ambapālī’s grove at Vaiśālī represents a remembered transfer of productive urban land into religious use In the Mahāparinibbāna Sutta, Ambapālī first provides a meal for the Buddha and the community and then gives her mango grove to the Saṅgha headed by the Buddha. The episode should be read as a canonical memory rather than as a surviving land deed, but it captures a crucial institutional transition: support could take the form not only of consumable food but also of access to a durable place. A grove offered shade, assembly space, lodging potential and a recognised address within the urban landscape. The donor was a woman of high public visibility, which also warns against imagining patronage as exclusively male or royal. Economically, the episode distinguishes a one-time consumable gift from an asset whose usefulness could recur. Socially, it binds a prominent urban patron to a religious community. Historiographically, it is safest to say that early Buddhist tradition considered the donation of parks and groves an appropriate and memorable form of support; the precise legal form of property rights must be reconstructed from broader evidence rather than assumed. 16.9 Competition to host a meal at Vaiśālī shows that giving carried prestige as well as cost The same narrative describes Licchavis encountering Ambapālī after she had secured the next day’s meal invitation and offering a very large sum if she would surrender the opportunity. The stated amount belongs to a literary scene and should not be converted into a reliable market price. Its significance is institutional and social: providing for the Buddha and Saṅgha is represented as a scarce honour for which powerful people competed. Giving therefore had a prestige economy. The donor expended resources but acquired public association with a revered community. Such competition could help religious institutions mobilise surplus without taxation or coercion, while also giving elites a language for generosity. It could, however, reproduce inequality because the most conspicuous gifts were easier for wealthy patrons. Small household alms and spectacular elite donations should therefore be distinguished. Both sustained religious life, but they operated at different scales and generated different forms of visibility. 16.10 Vaiśālī’s archaeological remains demonstrate long institutional continuity, not a single frozen “Buddha-period monastery” The archaeological landscape at Kolhua and ancient Vaiśālī contains stupas, monastic remains, a tank, shrines and an Aśokan pillar. UNESCO’s description of the Silk Road component notes remains ranging from the Mauryan period through the post-Gupta centuries, while the Archaeological Survey of India records protected Buddhist remains across the Vaiśālī complex. This long sequence is essential. It confirms that the area became a durable Buddhist institutional landscape, but much of the surviving masonry is later HISTORY OF MITHILA, VAJJI & ANGA — VOLUME II than the lifetime traditionally assigned to the Buddha. A responsible socio-economic reconstruction therefore separates early textual memory from the dates of excavated structures. The later expansion of brick architecture implies accumulated labour, materials, planning and maintenance, while votive monuments imply recurring patronage. These are strong indicators of an institutional economy in the subsequent centuries. They should not be collapsed into the sixth or fifth century BCE simply because the sacred topography links later buildings to earlier narratives. 16.11 The Vaiśālī relic stupa links ritual memory, valuables and monetisation without proving a monastery treasury The protected relic stupa at Harpur Basant is especially important for connecting Chapter 15’s monetary history with religious institutions. The Archaeological Survey of India describes an early inner stupa and reports a relic casket with ashes mixed with earth; associated finds include a punch-marked coin, beads and gold objects. Bihar Tourism likewise notes the coin among excavated contents. These objects show that valuables and monetary material entered a sacred depositional context. They do not demonstrate that the stupa operated a treasury or that coins financed its construction. Deposited objects can be offerings, commemorative inclusions or items incorporated during a particular building phase. The significance lies in coexistence: early monetisation and religious commemoration occupied the same social world. Sacred institutions could attract valuable objects because people assigned value to memorial presence. The economic and ritual meanings of a coin are therefore not mutually exclusive; context determines which inference is justified. 16.12 Campā’s Vinaya chapter makes institutional law part of Aṅga’s social history The ninth Khandhaka of the Mahāvagga is explicitly associated with Campā and is concerned with the validity and invalidity of formal acts of the Saṅgha. Its cases discuss quorum, motions, suspension and collective procedure. These are legal-institutional matters rather than market transactions, yet they have economic significance because durable property, residences and shared resources require rules about who can act for a community and under what conditions. An institution without valid procedure cannot reliably admit members, discipline them, settle disputes or manage common responsibilities. Campā thus appears as part of the remembered geography in which Buddhist corporate procedure was articulated. The text does not prove that every rule originated historically at the stated place, but the association itself is evidence that Campā was imagined as a significant monastic centre. This reinforces the city’s role, already established in Chapter 14, as a node of political, commercial and religious movement. 16.13 Buddhist prohibitions on gold, silver and trade separate personal renunciation from the monetary world around the Saṅgha The Pāli Bhikkhu Vibhaṅga’s Nissaggiya Pācittiya rules prohibit a monk from accepting gold and silver, engaging in monetary exchange and engaging in buying and selling. The commentary embedded in the disciplinary tradition treats “silver” broadly enough to include forms used in business. These rules are crucial for economic history because they do not describe a society without money; they regulate how renunciants are to relate to a monetised environment. A prohibition is therefore evidence of a boundary, not evidence of economic isolation. The rule also distinguishes the individual monk’s conduct from the needs of a continuing community. Later Vinaya traditions and inscriptions show a range of mechanisms by which lay stewards or corporate arrangements could mediate valuable gifts, but those mechanisms vary by school and 173173 GAJENDRA THAKUR period. For the early Ganga plain, the safest conclusion is that personal money-handling was a recognised disciplinary problem precisely because monetary exchange existed around the Saṅgha. 16.14 Corporate property and individual poverty are not contradictory categories A recurrent error in the history of monasticism is to assume that if monks renounce possessions, a monastery cannot possess durable assets. Buddhist legal literature eventually makes sophisticated distinctions among personal belongings, communal property, residence property and gifts intended for particular purposes. Gregory Schopen’s studies of Indian Vinayas and inscriptions demonstrate that Buddhist communities could function as juridical or corporate bodies with property and financial obligations while still regulating individual possession. Not every one of those developed mechanisms can be projected into early Vaiśālī or Campā. The conceptual distinction, however, is indispensable. A monk may own little while living in a building maintained by a community; a community may accept a donated grove while individuals are barred from treating it as private real estate. This separation allowed renunciation and institutional durability to coexist. It also created the need for rules governing use, inheritance, repair, alienation and the intentions of donors. 16.15 Permanent residences transformed religious communities into consumers of construction and maintenance Once a religious residence became durable, its economy extended beyond food. Brick-making, timber, roofing, plaster, drainage, wells, paths, doors, mats, lamps and cleaning created recurring demand for labour and materials. Archaeological remains at Vaiśālī illustrate this later built dimension particularly clearly, while Campā’s long urban sequence provides the broader craft and supply environment in which religious establishments could operate. Construction need not imply wage labour in every case: work could be donated, commanded, contracted or organised through patrons. Nor should every brick foundation near a sacred site be assumed to be monastic. Where identification is secure, however, the built environment reveals resource concentration. Maintenance is especially important because it is less visible than foundation ceremonies but more continuous. A donated building that cannot be repaired quickly becomes unusable. Institutional economy therefore includes mundane expenditure—water control, replacement materials, cleaning and storage—as much as spectacular patronage. 16.16 Monasteries and mendicant communities created demand without functioning like ordinary households Religious communities consumed goods, but their consumption pattern differed from that of reproductive households. They did not normally aim to accumulate family property, arrange inheritances for children or expand a domestic estate. Instead, expenditure clustered around sustenance, ritual, teaching, hospitality, buildings and care of members. This difference matters because the same merchant, farmer or artisan could interact with a monastery in a way unlike an ordinary customer. A pot might be donated rather than sold; cloth might be given for merit; a meal might be sponsored publicly; construction might combine hired labour and religious gift. The institution therefore sat across market and non-market exchange. It generated demand that could stimulate production, yet the transaction might be framed as dāna rather than purchase. Economic analysis must preserve both dimensions. Reducing all gifts to disguised trade ignores religious motivation; treating all gifts as economically irrelevant ignores their effects on production and redistribution. HISTORY OF MITHILA, VAJJI & ANGA — VOLUME II 16.17 Donor diversity prevents a single “merchant Buddhism” model Merchants were important patrons of Buddhism in many early historic contexts, and the urban settings of Vaiśālī and Campā make commercial participation plausible. Yet canonical narratives, archaeology and inscriptions across India show a wider donor spectrum: rulers, householders, monks, nuns, artisans, officials and women as well as merchants. Ambapālī’s Vaiśālī episode is a regional reminder that prominent female patrons cannot be erased by a merchant-only narrative. The Licchavis represent political elites; ordinary alms imply much smaller household gifts. Later inscriptions from Buddhist sites elsewhere often name donors with varied occupations and statuses. The institutional economy was therefore resilient partly because it could draw on multiple social groups. This diversity also distributed risk: a community dependent only on a court could suffer when dynasties changed, while one dependent only on local alms could struggle during scarcity. Multiple patronage channels allowed religious institutions to survive political and economic fluctuations more effectively. 16.18 Buddhist nuns must be included as economic actors, not treated as an invisible appendage The history of Buddhist institutions has often been written from male monastic rules and male donor lists. Gregory Schopen has emphasised inscriptional evidence showing Buddhist nuns acting as donors and legal persons in early India. The precise scale and chronology vary by region, and such evidence should not be mechanically transferred to Vaiśālī. Yet Vaiśālī is central to Buddhist traditions about the establishment and presence of the bhikkhunī community, making female institutional history especially relevant. Nuns required food, robes, lodging and medicine, organised teaching and discipline, and interacted with laywomen and laymen. Their material support could therefore generate its own networks. The archaeological identification of specific nunneries is often uncertain, and later architectural interpretations at Kolhua must be dated carefully. The larger conclusion is secure: a socio-economic history that counts only monks and male donors underestimates both the consuming population and the channels through which wealth, merit and authority circulated. 16.19 Merit functioned as a moral account of giving without becoming a literal currency Dāna linked material transfer to religious consequence. Donors did not simply lose food, cloth or land; they understood giving as ethically productive. This can be described as a “merit economy” only if the metaphor is controlled. Merit was not a coin with a uniform market price, and canonical statements about the fruit of giving are not exchange-rate tables. Nevertheless, belief in religious benefit helps explain why people repeatedly transferred resources to communities that did not return equivalent commodities. The institution converted material support into teaching, ritual association, memorialisation and a moral narrative of generosity. Public monuments and donor inscriptions in later centuries made that association durable by naming givers and intended beneficiaries. In early Vaiśālī, the narrative prestige surrounding Ambapālī and the Licchavis performs a similar literary function. Merit therefore reduced neither to altruism nor to profit; it was a culturally specific way of assigning value to transfers beyond immediate material reciprocity. 16.20 Patronage could reproduce inequality even while redistributing resources Religious giving moves resources, but redistribution is not automatically egalitarian. A wealthy patron could finance a grove, building or large meal and receive public visibility unavailable to a poor donor. A ruler 175175 GAJENDRA THAKUR could attach political legitimacy to support for a revered community. Merchant donors could strengthen networks of trust and reputation. At the same time, smaller gifts allowed ordinary households to participate in institutional life, and food redistribution supported people outside household production. The result was a layered economy of generosity. Religious institutions could soften some inequalities by feeding residents and travellers while also giving elites new arenas for status. Economic history must therefore avoid two opposite myths: monasteries were neither merely extractive accumulators nor automatically charitable levellers. Their effects depended on the form of the gift, the control of property, the social identity of recipients and the wider distribution of land and income. 16.21 Jain institutional economy begins with the fourfold Saṅgha, not with the monastery alone Jain tradition conceptualises the community as fourfold: monks, nuns, laymen and laywomen. This is economically significant because the institution is not identical with a residential monastery. Mendicants pursue rigorous non-possession and itinerancy, while householders remain economically active and support renunciants. The fourfold model therefore embeds asceticism inside a broader social body. The laity supplies food, shelter and other permissible necessities; renunciants provide teaching, discipline and a living model of the path. Jain sources preserve highly idealised numbers for Mahāvīra’s followers, so those totals should not be treated as demographic statistics. The structural principle is more reliable than the numbers: religious continuity required both renunciant specialists and a lay support base. This arrangement could operate across towns and villages without the same architectural concentration as a large Buddhist monastery. Institutional economy must therefore include networks and recurring relationships, not only buildings and treasuries. Figure 62 — The Jain fourfold Saṅgha linked monks and nuns practising strict renunciation with laymen and laywomen who remained within household economic life. 16.22 Jain aparigraha and alms discipline created strong limits on direct accumulation Non-possession is central to Jain mendicant ethics. Monks and nuns are expected to restrict possessions, food acquisition and attachment with a severity that makes ordinary economic self-provision difficult. Disciplinary literature devotes close attention to alms, acceptable food, movement, seasonal residence and the avoidance of harm in everyday acts. These rules are religious disciplines, but they also shape economic interaction. A mendicant dependent on prepared food cannot simply substitute unrestricted purchasing for alms without undermining the renunciant ideal. The burden of production therefore remains with householders. This creates a deliberate asymmetry: the ascetic offers no equivalent commodity in return, HISTORY OF MITHILA, VAJJI & ANGA — VOLUME II while the lay supporter gains religious instruction and the merit of supporting disciplined renunciation. The economic relationship is thus reciprocal without being a market exchange. Because Jain rules differ across sectarian and chronological traditions, later Śvetāmbara or Digambara practice should not be projected wholesale into the earliest period. 16.23 The Jain lay community connected religious life to agriculture, crafts and commerce Lay Jains were not required to abandon productive work. Their less absolute vows were designed for household life, allowing participation in property, trade and family obligations under ethical constraints. This made the lay community the principal material interface between mendicants and the economy. S. B. Deo’s survey of inscriptions concludes that, across many later sites, trading groups formed an important source of lay support, while other inscriptions also record artisans, officials and women. That comparative pattern helps explain why Jainism could flourish in urban and commercial settings, but it should not be turned into an ethnic or occupational stereotype for early Vaiśālī. The key institutional point is broader: householders could translate market earnings or agrarian surplus into alms, lodging, images, memorials and other religious gifts. Jain renunciation therefore depended on a lay economy it did not itself reproduce through ordinary household labour. 16.24 Jain women occupied both renunciant and donor roles within the institutional economy The fourfold Saṅgha explicitly includes nuns and laywomen. Jain tradition often remembers very large communities of nuns, although literary totals are not census data. More concrete evidence from early historic Mathurā includes numerous female donors in Jain dedicatory inscriptions, sometimes identified through kinship and sometimes associated with monks or nuns who prompted the donation. Mathurā lies outside Mithilā, Vajji and Aṅga, so it serves here as a comparative control rather than direct regional proof. It demonstrates, however, that women could command or direct resources within early Jain patronage networks. For the regional history, this prevents the support economy from being reconstructed solely through male merchants and male ascetics. Laywomen could mediate household wealth toward religious ends, while nuns constituted a large category of dependent and authoritative renunciants. Gender therefore shaped both access to resources and the institutional channels through which giving acquired religious meaning. 16.25 Mahāvīra’s Vaiśālī associations make Vajji central to Jain memory, but biography and archaeology must not be collapsed Jain traditions associate Mahāvīra with the Vaiśālī–Videha region, including Kundagrāma and Licchavi- linked social networks. These traditions make the area fundamental to Jain sacred history and help explain the enduring Jain significance of modern Vaiśālī. Yet the archaeological problem is difficult. A later temple or pilgrimage site cannot by itself authenticate a precise sixth- or fifth-century BCE biographical location. Nor should traditional dates be treated as archaeometric measurements. The strongest historical conclusion is regional: Jainism’s formative memory is deeply embedded in the same eastern Ganga political landscape that generated Vajji and Videha traditions. That memory implies an early support environment of settlements, households and itinerant routes capable of sustaining mendicants. The economic history should therefore reconstruct networks of mobility and lay support while keeping individual biographical claims at the level warranted by their textual transmission. 177177 GAJENDRA THAKUR 16.26 Campā belongs to Jain sacred geography as well as Buddhist institutional geography Jain tradition associates Campā with the Tīrthaṅkara Vāsupūjya and with later Jain pilgrimage, adding a second religious memory to the city already prominent in Buddhist texts. This layered sacred geography is historically important because it shows how the same urban centre could be claimed and revisited by different renunciant traditions. The early date and exact material form of particular Jain establishments at Campā are harder to establish than the Buddhist Vinaya association, so the evidence must remain asymmetrical. The socio-economic implication is nevertheless significant: a prosperous river city could support multiple communities through households, markets, donors and hospitality. Shared urban resources did not require institutional identity. Buddhist monks and Jain mendicants could depend on the same grain- producing hinterland, textile workers and transport routes while maintaining sharply different rules of discipline. Religious pluralism was therefore also a pluralism of support networks operating within a common economic landscape. 16.27 Mathurā’s early Jain inscriptions provide comparison for donor organisation, not a template for Vajji and Aṅga Kankali Tila and other Mathurā material from the early centuries BCE and CE preserve an exceptionally rich Jain donor record. Inscriptions identify lay donors, women, occupational groups, monks, nuns and organised lineages, while votive tablets and images show resources being converted into durable religious objects. This evidence is indispensable for understanding what a mature early historic Jain institutional economy could look like. It is not evidence that the same donor composition or monument form existed at Vaiśālī at the same date. Regional economies, sectarian histories and archaeological survival differ. Comparison is useful when it establishes possibilities—female patronage, merchant support, named monastic lineages, durable gifts—without replacing missing local evidence. The chapter therefore uses Mathurā as a control case: it demonstrates the institutional capacity of Jain communities in early historic India while leaving the exact scale of early Vajji and Aṅga patronage open. 16.28 Buddhist and Jain communities could compete for patronage without forming a zero-sum religious market Cities and route corridors often hosted multiple renunciant groups. Competition for meals, lodging, teaching audiences and elite patronage was possible, and polemical texts attest intellectual rivalry. Yet a household could support more than one type of ascetic, and rulers could patronise several traditions across a reign. Religious affiliation was therefore not necessarily an exclusive consumer choice. Different communities offered different disciplinary ideals, ritual relationships and teaching networks, while drawing from overlapping pools of surplus. Competition may have encouraged institutional differentiation and public generosity, but coexistence was equally important. In Vaiśālī and Campā, the presence of multiple traditions should be treated as part of urban social complexity rather than as evidence for a simple winner- and-loser sequence. The wider economy was large enough to contain households, Brahmanical specialists, Buddhist monks, Jain mendicants and other ascetics simultaneously. 16.29 Later land grants, endowed funds and great monasteries reveal a trajectory that must not be retrojected By the early centuries CE and especially the Gupta and post-Gupta periods, inscriptions from various parts of India document monasteries receiving land, permanent endowments and substantial monetary gifts. HISTORY OF MITHILA, VAJJI & ANGA — VOLUME II Schopen’s work shows that some Buddhist legal traditions developed sophisticated rules for corporate wealth, loans and property; later eastern institutions such as Nālandā became major landed and endowed establishments. Jain communities likewise accumulated temples, endowments and complex patronage networks in later centuries. These developments matter because they reveal what religious institutions could become. They do not prove that the Saṅgha at Vaiśālī in the Buddha narratives already possessed comparable estates or financial portfolios. Historical sequence must be preserved. Early alms, grove gifts, residences and collective procedures created institutional capacities; later political economies expanded some of those capacities dramatically. The direction of development is therefore from documented early support relationships toward more complex property regimes, not backward from medieval wealth to an imagined wealthy monastery in every early city. Figure 63 — Regional evidence from Vaiśālī and Campā must be distinguished from comparative early Indian evidence and from later endowed monastic systems. 16.30 Conclusion: religious renunciation generated institutions by reorganising rather than escaping material life Buddhist and Jain communities in the eastern Ganga world were economically consequential because they organised dependence. Renunciants withdrew from ordinary accumulation, but their food, robes, shelter, medicine, travel and teaching required recurrent transfers from households and patrons. Vaiśālī provides unusually rich regional evidence: canonical memories of meals and a grove donation, rains residence, a later monumental Buddhist landscape and a relic stupa containing valuable objects. Campā contributes the Vinaya’s detailed concern with hospitality and valid Saṅgha procedure inside an important Aṅga city. Jain tradition adds the fourfold Saṅgha, rigorous non-possession, lay support and deep Vaiśālī associations, while early Mathurā inscriptions provide a comparative view of donor diversity. The combined evidence supports neither a romantic picture of institutions outside the economy nor a reductive picture of monasteries as businesses. Religious institutions were distinctive organisations that converted surplus into subsistence, durable places, teaching, memory and merit. Their growth linked urbanisation, household economies, gender, mobility and patronage, preparing the institutional landscape examined in the next chapter on education, debate and intellectual communities. Table 16.1 — Evidence for Buddhist and Jain institutional economies, and limits of inference Evidence What it supports What it does not prove Key references / alone control DN 16: Ambapālī A canonical model of elite Exact legal deed, date of an Walshe 1995; genre 179179 GAJENDRA THAKUR Evidence What it supports What it does not prove Key references / alone control meal and mango- female patronage; excavated building, or control grove gift at Vaiśālī distinction between market value of the grove consumable gift and durable place DN 16: rains Seasonal residence and A permanent brick Walshe 1995; residence at Beluva dependence on local social monastery in the Buddha’s archaeological dating near Vaiśālī networks lifetime Kolhua / Vaiśālī Long-lived Buddhist That all surviving masonry Sinha and Roy 1969; monastic and stupa institutional landscape belongs to the sixth–fifth ASI/UNESCO remains with repeated construction century BCE archaeological and patronage control Vaiśālī relic stupa Intersection of sacred A monastery treasury, ASI context + with punch-marked deposition, portable value routine cash budget or numismatic caution coin and valuables and early monetisation precise donor identity Mahāvagga IX, Remembered institutional That every rule originated Horner 1938–1966; Campā Khandhaka geography; hospitality; historically at Campā or Vinaya genre control formal Saṅgha procedure measures local wealth and corporate governance Nissaggiya Pācittiya Normative boundary Absence of money around Vinaya rules + rules on money and against personal money monks or absence of Wijayaratna 1990 trade acceptance, monetary collective property transactions and buying/selling Jain fourfold Saṅgha Structural dependence of Traditional follower totals Jaini 1979; Dundas and mendicant monks/nuns on as census data or a uniform 2002; Deo 1956 discipline laymen/laywomen; economic occupation for organised lay–renunciant all laity reciprocity Early Jain donor Comparative proof of The same donor mix or Lüders 1961; inscriptions at female, mercantile, artisan institutional scale in early Quintanilla 2007 Mathurā and monastic participation Vaiśālī or Campā in durable religious giving Later Buddhist/Jain Long-term trajectory Equivalent estates or Schopen 2004; strict endowments and toward landed, endowed financial mechanisms in chronological large monasteries and financially complex fifth-century BCE control religious institutions Vajji/Aṅga Religious donations Transfer of surplus into That donors acted only for Multi-source social generally subsistence, buildings, profit, only for merit, or analysis memorials and that redistribution was institutional continuity egalitarian