The Subject Of Money. "to Help People Ward Off": Buddhist Ritual Exchange

"Reciprocity"is an important issue of gift study in anthropology, which is widely discovered by anthropologists in their fieldwork. A gift must be returned, and once you received a gift, you must send another gift to the giver. Mary Douglas insists that no free gifts. However, free gifts has been found in Indian ethnography, which is the gift received by Brahmans. Indians consider gifts as"poisonous", and gifts contain inauspiciousness, but Brahmans must fulfill the duty to receive gifts. This essay is based on my fieldwork in a temple of Sichuan province, China. There is a strict karma system in Buddhism, which means every act has its consequence and its cause, and the good inevitably is successful and the bad inevitably punished. This corresponds with reciprocity. But I found that there are also"free gifts"in Chinese Buddhist rituals, namely, the offering accepted by monks and nuns, who can just receive but not give. Actually, monks and nuns do return something to the laity; the former act as the latter's priests. But this exchange is special. Monks belongs to the sacred domain and they are beyond the whole society, so the exchange between monks and laity is the exchange between society and non-society, and it is by non-society that society is defined. I thought deeply on this fact, and discussed the paradox of gift, which has been considering as"utilitarian while also moral". Furthermore, I discussed different interpretations in social theory and reflected the concept of"gift"in anthropology.