Debt: The First 5000 Years Part 8

Mencius replied: "Why must Your Majesty necessarily use this word 'profit'? What I have are only these two topics: benevolence and righteousness, and nothing else."64 Still, the end-point was roughly the same. The Confucian ideal of ren, of humane benevolence, was basically just a more complete inversion of profit-seeking calculation than Mo Di's universal love; the main difference was that the Confucians added a certain aversion to calculation itself, preferring what might almost be called an art of decency. Taoists were later to take this even further with their embrace of intuition and spontaneity. All were so many attempts to provide a mirror image of market logic. Still, a mirror image is, ultimately, just that: the same thing, only backwards. Before long we end up with an endless maze of paired opposites-egoism versus altruism, profit versus charity, materialism versus idealism, calculation versus spontaneity-none of which could ever have been imagined except by someone starting out from pure, calculating, self-interested market transactions.65

Materialism II:.

Substance.

As in the near presence of death, despise poor flesh, this refuse of blood and bones, this web and tissue of nerves and veins and arteries.

-Marcus Aurelius, Meditations 2.2.

Taking pity on the hungry wolf, Wenshuang announced, "I do not covet this filthy bag of meat. I give it over to you that I may quickly acquire a body of more enduring strength. This donation will help benefit us both."

-Discourse on the Pure Land 21.12.

As I've already observed, China was unusual because philosophy there began with debates about ethics and only later turned to speculations about the nature of the cosmos. In both Greece and India, cosmological speculation came first. In each, too, questions about the nature of the physical universe quickly give way to speculation about mind, truth, consciousness, meaning, language, illusion, world-spirits, cosmic intelligence, and the fate of the human soul.

This particular maze of mirrors is so complex and dazzling that it's extraordinarily difficult to discern the starting point-that is, what, precisely, is being reflected back and forth. Here anthropology can be helpful, as anthropologists have the unique advantage of being able to observe how human beings who have not previously been part of these conversations react when first exposed to Axial Age concepts. Every now and then too, we are presented with moments of exceptional clarity: ones that reveal the essence of our own thought to be almost exactly the opposite of what we thought it to be.

Maurice Leenhardt, a Catholic missionary who had spent many long years teaching the Gospel in New Caledonia, experienced such a moment in the 1920s, when he asked one of his students, an aged sculptor named Boesoou, how he felt about having been introduced to spiritual ideas: Once, waiting to a.s.sess the mental progress of the Canaques I had taught for many years, I risked the following suggestion: "In short, we introduced the notion of the spirit to your way of thinking?"

He objected, "Spirit? Bah! You didn't bring us the spirit. We already knew the spirit existed. We have always acted in accord with the spirit. What you've brought us is the body."66 The notion that humans had souls appeared to Boesoou to be self-evident. The notion that there was such a thing as the body, apart from the soul, a mere material collection of nerves and tissues-let alone that the body is the prison of the soul; that the mortification of the body could be a means to the glorification or liberation of the soul-all this, it turns out, struck him as utterly new and exotic.

Axial Age spirituality, then, is built on a bedrock of materialism. This is its secret; one might almost say, the thing that has become invisible to us.67 But if one looks at the very beginnings of philosophical inquiry in Greece and India-the point when there was as yet no difference between what we'd now call "philosophy" and what we'd now call "science"-this is exactly what one finds. "Theory," if we can call it that, begins with the questions: "What substance is the world made of?" "What is the underlying material behind the physical forms of objects in the world?" "Is everything made up of varying combinations of certain basic elements (earth, air, water, fire, stone, motion, mind, number ...), or are these basic elements just the forms taken by some even more elementary substance (for instance, as Nyya and later Democritus proposed, atomic particles ...)"68 In just about every case, some notion of G.o.d, Mind, Spirit, some active organizing principle that gave form to and was not itself substance, emerged as well. But this was the kind of spirit that, like Leenhardt's G.o.d, only emerges in relation to inert matter.69 To connect this impulse, too, with the invention of coinage might seem like pus.h.i.+ng things a bit far but, at least for the Cla.s.sical world, there is an emerging scholarly literature-first set off by Harvard literary theorist Marc Sh.e.l.l, and more recently set forth by British cla.s.sicist Richard Seaford in a book called Money and the Early Greek Mind-that aims to do exactly that.70 In fact, some of the historical connections are so uncannily close that they are very hard to explain any other way. Let me give an example. After the first coins were minted around 600 bc in the kingdom of Lydia, the practice quickly spread to Ionia, the Greek cities of the adjacent coast. The greatest of these was the great walled metropolis of Miletus, which also appears to have been the first Greek city to strike its own coins. It was Ionia, too, that provided the bulk of the Greek mercenaries active in the Mediterranean at the time, with Miletus their effective headquarters. Miletus was also the commercial center of the region, and, perhaps, the first city in the world where everyday market transactions came to be carried out primarily in coins instead of credit.71 Greek philosophy, in turn, begins with three men: Thales, of Miletus (c. 624 bcc. 546 bc), Anaximander, of Miletus (c. 610 bcc. 546 bc), and Anaximenes, of Miletus (c. 585 bcc. 525 bc)-in other words, men who were living in that city at exactly the time that coinage was first introduced.72 All three are remembered chiefly for their speculations on the nature of the physical substance from which the world ultimately sprang. Thales proposed water, Anaximenes, air. Anaximander made up a new term, apeiron, "the unlimited," a kind of pure abstract substance that could not itself be perceived but was the material basis of everything that could be. In each case, the a.s.sumption was that this primal substance, by being heated, cooled, combined, divided, compressed, extended, or set in motion, gave rise to the endless particular stuffs and substances that humans actually encounter in the world, from which physical objects are composed-and was also that into which all those forms would eventually dissolve.

It was something that could turn into everything. As Seaford emphasizes, so was money. Gold, shaped into coins, is a material substance that is also an abstraction. It is both a lump of metal and something more than a lump of metal-it's a drachma or an obol, a unit of currency which (at least if collected in sufficient quant.i.ty, taken to the right place at the right time, turned over to the right person) could be exchanged for absolutely any other object whatsoever.73 For Seaford, what was genuinely new about coins was their double-sidedness: the fact that they were both valuable pieces of metal and, at the same time, something more. At least within the communities that created them, ancient coins were always worth more than the gold, silver, or copper of which they were composed. Seaford refers to this extra value by the inelegant term "fiduciarity," which comes from the term for public trust, the confidence a community places in its currency.74 True, at the height of Cla.s.sical Greece, when there were hundreds of city-states producing different currencies according to a number of different systems of weights and denominations, merchants often did carry scales and treat coins-particularly foreign coins-like so many chunks of silver, just as Indian merchants seem to have treated Roman coins; but within a city, that city's currency had a special status, since it was always acceptable at face value when used to pay taxes, public fees, or legal penalties. This is, incidentally, why ancient governments were so often able to introduce base metal into their coins without leading to immediate inflation; a debased coin might have lost value when traded overseas, but at home, it was still worth just as much when purchasing a license, or entering the public theater.75 This is also why, during publc emergencies, Greek city-states would occasionally strike coins made entirely of bronze or tin, which everyone would agree, while the emergency lasted, to treat as if they were really made of silver.76 This is the key to Seaford's argument about materialism and Greek philosophy. A coin was a piece of metal, but by giving it a particular shape, stamped with words and images, the civic community agreed to make it something more. But this power was not unlimited. Bronze coins could not be used forever; if one debased the coinage, inflation would eventually set in. It was as if there was a tension there, between the will of the community and the physical nature of the object itself. Greek thinkers were suddenly confronted with a profoundly new type of object, one of extraordinary importance-as evidenced by the fact that so many men were willing to risk their lives to get their hands on it-but whose nature was a profound enigma.

Consider this word, "materialism." What does it mean to adopt a "materialist" philosophy? What is "material," anyway? Normally, we speak of "materials" when we refer to objects that we wish to make into something else. A tree is a living thing. It only becomes "wood" when we begin to think about all the other things you could carve out of it. And of course you can carve a piece of wood into almost anything. The same is true of clay, or gla.s.s, or metal. They're solid and real and tangible, but also abstractions, because they have the potential to turn into almost anything else-or, not precisely that; one can't turn a piece of wood into a lion or an owl, but one can turn it into an image of a lion or an owl-it can take on almost any conceivable form. So already in any materialist philosophy, we are dealing with an opposition between form and content, substance and shape; a clash between the idea, sign, emblem, or model in the creator's mind, and the physical qualities of the materials on which it is to be stamped, built, or imposed, from which it will be brought into reality.77 With coins this rises to an even more abstract level because that emblem can no longer be conceived as the model in one person's head, but is rather the mark of a collective agreement. The images stamped on Greek coins (Miletus' lion, Athens' owl) were typically the emblems of the city's G.o.d, but they were also a kind of collective promise, by which citizens a.s.sured one another that not only would the coin be acceptable in payment of public debts, but in a larger sense, that everyone would accept them, for any debts, and thus, that they could be use to acquire anything anyone wanted.

The problem is that this collective power is not unlimited. It only really applies within the city. The farther you go outside, into places dominated by violence, slavery, and war-the sort of place where even philosophers taking a cruise might end up on the auction block-the more it turns into a mere lump of precious metal.78 The war between Spirit and Flesh, then, between the n.o.ble Idea and ugly Reality, the rational intellect versus stubborn corporeal drives and desires that resist it, even the idea that peace and community are not things that emerge spontaneously but that need to be stamped onto our baser material natures like a divine insignia stamped into base metal-all those ideas that came to haunt the religious and philosophical traditions of the Axial Age, and that have continued to surprise people like Boesoou ever since-can already be seen as inscribed in the nature of this new form of money.

It would be foolish to argue that all Axial Age philosophy was simply a meditation on the nature of coinage, but I think Seaford is right to argue that this is a critical starting place: one of the reasons that the pre-Socratic philosophers began to frame their questions in the peculiar way they did, asking (for instance): What are Ideas? Are they merely collective conventions? Do they exist, as Plato insisted, in some divine domain beyond material existence? Or do they exist in our minds? Or do our minds themselves ultimately partake of that divine immaterial domain? And if they do, what does this say about our relation to our bodies?

In India and China, the debate took different forms, but materialism was always the starting point. We only know the ideas of most truly materialist thinkers from the works of their intellectual enemies: as is the case with the Indian king Pysi, who enjoyed debating Buddhist and Jain philosophers, taking the position that the soul does not exist, that human bodies are nothing but particular configurations of air, water, earth, and fire, their consciousness the result of the elements' mutual interaction, and that when we die, the elements simply dissolve.79 Clearly, though, such ideas were commonplace. Even the Axial Age religions are often startlingly lacking in the plethora of supernatural forces seen before and after: as witnessed by continued debates over whether Buddhism even is a religion, since it rejects any notion of a supreme being, or whether Confucius' admonitions that one should continue to venerate one's ancestors was merely a way of encouraging filial piety, or based on a belief that dead ancestors did, in some sense, continue to exist. The fact that we have to ask says everything. Yet at the same time, what endures, above all, from that age-in inst.i.tutional terms-are what we call the "world religions."

What we see then is a strange kind of back-and-forth, attack and riposte, whereby the market, the state, war, and religion all continually separate and merge with one another. Let me summarize it as briefly as I can: 1) Markets appear to have first emerged, in the Near East at least, as a side effect of government administrative systems. Over time, however, the logic of the market became entangled in military affairs, where it became almost indistinguishable from the mercenary logic of Axial Age warfare, and then, finally, that logic came to conquer government itself; to define its very purpose.

2) As a result: everywhere we see the military-coinage-slavery complex emerge, we also see the birth of materialist philosophies. They are materialist, in fact, in both senses of the term: in that they envision a world made up of material forces, rather than divine powers, and in that they imagine the ultimate end of human existence to be the acc.u.mulation of material wealth, with ideals like morality and justice being reframed as tools designed to satisfy the ma.s.ses.

3) Everywhere, too, we find philosophers who react to this by exploring ideas of humanity and the soul, attempting to find a new foundation for ethics and morality.

4) Everywhere some of these philosophers made common cause with social movements that inevitably formed in the face of these new and extraordinarily violent and cynical elites. The result was something new to human history: popular movements that were also intellectual movements, due to the a.s.sumption that those opposing existing power arrangements did so in the name of some kind of theory about the nature of reality.

5) Everywhere, these movements were first and foremost peace movements, in that they rejected the new conception of violence, and especially aggressive war, as the foundation of politics.

6) Everywhere too, there seems to have been an initial impulse to use the new intellectual tools provided by impersonal markets to come up with a new basis for morality, and everywhere, it foundered. Mohism, with its notion of social profit, flourished briefly and then collapsed. It was replaced by Confucianism, which rejected such ideas outright. We have already seen that reimagining moral responsibility in terms of debt-an impulse that cropped up in both Greece and India-while almost inevitable given the new economic circ.u.mstances, seems to prove uniformly unsatisfying.80 The stronger impulse is to imagine another world where debt-and with it, all other worldly connections-can be entirely annihilated, where social attachments are seen as forms of bondage; just as the body is a prison.

7) Rulers' att.i.tudes changed over time. At first, most appear to have affected an att.i.tude of bemused tolerance toward the new philosophical and religious movements while privately embracing some version of cynical realpolitik, But as warring cities and princ.i.p.alities were replaced by great empires, and especially, as those empires began to reach the limits of their expansion, sending the military-coinage-slavery complex into crisis, all this suddenly changed. In India, Aoka tried to re-found his kingdom on Buddhism; in Rome, Constantine turned to the Christians; in China, the Han emperor Wu-Ti (15787 BC), faced with a similar military and financial crisis, adopted Confucianism as the philosophy of state. Of the three, only Wu Ti was ultimately successful: the Chinese empire endured, in one form or another, for two thousand years, almost always with Confucianism as its official ideology. In Constantine's case the Western empire fell apart, but the Roman church endured. Aoka's project could be said to be the least successful. Not only did his empire fall apart, replaced by an endless series of weaker, usually fragmentary kingdoms, but Buddhism itself was largely driven out of his one-time territories, though it did establish itself much more firmly in China, Nepal, Tibet, Sri Lanka, Korea, j.a.pan, and much of Southeast Asia.

8) The ultimate effect was a kind of ideal division of spheres of human activity that endures to this day: on the one hand the market, on the other, religion. To put the matter crudely: if one relegates a certain social s.p.a.ce simply to the selfish acquisition of material things, it is almost inevitable that soon someone else will come to set aside another domain in which to preach that, from the perspective of ultimate values, material things are unimportant; that selfishness-or even the self-are illusory, and that to give is better than to receive. If nothing else, it is surely significant that all the Axial Age religions emphasized the importance of charity, a concept that had barely existed before. Pure greed and pure generosity are complementary concepts; neither could really be imagined without the other; both could only arise in inst.i.tutional contexts that insisted on such pure and single-minded behavior; and both seem to have appeared together wherever impersonal, physical, cash money also appeared on the scene.

As for the religious movements: it would be easy enough to write them off as escapist, as promising the victims of the Axial Age empires liberation in the next world as a way of letting them accept their lot in this one, and convincing the rich that all they really owed the poor were occasional charitable donations. Radical thinkers almost invariably do write them off in this way. Surely, the willingness of the governments themselves to eventually embrace them would seem to support this conclusion. But the issue is more complicated. First of all, there is something to be said for escapism. Popular uprisings in the ancient world usually ended in the ma.s.sacre of the rebels. As I've already observed, physical escape, such as via exodus or defection, has always been the most effective response to oppressive conditions since the earliest times we know about. Where physical escape is not possible, what, exactly, is an oppressed peasant supposed to do? Sit and contemplate her misery? At the very least, otherworldly religions provided glimpses of radical alternatives. Often they allowed people to create other worlds within this one, liberated s.p.a.ces of one sort or another. It is surely significant that the only people who succeeded in abolis.h.i.+ng slavery in the ancient world were religious sects, such as the Essenes-who did so, effectively, by defecting from the larger social order and forming their own utopian communities.81 Or, in a smaller but more enduring example: the democratic city-states of northern India were all eventually stamped out by the great empires (Kautilya provides extensive advice on how to subvert and destroy democratic const.i.tutions), but the Buddha admired the democratic organization of their public a.s.semblies and adopted it as the model for his followers.82 Buddhist monasteries are still called sangha, the ancient name for such republics, and continue to operate by the same consensus-finding process to this day, preserving a certain egalitarian democratic ideal that would otherwise have been entirely forgotten.

Finally, the larger historical achievements of these movements are not, in fact, insignificant. As they took hold, things began to change. Wars became less brutal and less frequent. Slavery faded as an inst.i.tution, to the point at which, by the Middle Ages, it had become insignificant or even nonexistent across most of Eurasia. Everywhere too, the new religious authorities began to seriously address the social dislocations introduced by debt.

Chapter Ten.

THE MIDDLE AGES.

(600 450 AD).

Artificial wealth comprises the things which of themselves satisfy no natural need, for example money, which is a human contrivance.

-St. Thomas Aquinas.

IF THE AXIAL AGE saw the emergence of complementary ideals of commodity markets and universal world religions, the Middle Ages were the period in which those two inst.i.tutions began to merge.

Everywhere, the age began with the collapse of empires. Eventually, new states formed, but in these new states, the nexus between war, bullion, and slavery was broken; conquest and acquisition for their own sake were no longer celebrated as the end of all political life. At the same time, economic life, from the conduct of international trade to the organization of local markets, came to fall increasingly under the regulation of religious authorities. One result was a widespread movement to control, or even forbid, predatory lending. Another was a return, across Eurasia, to various forms of virtual credit money.

Granted, this is not the way we're used to thinking of the Middle Ages. For most of us, "Medieval" remains a synonym for superst.i.tion, intolerance, and oppression. Yet for most of the earth's inhabitants, it could only be seen as an extraordinary improvement over the terrors of the Axial Age.

One reason for our skewed perception is that we're used to thinking of the Middle Ages as something that happened primarily in Western Europe, in territories that had been little more than border outposts of the Roman Empire to begin with. According to the conventional wisdom, with the collapse of the empire, the cities were largely abandoned and the economy "reverted to barter," taking at least five centuries to recover. Even for Europe, though, this is based on a series of unquestioned a.s.sumptions that, as I've said, crumble the moment one starts seriously poking at them. Chief among them is the idea that the absence of coins means the absence of money. True, the destruction of the Roman war machine also meant that Roman coins went out of circulation; and the few coins produced within the Gothic or Frankish kingdoms that established themselves over the ruins of the old empire were largely fiduciary in nature.1 Still, a glance at the "barbarian law codes" reveals that even at the height of the Dark Ages, people were still carefully keeping accounts in Roman money as they calculated interest rates, contracts, and mortgages. Again, cities shriveled, and many were abandoned, but even this was something of a mixed blessing. Certainly, it had a terrible effect on literacy; but one must also bear in mind that ancient cities could only be maintained by extracting resources from the countryside. Roman Gaul, for instance, had been a network of cities, connected by the famous Roman roads to an endless succession of slave plantations, which were owned by the urban grandees.2 After around 400 ad, the population of the towns declined radically, but the plantations also disappeared. In the following centuries, many came to be replaced by manors, churches, and even later, castles-where new local lords extracted their own dues from the surrounding farmers. But one need only do the math: since Medieval agriculture was no less efficient than ancient agriculture (in fact, it rapidly became a great deal more so), the amount of work required to feed a handful of mounted warriors and clergymen could not possibly have been anything like that required to feed entire cities. However oppressed Medieval serfs might have been, their plight was nothing compared with that of their Axial Age equivalents.

Still, the Middle Ages proper are best seen as having begun not in Europe but in India and China, between 400 and 600 ad, and then sweeping across much of the western half of Eurasia with the advent of Islam. They only really reached Europe four hundred years later. Let us begin our story, then, in India.

Medieval India.

(Flight into Hierarchy).

I left off in India with Aoka's embrace of Buddhism, but I noted that ultimately, his project foundered. Neither his empire nor his church was to endure. It took a good deal of time, however, for this failure to occur.

The Mauryans represented a high watermark of empire. The next five hundred years saw a succession of kingdoms, most of them strongly supportive of Buddhism. Stupas and monasteries sprang up everywhere, but the states that sponsored them grew weaker and weaker; centralized armies dissolved; soldiers, like officials, increasingly came to be paid by land grants rather than salaries. As a result, the number of coins in circulation steadily declined.3 Here too, the early Middle Ages witnessed a dramatic decline of cities: where the Greek amba.s.sador Megasthenes described Aoka's capital of Patna as the largest city in the world of his day, Medieval Arab and Chinese travelers described India as a land of endless tiny villages.

As a result, most historians have come to write, much as they do in Europe, of a collapse of the money economy; of commerce becoming a "reversion to barter." Here too, this appears to be simply untrue. What vanished were the military means to extract resources from the peasants. In fact, Hindu law-books written at the time show increasing attention to credit arrangements, with a sophisticated language of sureties, collateral, mortgages, promissory notes, and compound interest.4 One need only consider how the Buddhist establishments popping up all over India during these centuries were funded. While the earliest monks were wandering mendicants, owning little more than their begging bowls, early Medieval monasteries were often magnificent establishments with vast treasuries. Still, in principle, their operations were financed almost entirely through credit.

The key innovation was the creation of what were called the "perpetual endowments" or "inexhaustible treasuries." Say a lay supporter wished to make a contribution to her local monastery. Rather than offering to provide candles for a specific ritual, or servants to attend to the upkeep of the monastic grounds, she would provide a certain sum of money-or something worth a great deal of money-that would then be loaned out in the name of the monastery, at the accepted 15-percent annual rate. The interest on the loan would then be earmarked for that specific purpose.5 An inscription discovered at the Great Monastery of Sanci sometime around 450 ad provides a handy ill.u.s.tration. A woman named Harisvamini donates the relatively modest sum of twelve dinaras to the "n.o.ble Community of Monks."6 The text carefully inscribes how the income is to be divided up: the interest on five of the dinaras was to provide daily meals for five different monks, the interest from another three would pay to light three lamps for the Buddha, in memory of her parents, and so forth. The inscription ends by saying that this was a permanent endowment, "created with a doc.u.ment in stone to last as long as the moon and the sun": since the princ.i.p.al would never be touched, the contribution would last forever.7 Some of these loans presumably went to individuals, others were commercial loans to "guilds of bamboo-workers, braziers, and potters," or to village a.s.semblies.8 We have to a.s.sume that in most cases the money is an accounting unit: what were really being transacted were animals, wheat, silk, b.u.t.ter, fruit, and all the other goods whose appropriate rates of interest were so carefully stipulated in the law-codes of the time. Still, large amounts of gold did end up flowing into monastic coffers. When coins go out of circulation, after all, the metal doesn't simply disappear. In the Middle Ages-and this seems to have been true across Eurasia-the vast majority of it ended up in religious establishments, churches, monasteries, and temples, either stockpiled in h.o.a.rds and treasuries or gilded onto or cast into altars, sanctums, and sacred instruments. Above all, it was shaped into images of G.o.ds. As a result, those rulers who did try to put an Axial Agestyle coinage system back into circulation-invariably, to fund some project of military expansion-often had to pursue self-consciously anti-religious policies in order to do so. Probably the most notorious was one Harsa, who ruled Kashmir from 1089 to 1101 ad, who is said to have appointed an officer called the "Superintendent for the Destruction of the G.o.ds." According to later histories, Harsa employed leprous monks to systematically desecrate divine images with urine and excrement, thus neutralizing their power, before dragging them off to be melted down.9 He is said to have destroyed more than four thousand Buddhist establishments before being betrayed and killed, the last of his dynasty-and his miserable fate was long held out as an example of where the revival of the old ways was likely to lead one in the end.

For the most part, then, the gold remained sacrosanct, laid up in the sacred places-though in India, over time these were increasingly Hindu ones, not Buddhist. What we now see as traditional Hindu-village India appears to have been largely a creation of the early Middle Ages. We do not know precisely how it happened. As kingdoms continued to rise and fall, the world inhabited by kings and princes became increasingly distant from that of most people's everyday affairs. During much of the period immediately following the collapse of the Mauryan empire, for instance, much of India was governed by foreigners.10 Apparently, this increasing distance allowed local Brahmins to begin reshaping the new-increasingly rural-society along strictly hierarchical principles.

They did it above all by seizing control of the administration of law. The Dharmastra, law-codes produced by Brahmin scholars between roughly 200 bc and 400 ad, give us a good idea of the new vision of society. In it, old ideas like the Vedic conception of a debt to G.o.ds, sages, and ancestors were resuscitated-but now, they applied only and specifically to Brahmins, whose duty and privilege it was to stand in for all humanity before the forces that controlled the universe.11 Far from being required to attain learning, members of the inferior cla.s.ses were forbidden to do so: the Laws of Manu, for instance, set down that any Sudra (the lowest caste, a.s.signed to farming and material production) who so much as listened in on the teaching of the law or sacred texts should have molten lead poured into their ears; on the occasion of a repeat offense, have their tongues cut out.12 At the same time Brahmins, however ferociously they guarded their privileges, also adopted aspects of once-radical Buddhist and Jain ideas like karma, reincarnation, and ahimsa. Brahmins were expected to refrain from any sort of physical violence, and even to become vegetarians. In alliance with representatives of the old warrior caste, they also managed to win control of most of the land in the ancient villages. Artisans and craftsmen fleeing the decline or destruction of cities often ended up as suppliant refugees, and, gradually, low-caste clients. The result were increasingly complex local patronage systems in the countryside-jajmani systems, as they came to be known-where the refugees provided services for the landowning castes, who took on many of the roles once held by the state, providing protection and justice, extracting labor dues, and so on-but also protected local communities from actual royal representatives.13 This latter function is crucial. Foreign visitors were later to be awed by the self-sufficiency of the traditional Indian village, with its elaborate system of landowning castes, farmers, and such "service castes" as barbers, smiths, tanners, drummers, and washermen, all arranged in hierarchical order, each seen as making its own unique and necessary contribution to their little society, all of it typically operating entirely without the use of metal currency. It was only possible for those reduced to the status of Sudras and Untouchables to have a chance of accepting their lowly position because the exaction of local landlords was, again, on nothing like the same scale as that under earlier governments-under which villagers had to support cities of upwards of a million people-and because the village community became an effective means of holding the state and its representatives at least partially at bay.

We don't know the mechanisms that brought this world about, but the role of debt was surely significant. The creation of thousands of Hindu temples alone must have involved hundreds of thousands, even millions, of interest-bearing loans-since, while Brahmins were themselves forbidden to lend money at interest, temples were not. We can already see, in the earliest of the new law-codes, the Laws of Manu, the way that local authorities were struggling to reconcile old customs like debt peonage and chattel slavery with the desire to establish an overarching hierarchical system in which everyone knew their place. The Laws of Manu carefully cla.s.sify slaves into seven types depending on how they were reduced to slavery (war, debt, self-sale ...) and explain the conditions under which each might be emanc.i.p.ated-but then go on to say that Sudras can never really be emanc.i.p.ated, since, after all, they were created to serve the other castes.14 Similarly, where earlier codes had established a 15-percent annual rate of interest, with exceptions for commercial loans,15 the new codes organized interest by caste: stating that one could charge a maximum of 2 percent a month for a Brahmin, 3 percent for a Ksatriya (warrior), 4 percent for a Vaisya (merchant), and 5 percent for a Sudra-which is the difference between 24 percent annually on the one extreme and a hefty 60 percent on the other.16 The laws also identify five different ways interest can be paid, of which the most significant for our concerns is "bodily interest": physical labor in the creditor's house or fields, to be rendered until such time as the princ.i.p.al is cleared. Even here, though, caste considerations were paramount. No one could be forced into the service of anyone of lower caste; moreover, since debts were enforceable on a debtor's children and even grandchildren, "until the princ.i.p.al is cleared" could mean quite some time-as the Indian historian R.S. Sharma notes, such stipulations "remind us of the present practice according to which several generations of the same family have been reduced to the position of hereditary ploughmen in consideration of some paltry sum advanced to them."17 Indeed, India has become notorious as a country in which a very large part of the working population is laboring in effective debt peonage to a landlord or other creditor. Such arrangements became even easier over time. By about 1000 ad, restrictions on usury by members of the upper castes in Hindu law-codes largely disappeared. On the other hand, 1000 ad was about the same time that Islam appeared in India-a religion dedicated to eradicating usury altogether. So at the very least we can say that these things never stopped being contested. And even Hindu law of that time was far more humane than almost anything found in the ancient world. Debtors were not, generally speaking, reduced to slavery, and there is no widespread evidence of the selling of women or children. In fact, overt slavery had largely vanished from the countryside by this time. And debt peons were not even p.a.w.ns, exactly; by law, they were simply paying interest on a freely contracted agreement. Even when that took generations, the law stipulated that even if the princ.i.p.al was never paid, in the third generation, they would be freed.

There is a peculiar tension here: a kind of paradox. Debt and credit arrangements may well have played a crucial role in creating the Indian village system, but they could never really become their basis. It might have made a certain sense to declare that, just as Brahmins had to dispatch their debts to the G.o.ds, everyone should be, in a certain sense, in debt to those above them. But in another sense, that would have completely subverted the very idea of caste, which was that the universe was a vast hierarchy in which different sorts of people were a.s.sumed to be of fundamentally different natures, that these ranks and grades were fixed forever, and that when goods and services moved up and down the hierarchy, they followed not principles of exchange at all but (as in all hierarchical systems) custom and precedent. The French anthropologist Louis Dumont made the famous argument that one cannot even really talk about "inequality" here, because to use that phrase implies that one believes people should or could be equal, and this idea was completely alien to Hindu conceptions.18 For them to have imagined their responsibilities as debts would have been profoundly subversive, since debts are by definition arrangements between equals-at least in the sense that they are equal parties to a contract-that could and should be repaid.19 Politically, it is never a particularly good idea to first tell people they are your equals, and then humiliate and degrade them. This is presumably why peasant insurrections, from Chiapas to j.a.pan, have so regularly aimed to wipe out debts, rather than focus on more structural issues like caste systems, or even slavery.20 The British Raj discovered this to their occasional chagrin when they used debt peonage-superimposed on the caste system-as the basis of their labor system in colonial India. Perhaps the paradigmatic popular insurrection was the Deccan riots of 1875, when indebted farmers rose up to seize and systematically destroy the account books of local money-lenders. Debt peonage, it would appear, is far more likely to inspire outrage and collective action than is a system premised on pure inequality.

China:.

Buddhism and the Economy of Infinite Debt.

By Medieval standards, India was unusual for resisting the appeal of the great Axial Age religions, but we observe the basic pattern: the decline of empire, armies, and cash economy, the rise of religious authorities, independent of the state, who win much of their popular legitimacy through their ability to regulate emerging credit systems.

China might be said to represent the opposite extreme. This was the one place where a late Axial Age attempt to yoke empire and religion together was a complete success. True, here as elsewhere, there was an initial period of breakdown: after the collapse of the Han dynasty around 220 ad, the central state broke apart, cities shrank, coins disappeared, and so on. But in China this was only temporary. As Max Weber long ago pointed out, once one sets up a genuinely effective bureaucracy, it's almost impossible to get rid of it. And the Chinese bureaucracy was uniquely effective. Before long, the old Han system reemerged: a centralized state, run by Confucian scholar-gentry trained in the literary cla.s.sics, selected through a national exam system, working in meticulously organized national and regional bureaus where the money supply, like other economic matters, was continually monitored and regulated. Chinese monetary theory was always chartalist. This was partly just an effect of size: the empire and its internal market were so huge that foreign trade was never especially important; therefore, those running the government were well aware that they could turn pretty much anything into money, simply by insisting that taxes be paid in that form.

The two great threats to the authorities were always the same: the nomadic peoples to the north (who they systematically bribed, but who nonetheless periodically swept over and conquered sections of China) and popular unrest and rebellion. The latter was almost constant, and on a scale unknown anywhere else in human history. There were decades in Chinese history when the rate of recorded peasant uprisings was roughly 1.8 per hour.21 What's more, such uprisings were frequently successful. Most of the most famous Chinese dynasties that were not the product of barbarian invasion (the Yuan or Qing) were originally peasant insurrections (the Han, Tang, Sung, and Ming). In no other part of the world do we see anything like this. As a result, Chinese statecraft ultimately came down to funneling enough resources to the cities to feed the urban population and keep the nomads at bay, without causing a notoriously contumacious rural population to rise up in arms. The official Confucian ideology of patriarchal authority, equal opportunity, promotion of agriculture, light taxes, and careful government control of merchants seemed expressly designed to appeal to the interests and sensibilities of a (potentially rebellious) rural patriarch.22 One need hardly add that in these circ.u.mstances, limiting the depredations of the local village loan shark-the traditional bane of rural families-was a constant government concern. Over and over we hear the same familiar story: peasants down on their luck, whether due to natural disaster or the need to pay for a parent's funeral-would fall into the hands of predatory lenders, who would seize their fields and houses, forcing them to work or pay rent in what had once been their own lands; the threat of rebellion would then drive the government to inst.i.tute a dramatic program of reforms. One of the first we know about came in the form of a coup d'etat in 9 ad, when a Confucian official named w.a.n.g Mang seized the throne to deal (so he claimed) with a nationwide debt crisis. According to proclamations made at the time, the practice of usury had caused the effective tax rate (that is, the amount of the average peasant's harvest that ended up being carried off by someone else) to rise from just over 3 percent, to 50 percent.23 In reaction, w.a.n.g Mang inst.i.tuted a program reforming the currency, nationalizing large estates, promoting state-run industries-including public granaries-and banning private holding of slaves. w.a.n.g Mang also established a state loan agency that would offer interest-free funeral loans for up to ninety days for those caught unprepared by the death of relatives, as well as long-term loans of 3 percent monthly or 10 percent annual income rates for commercial or agricultural investments.24 "With this scheme," one historian remarks, "w.a.n.g was confident that all business transactions would be under his scrutiny and the abuse of usury would be forever eradicated."25 Needless to say, it was not, and later Chinese history is full of similar stories: widespread inequality and unrest followed by the appointment of official commissions of inquiry, regional debt relief (either blanket amnesties or annulments of all loans in which interest had exceeded the princ.i.p.al), cheap grain loans, famine relief, laws against the selling of children.26 All this became the standard fare of government policy. It was very unevenly successful; it certainly did not create an egalitarian peasant utopia, but it prevented any widespread return to Axial Age conditions.

We are used to thinking of such bureaucratic interventions-particularly the monopolies and regulations-as state restriction on "the market"-owing to the prevailing prejudice that sees markets as quasi-natural phenomena that emerge by themselves, and governments as having no role other than to squelch or siphon from them. I have repeatedly pointed out how mistaken this is, but China provides a particularly striking example. The Confucian state may have been the world's greatest and most enduring bureaucracy, but it actively promoted markets, and as a result, commercial life in China soon became far more sophisticated, and markets more developed, than anywhere else in the world.

This despite the fact that Confucian orthodoxy was overtly hostile to merchants and even the profit motive itself. Commercial profit was seen as legitimate only as compensation for the labor that merchants expended in transporting goods from one place to another, but never as fruits of speculation. What this meant in practice was that they were pro-market but anti-capitalist.

Again, this seems bizarre, since we're used to a.s.suming that capitalism and markets are the same thing, but, as the great French historian Fernand Braudel pointed out, in many ways they could equally well be conceived as opposites. While markets are ways of exchanging goods through the medium of money-historically, ways for those with a surplus of grain to acquire candles and vice versa (in economic shorthand, C-M-C', for commodity-money-other commodity)-capitalism is first and foremost the art of using money to get more money (M-C-M'). Normally, the easiest way to do this is by establis.h.i.+ng some kind of formal or de facto monopoly. For this reason, capitalists, whether merchant princes, financiers, or industrialists, invariably try to ally themselves with political authorities to limit the freedom of the market, so as to make it easier for them to do so.27 From this perspective, China was for most of its history the ultimate anti-capitalist market state.28 Unlike later European princes, Chinese rulers systematically refused to team up with would-be Chinese capitalists (who always existed). Instead, like their officials, they saw them as destructive parasites-though, unlike the usurers, ones whose fundamentally selfish and antisocial motivations could still be put to use in certain ways. In Confucian terms, merchants were like soldiers. Those drawn to a career in the military were a.s.sumed to be driven largely by a love of violence. As individuals, they were not good people; but they were also necessary to defend the frontiers. Similarly, merchants were driven by greed and basically immoral; yet if kept under careful administrative supervision, they could be made to serve the public good.29 Whatever one might think of the principles, the results are hard to deny. For most of its history, China maintained the highest standard of living in the world-even England only really overtook it in perhaps the 1820s, well past the time of the Industrial Revolution.30 Confucianism is not precisely a religion, perhaps; it is usually considered more an ethical and philosophical system. So China too could be considered something of a departure from the common Medieval pattern, whereby commerce was, almost everywhere, brought under the control of religion. But it wasn't a complete departure. One need only consider the remarkable economic role of Buddhism in this same period. Buddhism had arrived in China through the Central Asia caravan routes and in its early days was largely a religion promoted by merchants, but in the chaos following the collapse of the Han dynasty in 220 ad, it began to take popular roots. The Liang (502557) and Tang (618907) dynasties saw outbreaks of pa.s.sionate religious fervor, in which thousands of rural young people across China would renounce their farms, shops, and families to seek ordination as Buddhist monks and nuns; where merchants or landed magnates pledged their entire fortunes to the propagation of the Dharma; building projects hollowed out whole mountains to create bodhisattvas and giant statues of the Buddha; and pageants where monks and devotees ritually burned their heads and hands or, in some instances, set themselves on fire. By the midfifth century, there were dozens of such spectacular suicides; they became, as one historian put it "a macabre kind of fas.h.i.+on."31 Historians differ over their meaning. Certainly the pa.s.sions unleashed provided a dramatic alternative to the staid orthodoxy of the Confucian literati, but it's also surprising, to say the least, to see this in a religion promoted above all by the commercial cla.s.ses. The French Sinologist Jacques Gernet observes: It is clear that these suicides, so contrary to traditional morality, aimed to redeem the sins of all beings, to compel the G.o.ds and men at one and the same time. And they were staged: usually, in the fifth century, a pyre was erected on a mountain. The suicide took place in the presence of a large crowd uttering lamentations and bringing forward rich offerings. People of all social ranks attended the spectacle together. After the fire had burned out, the ashes of the monk were collected and a stupa, a new place of wors.h.i.+p, was created to house them.32 Gernet's picture of dozens of Christ-like redeemers seems overstated, but the precise meaning of these suicides was unclear-and widely debated-even in the Middle Ages. Some contemporaries saw them as the ultimate expression of contempt for the body; others as recognition of the illusory nature of the self and all material attachments; yet others, as the ultimate form of charity, the giving of that which can only be most precious, one's very physical existence, as a sacrifice to the benefit of all living things; a sentiment that one tenth-century biographer expressed in the following verses: To give away the thing that is difficult to part with, Is the best offering amongst the alms.

Let this impure and sinful body, Turn into something like a diamond.

That is, an object of eternal value, an investment that can bear fruit for all eternity.

I draw attention to this because this sentiment provides an elegant ill.u.s.tration of a problem that seems to have first appeared in the world with notions of pure charity that always seemed to accompany Axial Age religions, and which provided endless philosophical conundrums. In human economies, it does not appear to have occurred to anyone that any act could be either purely selfish or purely altruistic. As I noted in chapter five, an act of absolute selfless giving can only also be absolutely antisocial-hence in a way, inhuman. It is merely the mirror image of an act of theft or even murder; hence, it makes a certain sort of sense that suicide be conceived as the ultimate selfless gift. Yet this is the door that necessarily opens as soon as one develops a notion of "profit" and then tries to conceive its opposite.

This tension seems to hang over the economic life of Medieval Chinese Buddhism, which, true to its commercial origins, retained a striking tendency to employ the language of the marketplace. "One purchases felicity, and sells one's sins," wrote one monk, "just as in commercial operations."34 Nowhere was this so true as in those schools, such as the School of the Three Stages, that adopted the notion of "karmic debt"-that each of the sins of one's acc.u.mulated past lives continues as a debt needing to be discharged. An obscure and unusual view in cla.s.sical Indian Buddhism, the notion of karmic debt took on a powerful new life in China.35 As one Three Stages text puts it, we all know that insolvent debtors will be reborn as animals or slaves; but in reality, we are all insolvent debtors, because acquiring the money to repay our temporal debts necessarily means acquire new, spiritual ones, since every means of acquiring wealth will necessarily involve exploiting, damaging, and causing suffering to other living beings.

Some use their power and authority as officials in order to bend the law and seize wealth. Some prosper in the marketplace ... They engage in an excess of lies and cheat and extort profits from others. Still others, farmers, burn the mountains and marshes, flood the fields, plough and mill, destroying the nests and burrows of animals ...

There is no avoiding the fact of our past debts, and it is difficult to comprehend the number of separate lives it would require if you wanted to pay them one by one.36 As Gernet remarks, the idea of life as an endless burden of debt would surely have struck a chord with Chinese villagers, for whom this was all too often literally true; but, as he also points out, like their counterparts in ancient Israel, they were also familiar with that sense of sudden liberation that came with official amnesties. There was a way to achieve that too. All that was required was to make regular donations to some monastery's Inexhaustible Treasury. The moment one does so, the debts from every one of one's past lives are instantly blotted out. The author even provides a little parable, not unlike Jesus's parable of the ungrateful servant, but far more optimistic. How, it might be asked, would a poor man's tiny contribution possibly have such cosmic effects?

Answer: In a parable it is like a poor man burdened by a debt of one thousand strings of coins to another person. He always suffers from his debt, and the poor man is afraid whenever the debt-master comes to collect.

He visits the rich man's house and confesses he is beyond the time-limit and begs forgiveness for his offense-he is poor and without a station in life. He tells him that each day he makes a single coin he will return it to the rich man. On hearing this, the rich man is very pleased and forgives him for being overdue; moreover, the poor man is not dragged away to jail.

Giving to the Inexhaustible Storehouse is also like this.37 One might almost call this salvation on the installment plan-but the implication is that the payments shall be made, like the interest payments on the wealth when it is subsequently loaned out, for all eternity.

Other schools concentrated not on karmic debt, but on one's debt to one's parents. Where Confucians built their system of morality above all on filial piety to fathers, Chinese Buddhists were primarily concerned with mothers; with the care and suffering required in raising, feeding, and educating children. A mother's kindness is unlimited, her selflessness absolute; this was seen to be embodied above all in the act of breastfeeding, the fact that mothers transform their very flesh and blood into milk; they feed their children with their own bodies. In doing so, however, they allow unlimited love to be precisely quantified. One author calculated that the average infant absorbs precisely 180 pecks of mother's milk in its first three years of life, and this const.i.tutes its debt as an adult. The figure soon became canonical. To repay this milk debt, or indeed one's debt to one's parents more generally, was simply impossible. "If you stacked up jewels from the ground up to the twenty-eighth heaven," wrote one Buddhist author, "it would not compare" with the value of your parent's nurturance.38 Even if you were to "cut your own flesh to offer her three times a day for four billion years," wrote another, "it would not pay back even a single day" of what your mother did for you.39 The solution, however, is the same: donating money to the Inexhaustible Treasuries. The result was an elaborate cycle of debts and forms of redemption. A man begins with an unpayable milk-debt. The only thing of comparable value is the Dharma, the Buddhist truth itself. One can thus repay one's parents by bringing them to Buddhism; indeed, this can be done even after death, when one's mother will otherwise wind up as a hungry ghost in h.e.l.l. If one makes a donation to the Inexhaustible Treasuries in her name, sutras will be recited for her; she will be delivered; the money, in the meantime, will be put partly to work as charity, as pure gift, but partly, too, as in India, as interest-bearing loans, earmarked for specific purposes for the furtherance of Buddhist education, ritual, or monastic life.

The Chinese Buddhist approach to charity was nothing if not multifaceted. Festivals often led to vast outpourings of contributions, with wealthy adherents vying with one another in generosity, often driving their entire fortunes to the monasteries, in the forms of oxcarts laden with millions of strings of cash-a kind of economic self-immolation that paralleled the spectacular monastic suicides. Their contributions swelled the Inexhaustible Treasuries. Some would be given to the needy, particularly in times of hards.h.i.+p. Some would be loaned. One practice that hovered between charity and business was providing peasants with alternatives to the local moneylender. Most monasteries had attendant p.a.w.nshops where the local poor could place some valuable possession-a robe, a couch, a mirror-in hock in exchange for low-interest loans.40 Finally, there was the business of the monastery itself: that portion of the Inexhaustible Treasury turned over to the management of lay brothers, and either put out at loan or invested. Since monks were not allowed to eat the products of their own fields, the fruit or grain had to be put on the market, further swelling monastic revenues. Most monasteries came to be surrounded not only by commercial farms but veritable industrial complexes of oil presses, flour mills, shops, and hostels, often with thousands of bonded workers.41 At the same time, the Treasuries themselves became-as Gernet was perhaps the first to point out-the world's first genuine forms of concentrated finance capital. They were, after all, enormous concentrations of wealth managed by what were in effect monastic corporations, which were constantly seeking new opportunities for profitable investment. They even shared the quintessential capitalist imperative of continual growth; the Treasuries had to expand, since according to Mahayana doctrine, genuine liberation would not be possible until the whole world embraced the Dharma.42 This was precisely the situation-huge concentrations of capital interested in nothing more than profit-that Confucian economic policy was supposed to prevent. Still, it took some time for Chinese governments to recognize the threat. Government att.i.tudes veered back and forth. At first, especially in the chaotic years of the early Middle Ages, monks were welcomed-even given generous land grants and provided with convict laborers to reclaim forests and marshes, and tax-exempt status for their business enterprises.43 A few emperors converted, and while most of the bureaucracy kept the monks at arm's length, Buddhism became especially popular with court women, as well as with eunuchs and many scions of wealthy families. As time went on, though, administrators turned from seeing monks as a boon to rural society to its potential ruination. Already, by 511 ad, there were decrees condemning monks for diverting grain that was supposed to be used for charitable purposes to high-interest loans, and altering debt contracts-a government commission had to be appointed to review the accounts and nullify any loans in which interest was found to have exceeded princ.i.p.al. In 713 ad we have another decree, confiscating two Inexhaustible Treasuries of the Three Stages sect, whose members they accused of fraudulent solicitation.44 Before long there were major campaigns of government repression, at first often limited to certain regions, but over time, more often empire-wide. During the most severe, carried out in 845 ad, a total of 4,600 monasteries were razed along with their shops and mills, 260,000 monks and nuns forcibly defrocked and returned to their families-but at the same time, according to government reports, 150,000 temple serfs released from bondage.

Whatever the real reasons behind the waves of repression (and these were no doubt many), the official reason was always the same: a need to restore the money supply. The monasteries were becoming so large, and so rich, administrators insisted, that China was simply running out of metal: The great repressions of Buddhism under the Chou emperor Wu between 574 and 577, under Wu-tsung in 842845, and finally in 955, presented themselves primarily as measures of economic recovery: each of them provided an opportunity for the imperial government to procure the necessary copper for the minting of new coins.45 One reason is that monks appear to have been systematically melting down strings of coins, often hundreds of thousands at a time, to build colossal copper or even gilded copper statues of the Buddha-along with other objects such as bells and copper chimes, or even such extravagances as mirrored halls or gilded copper roof tiles. The result, according to official commissions of inquiry, was economically disastrous: the price of metals would soar, coinage disappear, and rural marketplaces cease to function, even as those rural people whose children had not become monks often fell deeper into debt to the monasteries.

It perhaps stands to reason that Chinese Buddhism, a religion of merchants that then took popular roots, should have developed in this direction: a genuine theology of debt, even perhaps a practice of absolute self-sacrifice, of abandoning everything, one's fortune or even one's life, that ultimately led to collectively managed finance capital. The reason that the result seems so weird, so full of paradoxes, is that it is again an attempt to apply the logic of exchange to questions of Eternity.

Recall an idea from earlier in the book: exchange, unless it's an instantaneous cash transaction, creates debts. Debts linger over time. If you imagine all human relations as exchange, then insofar as people do have ongoing relations with one another, those relations are laced with debt and sin. The only way out is to annihilate the debt, but then social relations vanish too. This is quite in accord with Buddhism, whose ultimate aim is indeed the attainment of "emptiness," absolute liberation, the annihilation of all human and material attachments, since these are all ultimately causes of suffering. For Mahayana Buddhists, however, absolute liberation cannot be achieved by any one being independently; the liberation of each depends on all the others; therefore, until the end of time, such matters are in a certain sense always in suspension.

In the meantime, exchange dominates: "One purchases felicity, and sells one's sins, just as in commercial operations." Even acts of charity and self-sacrifice are not purely generous; one is purchasing "merit" from the bodhisattvas.46 The notion of infinite debt comes in when this logic slams up against the Absolute, or, one might perhaps better say, against something that utterly defies the logic of exchange. Because there are things that do. This would explain, for instance, the odd urge to first quantify the exact amount of milk one has absorbed at one's mother's breast, and then to say that there is no conceivable way to repay it. Exchange implies interaction between equivalent beings. Your mother, on the other hand, is not an equivalent being. She created you out of her own flesh. This is exactly the point that I suggested the Vedic authors were subtly trying to make when they talked about "debts" to the G.o.ds: of course you cannot really "pay your debt to the universe"-that would imply that (1) you and (2) everything that exists (including you) are in some sense equivalent ent.i.ties. This is clearly absurd. The closest you can come to repayment is to simply recognize that fact. Such recognition is the true meaning of sacrifice. Like Rospabe's original money, a sacrificial offering is not a way to pay a debt, but a way to acknowledge the impossibility of the idea that there could ever be repayment: The parallel was not missed in certain mythological traditions. According to one famous Hindu myth, two G.o.ds, the brothers Kartikeya and Ganesha, had a quarrel over who should be the first to marry. Their mother Parvati suggested a contest: the winner would be the one to most quickly circle the entire universe. Kartikeya set off on the b