Buddhism and Money: A Seminar

RELIGION 2706 Subject & Catalog Number

What’s the cost of being Buddhist? This graduate seminar examines the entanglements of Buddhism, economy, and ethical life, asking how money, gifts, labor, obligation, and value shape Buddhist practice and institutions. Drawing on religious studies, East Asian history, and economic anthropology, the course challenges the common framing of Buddhism as defined primarily by renunciation or anti-materialism. Buddhist institutions have long operated within systems of material and symbolic circulation, including donation and merit, ritual exchange, monastic labor, landholding, debt, patronage, and markets. Using classical texts, historical sources, ethnography, and critical social theory, the seminar approaches moral economy as a framework for analyzing how value and obligation are produced, justified, circulated, and contested in Buddhist worlds. 

The course is designed for graduate students in East Asian studies, religious studies, anthropology, and related fields. It assumes no uniform background in Buddhism or critical social theory, but it does require sustained engagement with theory, careful reading, and a willingness to work comparatively across historical periods and cultural contexts.