Debt: The First 5,000 Years

by David Graeber

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 (502–557) and Tang (618–907) dynasties saw outbreaks of passionate 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 mid–fifth century, there were dozens of such spectacular suicides; they became, as one historian put it, “a macabre kind of fashion.”