Buddhist Fund-Raising Poems and Other Lost Verses from Venerable Miaozhan’s Gāthā (Printed 1142)

Abstract

Buddhist fund-raising poetry lays at the intersection of literary arts, religious meaning making, and economic exchange. A twelfth-century woodblock print of Venerable Miaozhan’s Gāthā 妙湛和尚偈頌 contains 180 previously lost poems by the Chan master Miaozhan Sihui 妙湛思慧 (1071–1145). Neither Venerable Miaozhan’s Gāthā nor Miaozhan himself have previously been studied, likely because this rare text was in private collections until recently. Unusually, most of his poems are about fund-raising. This article introduces the text of Venerable Miaozhan’s Gāthā and its author, as well as the social networks encoded in his poems. Then, I focus on verses about fund-raising, economic exchange, and the role of tea in donations. Socioeconomic changes after war, the economic practices of monastery estates, and fund-raising instructions in ritual handbooks all provide contexts that partially explain Miaozhan’s fund-raising poetry. I interpret Miaozhan’s fund-raising poems as a religioliterary technology that circulated into the world where it could participate in the fashioning of religious meaning amid economic relationships between the monastery and its patrons.