Buddhist Alms Giving: What Two Thousand Years of Offerings Built

The Buddha’s community owned almost nothing. Its members gave up property when they took their vows and lived on what others chose to give them. The teaching that made this work is called dāna — generosity — and it turns the transaction around: the one who gives is the one who benefits, because giving earns merit. The monk holds out the bowl so that others may give.

That idea sounds small. Over two and a half thousand years it built some of the most remarkable institutions in Asia. Bhutan’s word for it is yojay, and before looking at what yojay has meant at home, it is worth seeing the company it keeps.

India: a grove paved with gold, and a gift that never ran out

The first great offering in Buddhist memory was a garden. The merchant Anāthapiṇḍika — the name means “one who gives alms to the unprotected” — wanted to give the Buddha a place to stay near Shravasti, and chose the grove of Prince Jeta. The prince, not wishing to sell, named a price he thought no one would pay: cover the ground with coins. The merchant began to do it. Moved by his resolve, and wanting a share in the merit, Jeta gave the last of the land himself and built its gateway. The Jetavana became the place where the Buddha spent nineteen of his forty-five rainy-season retreats — more than anywhere else.

Some six centuries later, a gift at the Nasik caves in western India shows the idea taking a form that could outlast its giver. Around 120 CE Uṣavadāta, son-in-law of the ruler Nahapāna, gave a cave to the monks, and with it 3,000 kārṣāpaṇas placed with two weavers’ guilds in the town of Govardhana — 2,000 with one and 1,000 with the other, at fixed monthly interest. The weavers kept the capital working in their trade; the interest paid for the robes and needs of twenty monks living in the cave. The terms were carved into the rock, where they can still be read.

It is one of the earliest recorded endowment funds anywhere: not a gift to be spent, but a gift that went on giving.

Nalanda: a university fed by villages

For about eight centuries, from its founding around 427 CE under the Gupta emperor Kumaragupta I until its destruction around 1200, Nalanda in present-day Bihar was the greatest centre of Buddhist learning in the world. Students came from across Asia to study there.

It ran on offerings. The Chinese pilgrim Xuanzang, who studied there in the 630s, recorded that the king had granted it the revenues of about 100 villages, whose households sent rice, butter and milk every day. Yijing, who spent about ten years there later in the same century, put the number at 200 villages. The monastery did not farm or trade. The surrounding countryside kept thousands of monks and teachers free to study, teach and copy texts — for longer than most universities today have existed. Its ruins are now a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

Sri Lanka: the canon written down

In Sri Lanka, King Devanampiya Tissa founded the Mahavihara at Anuradhapura in the third century BCE, and royal patronage sustained it for more than a thousand years. The pilgrim Faxian found about 3,000 monks there around 400 CE.

Its greatest service was preservation. For centuries the Buddha’s teachings had been carried orally, memorised and recited. In the first century BCE, during the reign of King Vattagamani Abhaya and amid famine and war, the monks — according to the Sri Lankan chronicles — committed the canon to writing at the Aluvihare monastery. The Pali Canon that Theravāda Buddhists read today descends from that act. A community that the laity kept alive in hard years kept the teaching alive in turn.

Japan: 2.6 million contributors and a Great Buddha

In 743 the Emperor Shōmu issued an edict calling on the whole country to help build a colossal bronze Buddha at Tōdai-ji in Nara. He enlisted the monk Gyōki, who travelled the provinces raising contributions. The temple’s own records say more than 2.6 million people gave rice, timber, metal, cloth or labour. The statue was consecrated in 752 before a reported 10,000 monks, and Tōdai-ji is today part of the Historic Monuments of Ancient Nara, a World Heritage Site.

The record is honest about its costs: a special levy was also raised, and the chronicles note the hardship the building caused. That is worth remembering. What distinguishes the tradition at its best is that the giving is voluntary.

China: the oldest dated printed book

At Dunhuang, on the Silk Road, patrons of every kind — monks, local rulers, merchants, officers, lay associations — paid over a thousand years for some 500 cave temples at Mogao, painted and filled with sculpture. Sealed inside one of them, the Library Cave, were about 50,000 documents.

One of them is the Diamond Sutra of 868, the oldest complete printed book in the world that carries a date. Its closing line records why it exists: a man named Wang Jie had it made for free distribution, on behalf of his two parents. It was an act of merit. The earliest dated printed book survives because someone gave a teaching away. It is now in the British Library.

Korea: eighty thousand woodblocks

In the thirteenth century, under Mongol invasion, the Goryeo court and its patrons undertook to carve the entire Buddhist canon onto wooden printing blocks — a work of devotion seeking protection for the country. The result, the Tripitaka Koreana, runs to more than 80,000 blocks, carved over roughly sixteen years. It has been kept at Haeinsa temple since 1398, in storage halls so well designed that the wood has survived for almost eight centuries. UNESCO lists the halls as World Heritage and the blocks in its Memory of the World register.

Thailand and Myanmar: the monastery as school

In the Theravāda countries the daily alms round — monks walking at dawn with their bowls, households filling them — sustained something as valuable as any monument: literacy.

In Myanmar the word kyaung means both monastery and school. Boys learned to read and write from monks, in monasteries that villages fed. When the 1901 Census of India measured literacy, it found 60.3 per cent of Burmese Buddhist men over twenty could read, against about ten per cent across British India. In Thailand, temples were the country’s main schools for more than seven centuries, and when King Chulalongkorn built a national primary system in 1898 he built it on the wats, with monks as village teachers.

Tibet: the great monasteries

In Tibet the relationship between lama and patron took a formal name, chöyön: the one worthy of offerings, and the one who gives. The great monastic universities it sustained reached a scale unmatched anywhere. Drepung, near Lhasa, held about 7,700 monks when a British visitor recorded it in the 1930s — sometimes as many as 10,000 — which he believed made it the largest monastery in the world.

A parallel beyond Buddhism

The idea of the gift that keeps giving is not only Buddhist. Islam’s waqf, the perpetual lamps of Hindu temples, Christian hospitals kept by their vineyards, the Sikh langar and China’s clan charitable estates all reached it by their own roads — the subject of Yojay Around the World.

What the pattern shows

Across these cases the same three things recur.

At its best, the giving was voluntary and devotional. Not all of it was: royal grants assigned village revenues, and Tōdai-ji raised a levy alongside its offerings. But the tradition’s ideal — and the offering people made of their own will — was a gift, not a purchase.

It was pooled and endured. A village’s rice or a king’s land grant kept an institution alive for centuries, long after any single donor.

What it produced served everyone. A preserved canon, a printed book, a school, a university — the returns went far beyond the monks who received the offering.

Bhutan’s yojay belongs to this family. How it took shape in Bhutan — from the Zhabdrung to the land that fed the monks — is the subject of Yojay in Bhutan: Four Hundred Years of Offering.