---
title: "The Saṅgha as a Field of Merit — The Cātuddisa Saṅgha as Early Buddhism's Legal Answer to the Temporal Problem of Giving"
author: "釋慧鏡 (Shi Huijing)"
series: "Six Practice Gates, Volume 2 — DĀNA: The Practice of Giving, from Pāli Roots to the Dharmadhātu"
series_short: "DĀNA"
volume: 2
paper_id: "DANA-P09"
paper_number: 9
part: "Part III · Vinaya and the Early Schools"
part_number: 3
date: "2026-04-21"
version: "1.0"
license: "CC BY-NC-SA 4.0"
---

# The Saṅgha as a Field of Merit
**The *Cātuddisa Saṅgha* as Early Buddhism's Legal Answer to the Temporal Problem of Giving — Donor-Recipient Asymmetry and the Suspension of Ownership as Institutional *Ahaṁkāra*-Loosening**

*中文主題：僧伽作為施田——四方僧伽作為早期佛教對施之時間難題的律法回應——捐受不對稱與懸置擁有權作為制度性我執鬆動*

---

**Author:** 釋慧鏡 (Shi Huijing)
**Date:** April 2026
**License:** CC BY-NC-SA 4.0
**Version:** 1.0
**Series:** DĀNA — The Practice of Giving

---

## Abstract

The *cātuddisa saṅgha* — the vinaya-constituted legal recipient of every monastic real-property donation — is the structural form by which early Buddhism answered a specific temporal problem: how giving remains operative once it passes from the donor's present-moment *cetanā* into the community structure that receives it. This paper reads the structure through two interlocking moves: the donor-recipient asymmetry (the legal recipient is not the community the donor perceives but a class-beneficiary extending spatially across the four directions and temporally across *āgatānāgata*, arrived and not-yet-arrived) and the time-binding mechanism (the triple prohibition *不應分 · 不應自入 · 不應賣買*, the suspension of present ownership, and the inter-class closure of the Upāli QA at T1435 fascicle 48). Together they produce the DĀNA volume's first institutional landing of *ahaṁkāra*-loosening: a release of the donor's "I give" performed by the vinaya's legal dative rather than by the donor's psychological cultivation. The asymmetry is performed, not described, in the three redirection episodes opening T1428's *Senāsanakkhandhaka* (Bimbisāra, an unnamed *gṛhapati*, Anāthapiṇḍika); the mechanism is codified in the four-class taxonomic definition of the same fascicle. Cross-disciplinary comparison with Mauss's *Essai sur le don* finds shared suspension of ownership but decisive divergence on reciprocity: a non-reciprocal gift-structure is possible, preserved across six independent Indian vinaya transmissions for 2,500 years, stabilized by the custodial assembly's self-binding rather than external fiduciary enforcement. Comparison with the common law charitable trust and *biens de mainmorte* shows class-beneficiary perpetuity and inalienability achieved without named trustee or external sovereign. The paper opens Part III, places the DĀNA volume's central thesis at its first institutional landing, and hands off to P10 *Abhayādāna*, which takes up the same problem for non-material giving through the *sīla* layer.

**Keywords:** *cātuddisa saṅgha*, the saṅgha of the four directions, *āgatānāgata* class-beneficiary, donor-recipient asymmetry, time-binding, suspension of ownership, triple prohibition *不應分 · 不應自入 · 不應賣買*, inalienability, present-assembly usufruct, institutional *ahaṁkāra*-loosening, the first institutional landing of the DĀNA volume-thesis, T1428 *Senāsanakkhandhaka*, the triple donor attestation (Bimbisāra / *gṛhapati* / Anāthapiṇḍika), the four-class taxonomic definition, T1435 Upāli QA on saṅgha property, recitation-stratum stability, *koṭi-santhara*, Jetavana and the gateway-structure, *Mahāvagga* I.22 *Bimbisārasamāgamakathā*, *Cūḷavagga* VI.4 *Anumodanā* verses, *saṅghānussati* refrain, *anuttaraṃ puññakkhettaṃ lokassa*, four-vinaya convergence, *sthūlātyaya* offense-schedule, self-binding custodianship, Marcel Mauss, *Essai sur le don*, *prestation totale*, non-reciprocity, *hau*, common law charitable trust, *cy-près* doctrine, *biens de mainmorte*, settlor / corpus / beneficiaries, Part III opener, early reveal as structural promise, forward-pointer to *abhayādāna* and the *sīla* mechanism, P08's three-base container carryover.

---

## I. Framing

Around the middle of the fifth century BCE, a wealthy householder from Sāvatthī travelled to Rājagaha on business. The Pāli Vinaya records his encounter there: he heard the Buddha's name for the first time in his host's house, became so agitated that he could not sleep, and set out before dawn through a darkness dense enough that he turned back twice — his body shivering, his hair on end — before a yakkha named Sivaka urged him three times: *abhikkama gahapati abhikkama gahapati, abhikkantaṃ te seyyo no paṭikkantan* — "go forward, householder, go forward; going forward is better for you than going back." The householder reached the Buddha at the Sītavana, received the graduated discourse (*anupubbikathā*) — the talk on giving, the talk on virtue, the talk on the heavens, the danger of sensual pleasures, the benefit of renunciation, the Four Noble Truths — and attained the stainless vision of the Truth (*dhamma-cakkhu*) right there on the ground. He returned to Sāvatthī and began searching for a suitable park. He found one belonging to Prince Jeta. The prince, asked to sell, refused: "I would not give it away even if you covered the park with ten million coins." The householder treated this as a contract (*gahito, ayyaputta, ārāmo*), had gold coins brought out in carts, and covered the Jeta Grove (*jetavanaṃ koṭisantharaṃ santharāpesi*). The park was his. The disputed sale was adjudicated before the *vohārika mahāmattā*, the royal judges of commerce, and the householder's claim was upheld. The man's given name was Sudatta — "Well-Given." He was called by everyone in Sāvatthī *Anāthapiṇḍika* — "feeder of the destitute" — for his habits of giving.

What Anāthapiṇḍika has just purchased is, in plain commercial terms, a named plot of land outside Sāvatthī. What he now perceives he is about to give is a specific park — the Jetavana — to a specific recipient: the Buddha and the community of bhikkhus around him, including the great disciples Sāriputta and Mahāmoggallāna, for whose sake Anāthapiṇḍika had just travelled the whole way back from Rājagaha. The Pāli Vinaya records his question, and the Buddha's answer:

> *"kathāhaṃ, bhante, jetavane paṭipajjāmī"ti?*
> *"Tena hi tvaṃ, gahapati, jetavanaṃ āgatānāgatassa cātuddisassa saṅghassa patiṭṭhapehī"ti.*
>
> "Sir, what should I do in regard to the Jeta Grove?"
> "Then, householder, you should dedicate the Jeta Grove to the *cātuddisa saṅgha*, both arrived and not-yet-arrived."[^1]

The Buddha's instruction is structurally startling. What the donor perceives is, directly in front of him, a particular community of bhikkhus presided over by the Buddha — that is, a specific present-tense recipient. What the vinaya constitutes the recipient as is something else: not the Buddha, not Sāriputta, not the Sāvatthī assembly, but the *cātuddisa saṅgha* — the saṅgha of the four directions — and the vinaya extends that corporate body along the two dimensions of its canonical dative: *āgata* (arrived, present) and *anāgata* (not-yet-arrived, future). What Anāthapiṇḍika is instructed to dedicate the park to is a body of bhikkhus from all four quarters, present and future, of which the Sāvatthī assembly is one subset and the Buddha — still living — is the internal head. The same grammatical move recurs across the Chinese vinayas. T1428 *Sifen lü*, a Dharmaguptaka transmission translated some seven hundred years after the historical donation, preserves the redirection three times in the opening of its *Senāsanakkhandhaka* (房舍揵度), each time with the Buddha as the agent of the redirection and each time with the identical inviolability clause 便是塔廟 — "this is now a shrine" — following the formula 奉佛及四方僧 ("to be offered to the Buddha and to the saṅgha of the four directions").[^2]

Here is the question this paper takes up. What Anāthapiṇḍika perceives he is giving is a park to the present saṅgha, headed by the Buddha, at Sāvatthī. What the vinaya legally constitutes the recipient as is the *cātuddisa saṅgha* — every bhikkhu who has ever existed, exists now, or will come into existence — including bhikkhus in the next generation, the next century, and the next two and a half millennia. These two recipients are structurally asymmetrical. The first is a present-tense body of specific persons in a particular place; the second is a class-beneficiary whose membership is open on both sides of the donor's lifetime. The asymmetry is not a later commentarial abstraction. It is performed three times in the opening of T1428's *Senāsanakkhandhaka*, each time pedagogically: Bimbisāra attempts to give Veḷuvana *奉施世尊* ("dedicate-offer to the Blessed One"); the Buddha redirects him to 佛及四方僧. An unnamed *gṛhapati* attempts the same with a sixty-room lodging-complex at the Vulture Peak; the Buddha redirects him in the same language. Anāthapiṇḍika attempts the same with the Jetavana; the Buddha redirects him in the same language. The repetition is deliberate: each donor *first* attempts a person-directed dedication, and the Buddha *first* refuses it. What the donor perceives is not mistaken; it is merely incomplete. What the vinaya inscribes in place of the donor's perception is a recipient that exceeds both the donor's spatial horizon (*cātuddisa* — the four directions) and the donor's temporal horizon (*āgatānāgata* — arrived and not-yet-arrived).

And — this is the second feature that asks for explanation — the rule has not changed. From the moment it is recorded across the Pāli Vinaya, the T1428 Dharmaguptaka, the T1421 Mahīśāsaka, the T1425 Mahāsāṃghika, the T1435 Sarvāstivāda, and the T1442 Mūlasarvāstivāda recensions — five widely-preserved Chinese vinayas alongside the Theravāda Pāli, representing six independent sectarian transmissions over six or more centuries — the *cātuddisa saṅgha* category and its accompanying triple prohibition (*not to be divided, not to be privately appropriated, not to be sold*) retain the same institutional shape. Pratimokṣa counts differ across schools; khandhaka organization differs; pre-Common-Era schisms are strong enough to produce different redactional lineages for the basic monastic rule-list. The *cātuddisa saṅgha* does not yield to any of these differences. Monastic property law in the Buddhist tradition has, for two and a half millennia and across every major transmission recoverable today, held to this structure. Why should an early redirection of a wealthy householder's gift, which might have begun as a pastoral improvisation, codify into a vinaya category that outlives its specific donors, outlives the Buddha's generation, outlives the sectarian split, outlives the transmission from India to the rest of Asia, and does not visibly yield to any later reformer's hand?

The argument of this paper is that the asymmetry is the point. The *cātuddisa saṅgha* category is early Buddhism's institutional answer to a specific temporal problem — the problem of how giving (*dāna*) can remain operative once it has passed the threshold of the individual giver's single present-moment *cetanā* (volition, intention) and entered the community-layer structure that P08 has just shown giving to be the entrance of. The individual's gift is single, transient, and decays with the giver and the present assembly; its operation across time is not a psychological matter at that point but a legal one. The vinaya's answer is to legislate the gift *out* of all present ownership so that it belongs simultaneously to all bhikkhus past, present, and future — that is, to constitute the recipient as a corporate entity crossing time. The structural asymmetry between the perceived recipient and the legal recipient is itself a form of *ahaṁkāra*-loosening (*ahaṁkāra*, the I-making function, literally "the making of 'I'") — but, and this is the sharpest point the paper will press, it is *ahaṁkāra*-loosening performed *not by the donor's psychology* (which DĀNA's earlier papers have treated extensively) but *by the institutional structure itself*. P09 is, in the architecture of the DĀNA volume, the first landing of *ahaṁkāra*-loosening in a non-psychological, structural register: the donor does not need to cultivate the letting-go by himself; the vinaya's dative performs it for him at the legal layer the moment his *cetanā* has executed. This is an early reveal of the volume's deep thesis, placed here at the Part III opener by design rather than by accident: the institutional layer is where the practice-question of giving first crosses out of the single donor's body and into the structure that receives it, and the paper needs to show the reader that crossing happening before the later parts can show the psychological and soteriological layers that build upon it. What P09 opens here, Parts IV through IX will continue — through *dāna-pāramitā*, through the three-wheel-emptiness of *prajñāpāramitā*, through the Lotus Sūtra's body-offering, through Samantabhadra's vast offerings, through the Dharmadhātu-scale offerings of the *Avataṃsaka* — each of them a different register in which the same *ahaṁkāra*-loosening is performed; but the first landing is institutional, legal, vinaya-inscribed, and this paper is about that first landing.

This paper develops the argument in four interlocking moves. §II sets out the canonical sources: the five load-bearing passages from T1428's *Senāsanakkhandhaka* (the Bimbisāra / *gṛhapati* / Anāthapiṇḍika triple attestation and the four-class taxonomic definition), the Upāli QA on the four classes of saṅgha property preserved verbatim across two recitation-strata at T1435 fascicle 48, the dense Sarvāstivāda Anāthapiṇḍika narrative at T1435 fascicle 34, the Pāli parallels at *Mahāvagga* I.22 (the Bimbisāra episode at Veḷuvana) and *Cūḷavagga* VI.4 (the Jetavana dedication and the Buddha's *anumodanā* verse-response), and the Nikāya refrain preserved inside the *saṅghānussati* (recollection of the saṅgha) — which names the institutional recipient with the epithet *anuttaraṃ puññakkhettaṃ lokassa*, "the unsurpassed field of merit for the world." §III unfolds the argument proper in four layers: (§III.1) the donor-recipient asymmetry observed performatively in the three redirection episodes; (§III.2) the time-binding mechanism through which the asymmetry is made legally operative — the suspension of present ownership codified in the triple prohibition; (§III.3) the cross-vinaya convergence confirming that this structure precedes the sectarian split and is therefore a first-order institutional element rather than a later sectarian layer; and (§III.4) a comparison with Marcel Mauss's analysis of the gift in the *Essai sur le don*, where the structural isomorphism of suspended ownership meets a decisive divergence at the point of reciprocity. §IV opens the cross-disciplinary conversation with Mauss and with the common law charitable trust (*cy-près*, *biens de mainmorte*), treating both as structural cousins of the *cātuddisa saṅgha* without doctrinal equivalents. §V sets out three common misreadings of the structure and two cross-disciplinary cautions. §VI closes with the essentials of the argument, the practical implication for contemporary giving, and the handoff to P10, which takes up the same structural question for non-material giving — how *abhayadāna*, the gift of fearlessness, can be institutionalized when there is nothing material to transfer and therefore nothing a legal dative can suspend.

One framing note before §II. The entry-point of this paper builds directly on the closing result of P08 — that giving, as *dānamaya puñña-kiriya-vatthu*, is the volitional entrance to the three-base container of meritorious activity (*dāna*, *sīla*, *bhāvanā*). P08 established that entrance at the individual and psychological layer, using the twin-engine observation of the sense-sphere realm in AN 8.36 and the cross-sectarian stability of 施業 / 平等業 / 思惟業 across T0125 and T0001 as its two anchors. P09 extends the entrance-function from the individual-psychological layer to the community-institutional layer: how does the entrance remain an entrance across a community that outlives its founding donors? The vinaya's answer, in effect, is: by legally removing the gift from the community that received it — by constituting the recipient as a corporate body whose class-membership extends beyond the present assembly — the entrance stays open. This is the bridge between P08 and P09; it is the structural move that P10 will again need to perform, but in a register where there is nothing material to transfer and therefore nothing a legal dative can suspend.

---

## II. Canonical Sources

The citations in this section are organized along three tracks matching the paper's four-vinaya convergence argument. The first track is Dharmaguptaka: T1428 *Sifen lü*, the Chinese Vinaya that preserves the *Senāsanakkhandhaka* (房舍揵度, the chapter on lodgings) in its longest and most structurally complete Chinese form, with the triple donor attestation and the four-class taxonomic definition. The second track is Sarvāstivāda: T1435 *Shisong lü*, preserving both the Upāli QA on saṅgha property (fascicle 48) and the most detailed Anāthapiṇḍika narrative in any Indian Buddhist source (fascicle 34). The third track is the Pāli Theravāda: the *Mahāvagga* and *Cūḷavagga* episodes that the Chinese vinayas parallel, together with the Nikāya refrain preserved inside the *saṅghānussati* (recollection of the saṅgha) at *Visuddhimagga* VII.3. Following the NIAN-A and DĀNA dual-track discipline, Pāli materials carry PTS references and the translator's name (in this paper, Ajahn Brahmali's CC0 rendering for the Vinaya); Chinese materials carry Taishō volume and fascicle numbers and are cited in traditional characters with my own English rendering beneath the blockquote.

### 2.1 The *Sifen lü* *Senāsanakkhandhaka*: The Triple Donor Attestation

The first fascicle of the fourth division of T1428 (卷050, 第四分之一 · 房舍揵度初) opens with the Buddha's permission for bhikkhus to take shelter — "in the wilderness, under trees, in empty rooms, in mountain caves" — and almost immediately stages the Vinaya's first real-property donation: King Bimbisāra's gift of the Veṇuvana (迦蘭陀竹園) bamboo grove outside Rājagaha. The episode is structured around a pedagogical redirection. Bimbisāra pours water from a golden vessel and dedicates the park to the Blessed One personally (*奉施世尊*); the Buddha immediately redirects:

> 佛告王言：「汝今以此園施佛及四方僧。何以故？若是佛所有、若園園物、若房房物、若衣鉢坐具針筒，一切諸天、世人、魔王、梵王、沙門、婆羅門無能用者，應恭敬如塔。」[^3]
>
> The Buddha said to the king: "You should now give this park to the Buddha and the *cātuddisa saṅgha*. Why? If what is the Buddha's — the park and its contents, the lodgings and their contents, robes, bowls, sitting-cloths, needle-tubes — [is given in this form], no deva, no human, no Māra, no Brahmā, no samaṇa, no brahmin can use or appropriate any of it. It is to be revered as a stūpa."

The same move recurs within thirty lines of the first episode. An unnamed *gṛhapati* at the Vulture Peak (耆闍崛山, *Gṛdhrakūṭa*) builds sixty individual lodging-rooms "with all the necessities complete" and attempts the personal dedication: *今以奉上佛及四方僧* ("I now offer this above to the Buddha and to the *cātuddisa saṅgha*"). This time, the donor performs the redirection himself; he has already internalized the formula, having presumably witnessed or heard of the Bimbisāra precedent.[^4] Twenty fascicle-lines later, Anāthapiṇḍika attempts to dedicate the Jetavana with the same person-directed language (*奉上世尊*); the Buddha redirects him with the identical inviolability clause and the identical stūpa-equivalence.[^5] Three episodes, three donors, three redirections — the first performed by the Buddha explicitly, the second internalized by the donor in the interval, the third returning to the explicit form. The redirection is not a one-off pastoral correction; it is a codified vinaya norm attested three times in the opening of T1428's *Senāsanakkhandhaka*.

### 2.2 The *Sifen lü* *Senāsanakkhandhaka*: The Four-Class Taxonomic Definition

Near the close of the same fascicle, T1428 provides the doctrinal taxonomy proper. The narrative setting is a conflict resolution. Four resident bhikkhus at 䩭連 (Kimbila) — Assaji, Punabbasu, Panthaka, and Lohitaka — hearing that the Buddha and five hundred bhikkhus are en route, pre-emptively divide the local saṅghārāma into four personal shares, reserving the best room for the Buddha. Sāriputta and Mahāmoggallāna arrive to prepare lodgings and discover there are none available for the incoming bhikkhus. The Buddha, informed of the pre-emptive division, responds with a formal taxonomic pronouncement that — unlike the narrative redirections of §2.1 — makes explicit the legal substructure that had been operating performatively all along:

> 世尊以此因緣集比丘僧，告言：「**此四分物，是四方僧物，不應分、不應自入、不應賣買，亦非僧所賣，非眾多人乃至一人所賣。**若彼僧、眾多人、一人，自入己、若分、若賣買者，不成自入、不成分、不成賣買，犯偷蘭遮。何等四方僧物？**僧伽藍僧伽藍物、房房物，此是第一分四方僧物**，不應分、不應自入、不應賣買 …… 第二、第三亦如是。第四分中果葉聽分，若花上佛，餘者同上。」[^6]
>
> The World-Honored One convened the bhikkhu-saṅgha and declared: "**These four categories of things are *cātuddisa saṅgha* property. They are not to be divided, not to be privately appropriated, not to be sold. Nor are they the saṅgha's to sell, not those of a group, not those even of a single person.** If the saṅgha, or a group, or a single person, should privately appropriate them, or divide them, or sell them — the appropriation is not valid, the division is not valid, the sale is not valid; and the offense is *sthūlātyaya* (*偷蘭遮*, a grave offense). **What are the four classes of *cātuddisa saṅgha* property? First: the monastery compound and its contents, rooms and their contents** — not to be divided, not to be privately appropriated, not to be sold. […] The second and third categories likewise. In the fourth category: fruit and leaves may be divided; flowers are offered to the Buddha; the rest is as above."

Four structural features of this passage carry the paper's thesis. **First**, the definition is negative. The vinaya does not positively define what *cātuddisa saṅgha* property *is*; it defines what is *forbidden with respect to it* — the three prohibitions (不應分 · 不應自入 · 不應賣買, *not-to-be-divided · not-to-be-privately-appropriated · not-to-be-sold*). This negative structure is the technical signature of legal inalienability: the property is characterized not by a positive specification of its owner but by the closure of all pathways by which it could be reassigned to any owner. **Second**, the jurisdiction-clause *亦非僧所賣* (*nor is it the saṅgha's to sell*) is decisive: the present saṅgha is not the owner of this property but only its custodian; no concrete assembly, no matter how constituted, can alienate it. **Third**, the four sub-classes — the lodging-compound and its fittings (immovables), heavy moveables (cooking vessels, tools, lamps), furnishings (beds, bedding, cushions), and garden produce (wood, bamboo, grass, flowers, fruit, leaves) — exhaustively cover the material content of a monastery, with the single narrow exception that consumable produce (fruit and leaves) may be partitioned for daily use while flowers are reserved for Buddha-offering. **Fourth**, the offense-schedule (*sthūlātyaya*, grave but non-expelling) calibrates the penalty one step below *saṅghādisesa* and two steps below *pārājika*: serious enough to require formal saṅgha-procedure, not so serious as to expel. This is what the codification of an institution looks like in Indian legal form: a negative definition, an exhaustive sub-taxonomy, a jurisdiction clause, and a calibrated offense-schedule — the materials of law, not of devotion.

### 2.3 The *Shisong lü* Fascicle 48: The Upāli QA on Four Classes of Saṅgha Property

The Sarvāstivāda Vinaya preserves a parallel — but structurally distinct — four-class taxonomy in the form of a question-and-answer between the Buddha and Upāli (優波離), the vinaya-specialist great disciple, at T1435 fascicle 48. The setting is again Anāthapiṇḍika's temple-supply, now recast as the donor asking permission for a series of large festival-meals (*大施會*) at the stūpa. The resulting material arrives in four identifiable classes, the bhikkhus cannot tell them apart, and the Buddha has Upāli pose the question:

> 長老優波離問佛言：「世尊！是四種物：塔物、四方僧物、食物、應分物，得錯互用不？」佛言：「不得。」佛語優波離：「塔物者，不得與四方僧、不得作食、不得分。四方僧物者，不得作食、不得分、不得作塔。作食物者，不得分、不得作塔、不得與四方僧。應分物者，隨僧用。」[^7]
>
> The venerable Upāli asked the Buddha: "Blessed One — these four classes of property: stūpa-property, *cātuddisa saṅgha* property, food-property, property-for-partition — may they be used interchangeably?" The Buddha said: "They may not." The Buddha said to Upāli: "Stūpa-property is not to be converted to *cātuddisa saṅgha* use, not to be prepared as food, not to be partitioned. *Cātuddisa saṅgha* property is not to be prepared as food, not to be partitioned, not to be converted to stūpa-property. Food-property is not to be partitioned, not to be converted to stūpa-property, not to be converted to *cātuddisa saṅgha* use. Property-for-partition: may be used by the saṅgha as needed."

The Sarvāstivāda taxonomy converges with the Dharmaguptaka taxonomy on the central category (*cātuddisa saṅgha* property) and on the three-prohibition structure (*not to be converted, not to be partitioned, not to be used as any other class*). It differs on the segmentation of the permanent-capital categories: T1428 collapses stūpa-property into the saṅghārāma-compound category (第一分 *cātuddisa saṅgha* property includes 僧伽藍僧伽藍物、房房物); T1435 carves stūpa-property out as an independent first class and adds food-property as a third. The effect is the same — each class is closed against conversion into any other — but the internal discrimination is sharper in the Sarvāstivāda transmission, reflecting the richer stūpa-supported monastic economy of the region and period that produced the Sarvāstivāda redaction.

A textual feature of the Sarvāstivāda QA deserves notice, because it bears on the paper's claim that the *cātuddisa* structure is doctrinally stable across recitation-strata rather than the product of a single redactor's hand. The same QA appears twice in fascicle 48 — once at lines 586–614 and once at lines 864–895 — with minor lexical variants preserved between the two renderings: 髮指甲 vs 髮爪甲 (*hair and nails*); 食物者 vs 作食物者 (*food-property* vs *prepared-food-property*); 戶扉 vs 戶扇 (*door-panel*, synonymous variants). The two are not manuscript duplications of a single passage but independent recitation-stratum renderings of the same judicial ruling, preserved together in the Sarvāstivāda redaction. This paper's main citation is the later of the two (L864–895), which has the more structurally complete rendering; the variants at L586–614 stand as collateral evidence that the ruling was transmitted independently through two recitation-lineages before being collated into the same fascicle.[^8]

### 2.4 The *Shisong lü* Fascicle 34: The Sarvāstivāda Anāthapiṇḍika Narrative (Scene 5)

T1435 preserves, at fascicle 34 (臥具法第七, "the law of lodging-requisites"), the longest Chinese-language account of Anāthapiṇḍika's Jetavana donation — a six-scene narrative running from lines 187 to 291. The narrative opens with Anāthapiṇḍika's accidental encounter at a householder's house in Rājagaha, proceeds through his conversion to stream-entry under the Buddha's graduated discourse, and closes with the construction of the Jetavana complex under Sāriputta's supervision. This paper's use of the narrative is deliberately narrow: the load-bearing scene for the thesis of donor-recipient asymmetry is scene 5 — the moment of the actual transfer — which T1435 renders in unusually concrete legal detail:

> 爾時給孤獨氏，限半由旬起僧坊 …… 遣象馬車乘，負載金錢到祇陀園，側布其地，餘少未足。居士思惟：「出何藏金令滿此地……」王子祇陀見其靜默，語居士言：「欲悔隨意，以金相付園地還我。」報言：「王子！吾心不悔，但自思惟：『開何藏金不多不少，而得滿足。』」王子聞已便作是念：「佛法僧眾必大不小，能令居士捨爾所寶物。」作是念已語居士言：「莫復布錢，吾於此中當起門屋施佛及僧。」時居士便聽，以憐愍故，王子於中起立門屋施佛眾僧。爾時居士以舍利弗為師，於此園中起十六大重閣作六十窟屋。[^9]
>
> The householder laid out, in increments of half a *yojana*, the plan for a monastery-complex. […] He had elephants, horses, and carts dispatched, loaded with gold coins, to Prince Jeta's park; he laid them out to cover the ground, but a small portion of the ground remained uncovered. The householder thought: "Which of my treasuries shall I open, that the gold will fill exactly the remaining ground?" Prince Jeta, seeing him stand silent, said: "If you would withdraw, you may; return my gold and take back the land." He replied: "Prince, my heart does not withdraw. I was only considering which treasury I should open, so that the gold is neither too much nor too little but exactly suffices." The prince, hearing this, thought: "The Buddha, the Dharma, and the saṅgha-community must indeed be a great thing, not a small one, that they can move this householder to relinquish such wealth." Thinking thus, he said to the householder: "Stop laying out the coins; I shall build the gateway-structure here and dedicate it to the Buddha and the saṅgha." The householder consented, out of compassion [toward the prince]. And so Prince Jeta built the gateway and dedicated it to the Buddha and the saṅgha. Then the householder, with Sāriputta as his construction-supervisor, built sixteen great multi-storied pavilions and sixty cave-cells in the park.

The scene's legal structure is double. On the Anāthapiṇḍika side: gold coins transported from his treasury, laid across the ground of Prince Jeta's park until the prince yields; the *koṭi-santhara* is a legal purchase, adjudicated in the Pāli parallel at *Cūḷavagga* VI.4 by the *vohārika mahāmattā* (the royal judges of commerce). On the Prince Jeta side: the golden-coin transaction has ended, but Jeta adds the gateway-structure (*門屋*) as a separate additional dedication — "to the Buddha and the saṅgha." Two donors, two transactions, one site. At the moment of completion — sixteen pavilions, sixty cave-cells, and a gateway — every structure on the property is *cātuddisa saṅgha* property under the taxonomic definition of §2.2. The two donors' present-tense acts have, legally speaking, produced a property that belongs to no present person: not to Anāthapiṇḍika (he has dedicated it), not to Prince Jeta (he has dedicated his share), not to Sāriputta (he was the construction-supervisor, not an owner), not to the Buddha (who has already redirected every such offering in the three T1428 episodes above). The property belongs to the *cātuddisa saṅgha* in its class-extensive sense: to every bhikkhu who has not yet arrived.

The scenes preceding and following scene 5 — Anāthapiṇḍika's accidental midnight journey with the yakkha Sivaka's verse encouragements (scenes 2–3); the three-stage progressive discourse and the stream-entry moment (scene 4); the cross-country construction of pilgrimage rest-houses "at every half-*yojana*" (scene 6) — are structurally significant in Sarvāstivāda hagiographic style, but they are not load-bearing for the paper's thesis and are therefore not expanded here.

### 2.5 Pāli Parallels: Mahāvagga I.22, Cūḷavagga VI.4, and the Saṅghānussati Refrain

The Pāli Vinaya preserves the same institutional structure in the two earliest real-property donation narratives. The *Mahāvagga* at I.22 (*Bimbisārasamāgamakathā*, "the account of the meeting with Bimbisāra") presents the first monastic park in the tradition. The king reflects that Veḷuvana is neither too close to the city nor too distant — *paṭisallāna-sāruppa*, "suitable for seclusion" — and concludes: *yannūnāhaṃ veḷuvanaṃ uyyānaṃ buddhappamukhassa bhikkhusaṅghassa dadeyyan* ("I shall give the Bamboo Grove park to the saṅgha of monks headed by the Buddha"). He takes up a golden ceremonial vessel (*sovaṇṇamayaṃ bhiṅkāraṃ*) and performs the ritual speech-act: *etāhaṃ, bhante, veḷuvanaṃ uyyānaṃ buddhappamukhassa bhikkhusaṅghassa dammi* ("I give this Bamboo Grove park to the saṅgha of monks headed by the Buddha"). The Buddha accepts the park, and immediately afterward issues the allowance: *anujānāmi, bhikkhave, ārāmaṃ* ("monks, I allow monasteries").[^10]

Two features of the Pāli locution are decisive for the paper's thesis. First, the recipient-dative is *buddhappamukhassa bhikkhusaṅghassa* — "to the saṅgha of monks *headed by* (*-ppamukha*) the Buddha" — not *bhagavato* ("to the Blessed One"). The Buddha is positioned *inside* the recipient body as its head, not as the recipient itself. The corporate recipient is, grammatically and legally, the *bhikkhu-saṅgha*; the Buddha is a structural position within it. Second, the allowance for monasteries (*anujānāmi bhikkhave ārāmaṃ*) is issued immediately after the Veḷuvana donation. Before it, the bhikkhu-saṅgha is a wandering mendicant community; after it, monastic real property is doctrinally licensed, and the rest of the *Senāsanakkhandhaka* builds on this single precedent.

The *Cūḷavagga* at VI.4 (*Senāsanakkhandhaka* 2.1 *Anāthapiṇḍikavatthu* → 2.7 *Jetavanavihārānumodanā*) carries the Jetavana episode, including the dedication-phrase that §I has already quoted: *āgatānāgatassa cātuddisassa saṅghassa patiṭṭhapehi* ("dedicate it to the *cātuddisa saṅgha*, arrived and not-yet-arrived"). The Buddha's verse-response at the dedication (the *anumodanā*) includes, in its middle triplet, a line that will matter again for §V's correction of the "asymmetry-as-deception" misreading:

> *Vihāradānaṃ saṅghassa, aggaṃ buddhena vaṇṇitaṃ* […]
> *Te tassa dhammaṃ desenti, sabbadukkhāpanūdanaṃ;*
> *Yaṃ so dhammaṃ idhaññāya, parinibbāti anāsavo.*[^11]
>
> Giving dwellings to the saṅgha — the Buddha praises it as foremost. […] They [the learned monks who stay there] will teach the donor the Dhamma, that which removes all suffering; and understanding that Dhamma in this very life, the donor attains final extinguishment, free of the taints.

The Buddha's own verse installs the reciprocity: the legal asymmetry at the receiving end (the gift becomes inalienable *cātuddisa saṅgha* property) is met, at the soteriological end, by a countercurrent — the bhikkhus who inhabit the donation return dhamma-instruction to the donor, and the donor's final fruit is *parinibbāna*. The two currents run in opposite directions at opposite layers; and they do so at the first-order authority of the Buddha's own verse-response, not as a later commentarial reading.

Finally — naming rather than expounding — the vinaya's institutional grammar is doctrinally crystallized in the Nikāya refrain at the core of *saṅghānussati* (recollection of the saṅgha), preserved throughout the *Dīgha*, *Majjhima*, *Aṅguttara*, and *Saṃyutta* Nikāyas and reproduced in *Visuddhimagga* VII.3: *supaṭipanno bhagavato sāvakasaṅgho* […] *āhuneyyo pāhuneyyo dakkhiṇeyyo añjalīkaraṇīyo anuttaraṃ puññakkhettaṃ lokassa* ("well-practised is the Blessed One's disciple-saṅgha; worthy of offerings, worthy of hospitality, worthy of gifts, worthy of salutation, the unsurpassed field of merit for the world"). The refrain is independently attested across the Nikāyas as a stable formula and is therefore citable in its own right; Buddhaghosa's extended fifth-century gloss on each epithet at *Visuddhimagga* VII.3 is structurally congruent with the Vinaya donation narratives at every point but is cited here by reference (PTS Vism 218–221) rather than expounded, both on licensing grounds (the GRETIL base-text for the commentary is CC-BY-SA, creating a ShareAlike conflict for this paper's CC-BY-NC-SA licensing) and on scope grounds (Buddhaghosa's commentarial synthesis is a fifth-century act of crystallization, and this paper is about the vinaya-era institutional act that Buddhaghosa is crystallizing).[^12]

---

## III. Core Argument

This section develops the paper's argument in four interlocking layers. §3.1 reads the donor-recipient asymmetry as something that the vinaya *performs* rather than describes — a structural observation about what three redirection episodes are doing. §3.2 identifies the legal mechanism through which the asymmetry is made operative — the suspension of present ownership, the triple prohibition, and the resulting class-beneficiary structure. §3.3 briefly registers the four-vinaya convergence that shows the structure to be first-order rather than sectarian. §3.4 puts the structure into conversation with Marcel Mauss's *Essai sur le don*, where an unexpected structural isomorphism meets a decisive divergence at the point of reciprocity.

### 3.1 The Asymmetry Observation: What the Redirection Performs

The three redirection episodes at the opening of T1428's *Senāsanakkhandhaka* — Bimbisāra at Veṇuvana, the unnamed *gṛhapati* at the Vulture Peak, Anāthapiṇḍika at the Jetavana — do not describe an asymmetry; they produce it. The grammatical move that produces it is small and repeated. Each donor articulates a first-person present-tense dedication (*奉施世尊*, *今以奉上*, *奉上世尊*); the Buddha responds with a dative that substitutes something else (*仍以此園施佛及四方僧*). The donor's dative names a recipient the donor can see — the Buddha in front of him, and by extension the community gathered around the Buddha. The Buddha's dative names a recipient the donor cannot see: the *cātuddisa saṅgha*, the saṅgha of the four quarters; and, in the Pāli parallel at *Cūḷavagga* VI.4, the *āgatānāgata* saṅgha, the saṅgha of those arrived and those not-yet-arrived. The substitution is the asymmetry.

The asymmetry has three vectors. The first is *spatial*: what the donor perceives is local — the monks at Rājagaha, the monks at the Vulture Peak, the monks at Sāvatthī, in each case an identifiable community in an identifiable place. What the vinaya constitutes is trans-local — the *cātuddisa*, the four directions. The gift is not received, legally, by the community in front of the donor but by a distribution across space that the donor cannot circumscribe. The second vector is *temporal*: what the donor perceives is present-tense. What the vinaya constitutes is *āgatānāgata* — arrived and not-yet-arrived, meaning present and future, meaning (once historical time has carried the institution forward) present, past, and future. The gift is not received, legally, by the community living at the moment of dedication but by a class that extends across generations without a terminating boundary. The third vector is *personal*: what the donor perceives is individuated — specific persons, including Sāriputta, Mahāmoggallāna, the Buddha himself, seated before him in the flesh. What the vinaya constitutes is a class-beneficiary — not these persons but whoever, by virtue of ordination into the *bhikkhu-saṅgha*, occupies the membership-slot of the corporate recipient, at any place and at any time. Spatial, temporal, personal: three vectors of dispersal, each of which takes the gift one further step away from the concrete recipient the donor perceived.

Two features of this asymmetry need stressing because they are exactly the features that a later commentarial tradition could not have constructed ex post. The first feature is that the asymmetry is performed, not described. The vinaya does not say: "*the donor's perception of the recipient is incomplete; the legal recipient is broader.*" It enacts the broadening, three times, in pedagogical form — the donor names the narrow recipient; the Buddha substitutes the broader one; the donor accepts the substitution and re-dedicates in the substituted form. Performative production is a signature of an institutional act rather than a theoretical description: the vinaya is not telling its audience what the asymmetry *means*; it is showing its audience how to *execute* it. The second feature is that the Buddha is the agent of the substitution. A later commentarial tradition could have inferred the broader recipient from soteriological reasoning — *the dedication, to count as generosity, must exceed the donor's narrow circle; the dedication, to generate the greatest field-of-merit, must extend across as much of the saṅgha as possible.* But the vinaya records the Buddha himself, in present-tense dialogue, refusing the donor's first-attempted dedication and redirecting it. This is early Buddhism performing a legal move as pedagogy; it is not early Buddhism theorizing about a legal move that has already become convention.

What this performative structure gives the paper is the following. The donor-recipient asymmetry in P09 is the first landing, in the DĀNA volume, of *ahaṁkāra*-loosening as an *institutional* act rather than a psychological one. P01 through P08 have treated *ahaṁkāra*-loosening as something the donor does — something the donor's *cetanā* enacts through the quality of his giving (P04), the rank of his ladder (P05), the visible fruits of his current life (P06), the category-switch between personal and saṅgha-directed giving (P07), and the entry-function of *dānamaya* in the three-base container (P08). In P09 the loosening is performed *for the donor by the vinaya itself*: the donor does not need to cultivate the letting-go of the recipient-circle through his own meditative attainment — he simply executes the dedication in the substituted dative-form, and the dative-form does the loosening on his behalf. The *ahaṁkāra* that says "*I give to those I see*" is released at the legal layer before any psychological cultivation has had time to catch up. This is structurally new to the volume at P09 and is, for that reason, the load-bearing argument of the paper.

### 3.2 The Time-Binding Mechanism: Suspension of Present Ownership

To say that the gift belongs to a class-beneficiary extending across time is to say, at the legal layer, that the gift does not belong to anyone at any given time. This is the mechanism. The *cātuddisa saṅgha* is not a corporate body in the modern sense of a legal person that can act, own, and be sued; it is a class-extensional object whose membership at any moment is a subset of all its temporal instances. No single subset of that membership — no present assembly, no group of bhikkhus large or small, no individual bhikkhu — has owner-like standing with respect to the gift. What each present assembly has is a *usufruct*: a usage-right without ownership — the right to reside in the saṅghārāma, to use the lodging-fittings, to eat what is prepared in the kitchen-vessels, to sit on the cushions — without the right to divide, appropriate, or alienate. The modern legal term is *inalienability*: the property cannot be converted into any form that would transfer it to any ownership. The vinaya's term is the triple prohibition: *不應分 · 不應自入 · 不應賣買*.

The logical form of the triple prohibition is worth registering. Each term closes a pathway by which the property could be reassigned to any owner: *不應分* (not to be divided) closes the pathway of partition — if the gift cannot be divided, no single bhikkhu can inherit any fraction of it. *不應自入* (not to be privately appropriated) closes the pathway of personal possession — no bhikkhu, no matter how senior or how exclusively present, can take the property into private ownership. *不應賣買* (not to be sold) closes the pathway of commercial conversion — no bhikkhu, no group of bhikkhus, and no present assembly can exchange the property for any other form of value. Together, the three close all three reassignment-paths by which a corporate property could revert to individual ownership; what remains after the closure is the object of the paper's thesis — a property that cannot be owned because ownership has been legally suspended.

What makes the suspension *temporal* rather than merely relational is the second T1428 clause that §2.2 set out: *亦非僧所賣，非眾多人乃至一人所賣* — *nor is it the saṅgha's to sell, not those of a group, not those even of a single person*. The clause extends the prohibition from individuals and small groups to the saṅgha as a whole. Even the full saṅgha in formal assembly cannot alienate *cātuddisa saṅgha* property, because the saṅgha in formal assembly is still a *present* assembly — a subset of the *cātuddisa* recipient class — and cannot act on behalf of members who have not yet arrived. The class-beneficiary extending across *āgatānāgata* time cannot be convened in any single *uposatha* hall. The present assembly's power over the property is therefore structurally capped: usufruct yes, alienation no; management yes, ownership no; maintenance yes, partition no. The present assembly holds the property in trust — though §IV will have reason to be careful about that word — for a recipient whose membership exceeds the present.

The Sarvāstivāda complement at T1435 fascicle 48 adds the interlock. What the Upāli QA does (see §2.3) is close *the interchange pathways between classes* of saṅgha property. Stūpa-property cannot become *cātuddisa saṅgha* property; *cātuddisa saṅgha* property cannot become food-property; food-property cannot become stūpa-property; and so on around the four-class ring. A property, once it has entered a class, cannot be reassigned to another class by any act of the present saṅgha. Together with the three-prohibition closure within each class, the inter-class closure produces an institutional structure of exceptional rigidity: once a gift has been received and classified, the gift has entered a formal category that no present act can exit. Suspension of ownership becomes, at the aggregate, suspension of category-transfer — and therefore suspension of *all* present-tense legal action on the property that would reassign it to any ownership.

Two observations about this mechanism matter for the paper's thesis. First, the mechanism is minimal. It does not require a new legal category (a corporate person, a trust entity, a juristic body) that would then own the gift on the class-beneficiary's behalf; it operates by *subtraction* — by removing ownership-possibilities from the present assembly — rather than by construction of a new owner. What remains is a property held in permanent suspension; the permanence of the suspension is what constitutes the class-beneficiary as its perpetual recipient. The vinaya's answer to the temporal problem of giving is not to build a receiver-institution that persists; it is to *prevent* any temporal recipient from becoming the owner. Second, the mechanism is cheap in terms of social infrastructure. It requires only that the present assembly uphold its own prohibitions — and that the offense-schedule (*sthūlātyaya*) provide calibrated internal enforcement. No external judiciary is needed to sustain the structure; no political sovereign is enlisted to guarantee the inalienability. The present assembly is its own custodian, binding itself by self-enforced prohibition to refrain from the acts that would alienate the property. This is what makes the structure sustainable across 2,500 years of political change: no emperor, no parliament, no external legal system is a necessary party to the arrangement; the saṅgha that inherits the property inherits, at the same time, the self-binding that prevents its alienation.

This is the time-binding mechanism. Each donor's single act of *cetanā* enters, at the moment of dedication, a class-extensional recipient whose membership the donor cannot meet; and the donor's *ahaṁkāra* — the "I give" with a specific recipient in view — is released at the legal layer by being made inoperative: there is no present owner for the "I" to have given to, because present ownership has been suspended. What the donor has given has become, legally speaking, ownerless-in-time; and this ownerless-in-time object is exactly the *puñña-kkhetta*, the field of merit, that the *saṅghānussati* refrain names.

### 3.3 The Four-Vinaya Convergence: Structure Prior to the Schisms

The argument so far has drawn principally on two transmissions — T1428 Dharmaguptaka and T1435 Sarvāstivāda — with the Pāli Theravāda serving as parallel witness. For the thesis to hold in its full shape, a third observation is needed: the structure is not the achievement of any one transmission. It is preserved, in its load-bearing features, across every widely-preserved Indian Buddhist vinaya recoverable today.

T1421 *Wufen lü*, the Mahīśāsaka transmission, preserves the Jetavana donation in its *房舍法* (*fang-she-fa*, "law of lodgings") at fascicle 25, with the *koṭi-santhara* detail present in a somewhat compressed form and with a three-fold property classification (saṅgha / *cātuddisa* saṅgha / individual) that converges with T1428's taxonomy on the inalienability of the *cātuddisa* category. T1425 *Moheseng’qi lü*, the Mahāsāṃghika transmission, preserves the structure in its *房舍法* at fascicle 27, with particular attention to the formal procedure (*白二羯磨*, *ñatti-dutiya-kamma*) by which a present assembly appoints a custodian-monk (*典知付房舍*) to administer the *cātuddisa* property on the present assembly's behalf without taking possession of it — the Mahāsāṃghika version has the most detailed administrative counterpart to the Dharmaguptaka taxonomy. T1442 *Genben shuoyiqieyoubu lü*, the Mūlasarvāstivāda transmission, preserves the structure in its *造房法式* at fascicle 12, with a doubled *kamma* (*雙段白羯磨*) procedure for construction-approval that presupposes the same inalienability framework. Each transmission handles the material with its own idiom and its own administrative emphasis; none departs from the basic structure of class-beneficiary recipient + present-assembly usufruct + inalienability of the class-property.

The observation is not philological in the strong sense. It is not an argument about textual priority between recensions; it is not an argument about what pre-schismatic material can be reconstructed from the intersection. It is the simple factual observation that five Chinese widely-preserved vinayas (Dharmaguptaka, Mahīśāsaka, Mahāsāṃghika, Sarvāstivāda, Mūlasarvāstivāda) and the Theravāda Pāli — six independent transmissions, across sectarian lineages that diverged substantially on *pratimokṣa* content, on *khandhaka* organization, and on minor monastic procedure — nevertheless preserve the *cātuddisa saṅgha* category, the triple prohibition structure, and the class-beneficiary / present-assembly-usufruct distinction in functionally equivalent form. *Pratimokṣa* counts vary: T1428 has 250 rules for bhikkhus, T1421 has 251, T1435 has 257, T1442 has 253, and the Pāli has 227. *Khandhaka* organizations vary: the Dharmaguptaka places the lodging-chapter as 房舍揵度 in the fourth division; the Sarvāstivāda treats lodging-material as 臥具法 within the general saṅgha-procedure section; the Mahāsāṃghika embeds the material differently again. These divergences mean that whatever transmission-event produced the schisms was substantial enough to re-organize the external structure of the vinaya canon. What the divergences do *not* touch is the *cātuddisa* category's internal structure. The conclusion is conservative: the structure predates the schism-events that produced the independent vinaya lineages; it is therefore a first-order element of the earliest recoverable monastic law, not a later sectarian theological addition.

This observation is modest in itself, but it does important work for the paper. The DĀNA volume's thesis — that giving is a *practice of ahaṁkāra*-loosening — needs, at P09, a showing that the institutional layer of this practice is not a sectarian peculiarity but a structural feature of early Buddhism as such. The four-vinaya convergence provides exactly that showing. Wherever the bhikkhu-saṅgha goes in the centuries after the Buddha's *parinibbāna*, it takes with it the institutional form by which a donor's gift is released from all present ownership — and does not, across any major transmission, abandon that form. The practice of giving has an institutional expression whose stability across the sectarian space is one of the most reliable structural facts of the early Buddhist legal corpus.

### 3.4 Mauss's *Essai sur le don* and the Question of Reciprocity

Marcel Mauss's *Essai sur le don: forme et raison de l’échange dans les sociétés archaïques* (1925) is the modern social-theoretical text to which the *cātuddisa saṅgha* structure most directly speaks. Mauss, working across Polynesian, Melanesian, Northwest Coast, and ancient Indo-European materials, argues that what distinguishes gift-economies from commodity-economies is not the presence or absence of reciprocity but the *total* character of the exchange — the *prestation totale* in which the giver, the gift, and the recipient are all bound into a single obligation-structure that neither party can individually exit. Gifts, in Mauss, carry the giver in them (the Polynesian *hau*, the "spirit of the thing given"), and the recipient's obligation to return is not contractual but structural: to fail to reciprocate is to fail to recognize the gift as gift. Mauss's argument produces, across the book, a series of structural observations that align strikingly with the institutional structure the present paper has been developing. The most direct alignment is the observation of *suspended ownership*: Mauss describes classes of goods in many of his archaic societies that cannot be sold, cannot be permanently alienated, cannot be individually appropriated — goods that circulate, or are held, under structural prohibition against private ownership. The Kwākwaka’wakw (Kwakiutl) potlatch-treasures, the Māori *taonga*, certain ancient Indian cattle-types, all exhibit the same logical structure as the *cātuddisa saṅgha* property: inalienable, held against all present-tense private ownership, bound to a broader collective than any present owner can convene. Mauss's name for the general structure — *prestation totale* — is not far from the vinaya's *cātuddisa saṅgha* in its basic legal shape.

The structural isomorphism is close enough that it would be easy to conclude: the *cātuddisa saṅgha* is the Buddhist version of Mauss's *prestation totale*, and the DĀNA volume's thesis about giving as *ahaṁkāra*-loosening is simply early Buddhism's contribution to the general anthropology of the gift. That conclusion is wrong, and the point at which it goes wrong is the point of the paper's sharpest argument.

Mauss's entire analytic framework depends on *reciprocity*. The *prestation totale* is *total* because the obligation to return runs through all the parties involved — giver, recipient, and all the parties to whom the recipient is connected — such that the gift cannot be absorbed at any single point; it must continue circulating in counter-gifts and counter-counter-gifts that bind the society into a single ongoing exchange-structure. The Polynesian *hau* is the spirit that enforces this — the gift-thing insists on returning to its origin; the recipient who keeps the gift without reciprocating risks structural violence because the *hau* has been interrupted. Mauss's society is a society bound together by the impossibility of unilateral reception. Every gift implies a counter-gift; every receiver implies an eventual giver; the structure is *essentially circular*.

The *cātuddisa saṅgha* structure is the structural negation of this. The donor gives to a recipient who, by the very form of the recipient-dative, cannot reciprocate. The *cātuddisa saṅgha* is a class-extensional object whose membership is spread across time and space and includes bhikkhus the donor will never meet, cannot meet, and by assumption will never have given to in exchange for anything. The donor's gift enters a reception-structure that *blocks* reciprocity by design: no counter-gift flows back from the class-beneficiary because the class-beneficiary is not a party that can act. What the vinaya has done, through the class-extensional recipient-dative, is construct a gift-structure whose reception is explicitly *non-reciprocal* — a gift-structure in which the Maussian circle is deliberately broken. The suspension of ownership that isomorphs Mauss's *prestation totale* reaches, at its limit, a place Mauss's framework cannot follow: not the total circulation of the gift through an obligation-bound society, but the total release of the gift from any circulation at all.

This is the Buddhist payoff of the comparison. Mauss's argument, read as a general theory of the gift, predicts that non-reciprocal gift-structures are unstable — societies cannot sustain a unilateral giving that receives no counter-gift in return, because the obligation-loop that binds the society together requires reciprocal flow. The existence of the *cātuddisa saṅgha* as a 2,500-year institutional structure shows that Mauss's prediction, taken as universal, is wrong. A non-reciprocal gift-structure *can* exist, *has* existed continuously across the major transmissions of Indian monasticism, and does not produce the structural collapse that Maussian reciprocity-theory would predict. What stabilizes the Buddhist non-reciprocal structure is not a circulating counter-gift but exactly the institutional-legal device this paper has been examining: the suspension of present ownership, which converts the giving-event into an object that no present party owns, and which therefore cannot be caught up in any counter-gift obligation. The *ahaṁkāra*-loosening that the vinaya performs at the legal layer is, simultaneously, a release from the Maussian obligation-structure: the donor who gives to the *cātuddisa saṅgha* has given to a recipient that cannot bind him in any returning obligation, and has therefore given in a form that the giving-societies of Mauss's corpus could not structurally accomplish.

This payoff will recur in §V, where the claim that "non-reciprocity equals deception" is corrected against the soteriological counter-current documented in the *anumodanā* verses of §2.5 — the only *return*, in the Buddhist structure, that is not a Maussian counter-gift but the Dhamma itself, operating at a different layer than the legal transfer. But the primary observation of §3.4 stands: the *cātuddisa saṅgha* is not the Buddhist version of the Maussian gift; it is the structural proof that a non-reciprocal gift is possible, and that its possibility depends on the legal suspension of ownership that §3.2 has set out.

---

## IV. Cross-Disciplinary Interlocutor: The Common Law Charitable Trust

§3.4 has already developed the paper's primary cross-disciplinary interlocutor — Mauss's *Essai sur le don* — at length, with the non-reciprocity divergence as the load-bearing result. This section turns to a second interlocutor, briefer in treatment but structurally complementary: the common law charitable trust. The trust is useful as a comparison precisely because it occupies, within the common law tradition, the same structural problem-space the *cātuddisa saṅgha* occupies within the vinaya — how to receive a gift into a recipient-body whose membership exceeds the present — and has developed its own technical machinery for handling that problem. The comparison illuminates both structures, but it also clarifies the limit beyond which the two structures diverge.

The common law charitable trust, as it developed in English law from the *Statute of Charitable Uses* (1601) forward, solves the temporal problem of charitable giving through a three-party legal triad: *settlor* (the donor who establishes the trust), *corpus* (the property that constitutes the trust's endowment), and *beneficiaries* (the class of persons intended to benefit from the trust's operation). The settlor transfers legal title of the corpus to a *trustee* who holds the property not as owner but as fiduciary, with enforceable duties to manage the corpus for the benefit of the beneficiary-class. Crucially, the beneficiary-class in a charitable trust can be specified by general description rather than by named individuals — "the poor of this parish," "students of this college," "patients at this hospital" — and the class can explicitly extend across time, including persons not yet born. The structural isomorphism with the *cātuddisa saṅgha* is immediate: both separate the donor from the present beneficiaries through a fiduciary layer; both extend the beneficiary-class temporally beyond the present; both protect the corpus against alienation by any present party.

The doctrine of *cy-près* (from Anglo-Norman French: "as near as possible") sharpens the comparison. When the original charitable purpose of a trust becomes impossible or impracticable — the specific hospital closes, the specific institution dissolves — the court does not dissolve the trust and return the corpus to the settlor's heirs. It redirects the corpus to the *nearest* available charitable purpose that matches the settlor's original intent. The doctrine is explicit about what it is protecting: the donor's charitable intent, abstracted from any specific present-day instantiation, across time-horizons that may exceed the original trust instrument's imagination. This is functionally equivalent to the *cātuddisa* structure's protection against category-transfer: in both cases, the gift is legally bound to its class-purpose in a form that no single present party (including the donor's heirs) can reassign.

A related but politically loaded comparison is the doctrine of *biens de mainmorte* — literally "goods of the dead hand" — the medieval Western European legal category for ecclesiastical property held in perpetuity by religious corporations that could not legally die, convey, or be taxed in the ordinary ways. The structural isomorphism is once again direct: *biens de mainmorte* are held against all present ownership by a corporate body extending across generations, by legal device similar in form to both *cātuddisa saṅgha* property and the common law charitable trust corpus. The historical reception of *biens de mainmorte* in Western Europe is politically vexed — the category's abolition or reform in various jurisdictions, and the associated civil-religious conflicts, is outside the scope of this paper. What matters here is the structural observation alone: the idea that property can be held in legal perpetuity by a corporate body exceeding any present owner is not unique to the vinaya; it appears in multiple legal traditions that have independently needed to solve the same temporal problem.

The comparison clarifies two things about the *cātuddisa saṅgha* structure. First, structural similarity is not doctrinal equivalence. The common law trust has named *trustees* — fiduciaries with enforceable duties who act as the legal agents of the corpus — and the *cātuddisa saṅgha* does not. There is no trustee of the *cātuddisa* property; there is only the present assembly, which holds the property under triple-prohibition self-binding but does not act as legal agent on the class-beneficiary's behalf. The trust's fiduciary structure externalizes enforcement to the legal system (the court enforces the trustee's duties); the vinaya's prohibition structure internalizes enforcement to the saṅgha (the saṅgha's own *sthūlātyaya* offense-schedule binds its members). Different mechanisms, same structural result. Second, the common law trust and the *biens de mainmorte* require an external legal system — courts, a sovereign, an enforceable civil code — to sustain the structure; when those external supports are removed, the structure collapses. The *cātuddisa saṅgha* is the structural exception: it sustains itself through the saṅgha's internal self-binding, independent of any particular external legal order, and has done so across 2,500 years of political and civilizational change. This is not a claim that the vinaya is superior to the common law trust; it is the observation that the vinaya's mechanism solves the temporal problem of giving through an unusually minimal dependence on external legal infrastructure, and is therefore unusually portable across changing political contexts.

The cross-disciplinary conversation's outcome is the following. The *cātuddisa saṅgha* shares with Mauss's *prestation totale* the structure of suspended ownership, and diverges decisively on the question of reciprocity. It shares with the common law charitable trust the structure of class-beneficiary perpetuity, and diverges on the question of external fiduciary enforcement. Taken together, the two comparisons locate the vinaya's institutional structure in a cross-disciplinary problem-space while keeping visible the specific legal signatures that make the Buddhist solution its own: non-reciprocity at the recipient-boundary, and self-binding at the custodial layer. Neither signature is available in the cross-disciplinary interlocutors; each is the vinaya's structural contribution to a problem that multiple legal traditions have independently needed to solve.

---

## V. Middle-Way Corrections

This section addresses three common misreadings of the *cātuddisa saṅgha* structure, marked ❌, and two cross-disciplinary analogy risks, marked ⚠️. Each is a structural error that the paper's argument allows us to specify precisely.

**❌ Misreading 1: "*Cātuddisa saṅgha* property is a form of Buddhist communism or collective ownership."**

The reading is intuitive in the modern Western context. A property that cannot be privately appropriated, cannot be sold, cannot be divided — the description sounds like a resource held in common by a collective that is the actual owner. But the structure §3.2 has set out is not collective ownership. It is the *suspension of ownership entirely*. Collective ownership presupposes an owner (the collective) whose title to the property remains legally coherent; the collective can convene, decide, alienate, partition by collective decision. The *cātuddisa saṅgha* is not an owner in this sense. The jurisdiction clause *亦非僧所賣* is explicit: even the full saṅgha in formal assembly cannot alienate the property, because the class-beneficiary extending across *āgatānāgata* time cannot be convened in any present body that could issue a collective decision. The vinaya has not assigned ownership to a collective; it has *subtracted* ownership from all possible temporal subjects, leaving a property that no present party owns because present ownership has been legally suspended. This is logically different from and stronger than collective ownership. The Buddhist structure is not a communalized private property; it is a structurally ownerless-in-time property whose permanent suspension is what makes the class-beneficiary its recipient.

**❌ Misreading 2: "If nothing can be divided, privately appropriated, or sold, then bhikkhus effectively have no property rights at all."**

The reading confuses two different legal positions. Ownership and usufruct are distinct legal relations, and the vinaya's structure assigns bhikkhus the second while withholding the first. The present assembly has legally-protected rights to *use* the *cātuddisa* property — to reside in the monastery, use the lodgings and their fittings, consume what is prepared in the kitchen-vessels, sit on the cushions, eat the fruit from the garden — and these usufruct rights are not merely permissive but formally guaranteed by the same vinaya that establishes the triple prohibition. What bhikkhus lack is not property-related rights but specifically *alienation rights*: the right to divide the property into personal shares, the right to appropriate it privately, the right to sell or convert it. These are a specific subset of ownership-like rights, not the totality of property relations. The present assembly is a structurally robust user of the *cātuddisa* property; it simply cannot alienate what it uses.

**❌ Misreading 3: "Jetavana is part of Anāthapiṇḍika's private *dāna*-merit tradition."**

A reading sometimes met in devotional biography: Anāthapiṇḍika's remarkable act of *koṭi-santhara* generosity produces a personal merit-accumulation for which the Jetavana monastery is a named monument. The reading respects the donor's virtue but misreads the legal structure. From the moment of dedication, the Jetavana is not Anāthapiṇḍika's monument; it is *cātuddisa saṅgha* property, governed by the triple prohibition, usable by the present assembly under triple-prohibition self-binding, legally beyond Anāthapiṇḍika's power to adjust, revise, or revoke. What Anāthapiṇḍika has produced is not a personal merit-monument but a class-extensional institutional object that includes him, at the moment of dedication, among the category of *past* donors — his giving having already entered the class-structure that will continue operating long after his own historical death. The merit that accrues to Anāthapiṇḍika's *cetanā* is not in dispute; the legal form of what he has given has, from the first moment, exited the private-merit-accumulation frame and entered the trans-temporal institutional frame. The *anumodanā* verses make this explicit: the gift is *aggaṃ buddhena vaṇṇitaṃ*, praised by the Buddha as foremost precisely because its form — dwelling-gift to the saṅgha — is structurally institutional from the outset, not a private act of merit-accumulation that requires later institutional ratification.

And here, briefly, is the place to resolve the question §3.4 raised and promised to answer: does the donor-recipient asymmetry mean the donor has been deceived? The answer is no, for the reason the *anumodanā* verses make explicit. What the donor receives back from the structure is not a Maussian counter-gift — there is no counter-gift, by design — but the *dhamma-desanā*, the teaching-back that the Buddha's verse installs as the reciprocal flow on the soteriological layer. The asymmetry is unidirectional at the legal layer (the class-beneficiary cannot reciprocate by counter-gift); it is reciprocal at the doctrinal layer (the bhikkhus who inhabit the donation return instruction to the donor). The donor who understands the structure has given in full knowledge of its form; the form is public, codified, visible in the Buddha's verse at the moment of dedication itself. The asymmetry is not a deception performed on the donor; it is a legal-soteriological architecture that the donor joins with open eyes.

**⚠️ Cross-disciplinary caution 1: Structural similarity between the *cātuddisa saṅgha* and the common law charitable trust does not indicate doctrinal equivalence.**

§IV has already set this out: the two structures share the class-beneficiary perpetuity but differ in enforcement mechanism (external fiduciary vs. internal self-binding). The caution here extends that observation — the two structures also embed different telos. The common law trust's telos is the charitable purpose the settlor specified, which the trust enforces across time. The *cātuddisa saṅgha*'s telos is not a specific charitable purpose but the broader soteriological function of the saṅgha as *anuttaraṃ puññakkhettaṃ lokassa*, the unsurpassed field of merit for the world. The trust is goal-directed; the *cātuddisa saṅgha* is function-extensional. Cross-disciplinary translation between the two structures must track this difference as well as the similarities.

**⚠️ Cross-disciplinary caution 2: The Maussian isomorphism of suspended ownership runs in a direction structurally opposite to the Maussian reciprocity requirement.**

§3.4 has set this out, and the caution here reinforces: when readers encounter the structural similarity to Mauss's *prestation totale*, the temptation is to import the rest of Mauss's framework — obligation, circulation, *hau* — into the *cātuddisa* structure. That importation is wrong because the vinaya's structure has *deliberately broken* the circulatory loop that Maussian gift-theory treats as essential. The isomorphism and the divergence are inseparable: the Buddhist structure's achievement is precisely that it has the suspension-of-ownership of Mauss's *prestation totale* *without* the reciprocity-obligation that Mauss treats as structurally inseparable from it. Readers familiar with Mauss should not collapse one into the other.

---

## VI. Conclusion

**Essentials**

The *cātuddisa saṅgha* category is early Buddhism's institutional answer to a specific temporal problem: how giving can remain operative once it has passed from the individual donor's present-moment *cetanā* into the community structure that receives it. The vinaya's answer has two interlocking moves. The first move is the donor-recipient asymmetry — the legal recipient of the gift is constituted not as the present community the donor perceives but as the *cātuddisa saṅgha*, the saṅgha of the four directions, arrived and not-yet-arrived, extending across spatial, temporal, and personal dispersal beyond any horizon the donor can meet. The second move is the time-binding mechanism — the suspension of present ownership, codified in the triple prohibition (*不應分 · 不應自入 · 不應賣買*) and extended across classes by the Upāli QA's inter-class closure — which makes the asymmetry legally operative by constructing a class-extensional recipient whose membership no present assembly can own. The two moves together produce the first landing, in the DĀNA volume's architecture, of *ahaṁkāra*-loosening as an *institutional* act rather than a psychological one: the donor's "I give" is released at the legal layer by being made inoperative, because present ownership has been suspended and there is no present owner for the "I" to have given to. The four-vinaya convergence shows the structure to be first-order rather than sectarian; the cross-disciplinary comparisons with Mauss and with the common law charitable trust locate the structure in a wider problem-space while keeping visible the two signatures that are the vinaya's own — non-reciprocity at the recipient-boundary, self-binding at the custodial layer.

**Practical implication**

For the contemporary practice of giving, the structure suggests a reframing of what completion looks like. Contemporary donors often ask, before or after a gift: *how will the recipient use this? is the use appropriate? will it accomplish what I hoped?* The vinaya's structure suggests a different set of questions. The donor's practice-question is whether *the giving-action has completed its legal letting-go* — whether the *cetanā* of the gift has passed through the structural form that releases it from the donor's continuing control. The Buddhist structure's answer to this question is institutional rather than psychological: the form of the *cātuddisa* dedication does the releasing for the donor, provided the dedication is entered into with understanding of what the form accomplishes. What the recipient does with the gift — within the limits of the triple prohibition — is not a question for the donor; it is a question for the self-binding of the recipient-body. The donor's practice is to complete the legal letting-go, and to understand that the legal letting-go is itself the *ahaṁkāra*-loosening that the practice of giving, as DĀNA's volume-thesis has it, is for. What the recipient does with the gift is the recipient's practice, not the donor's.

**Early reveal and structural promise**

This paper has placed the DĀNA volume's central thesis — that giving is a *practice of ahaṁkāra*-loosening — in view at P09 rather than reserving it for the volume's closing synthesis. The choice is deliberate. P09 is the Part III opener, which is the first place in the volume where the practice-question crosses out of the individual donor's psychology and into the community-layer structure that receives it; and it is at precisely that crossing that *ahaṁkāra*-loosening first becomes possible as an *institutional* act rather than only as a psychological one. The reveal is therefore not a giveaway of the conclusion but a naming of the structural juncture the paper is describing. What Parts IV through IX will continue — through *dāna-pāramitā*, through the three-wheel emptiness of the *Prajn̄āpāramitā* traditions, through the body-offering of the Lotus Sutra, through Samantabhadra's vast offerings, through the Dharmadhātu-scale offerings of the *Avataṃsaka* — is the same *ahaṁkāra*-loosening in successively different registers: the *pāramitā* register, the *śūnyatā* register, the dramatic register, the cosmic register. Each register has its own structural signature, its own set of load-bearing textual anchors, its own middle-way corrections; but the first landing, legal and vinaya-inscribed, is here at P09. What comes later builds on what P09 has shown to be possible at the institutional layer.

**Open question → handoff to P10**

If the vinaya's answer to the temporal problem of material giving is the suspension of present ownership, what does the equivalent answer look like when there is no material gift to suspend? This is the question P10 takes up. *Abhayādāna* — the gift of fearlessness — is the *dāna* volume's earliest non-material giving-category, canonically present in the late Nikāya / early Vinaya stratum alongside *āmisadāna* (material gift) and *dhammadāna* (dhamma gift). *Abhayādāna* is what a giver practices when the recipient faces fear — of violence, of deprivation, of the consequences of the giver's own power over the recipient — and the giver foregoes the action that would instantiate that fear. There is no transferable object; there is no dedicable corpus; there is nothing a legal dative could suspend. How does a gift-structure without a material object institutionalize its own form of *ahaṁkāra*-loosening? The provisional answer that P10 will develop is that *abhayādāna* institutionalizes through a different mechanism — not the suspension of ownership but the suspension of the giver's own legitimate capacity to act harmfully, which is to say through the *sīla* (virtue) layer rather than through the property layer. If this provisional answer holds, then Part III's two papers together will have shown two distinct institutional mechanisms by which giving's *ahaṁkāra*-loosening is structurally achieved: for material gifts, through the *cātuddisa* suspension of ownership; for non-material gifts, through the *sīla* suspension of the giver's harmful capacity. Two mechanisms, one function. That is the shape P10 will need to confirm or revise.

---

## Footnotes

[^1]: *Cūḷavagga* VI.4 (*Senāsanakkhandhaka* 2.1 *Anāthapiṇḍikavatthu*), PTS Vin ii 158–159. Bhikkhu Brahmali's English translation (CC0) at SuttaCentral: `pli-tv-kd16` segment 2.1.

[^2]: The inviolability clause 便是塔廟 ("it is now a shrine") appears three times in T1428 fascicle 50 (T22.1428), following the formulaic redirection 佛及四方僧 at the Bimbisāra, unnamed *gṛhapati*, and Anāthapiṇḍika episodes. See [^3], [^4], and [^5] below for specific fascicle-line locations.

[^3]: T1428 *Sifen lü* (*Dharmaguptaka-vinaya*), fascicle 50, opening of 房舍揵度 (*Senāsanakkhandhaka*), lines 38–56 of the CBETA-derived Obsidian vault rendering; corresponding to the T22 volume folios at the fascicle opening. Bimbisāra's dedication of 迦蘭陀竹園 (Veṇuvana) to the Buddha (奉施世尊) and the Buddha's redirection to 佛及四方僧. Translated by Buddhayaśas, Zhu Fonian, et al., Later Qin, ca. 410–412 CE.

[^4]: T1428 *Sifen lü*, fascicle 50, lines 66–76. An unnamed *gṛhapati* builds sixty lodging-rooms at 耆闍崛山 (*Gṛdhrakūṭa*, the Vulture Peak) and offers them to the Buddha and the *cātuddisa saṅgha* using the self-internalized formula 今以奉上佛及四方僧. The pedagogical point: the donor has internalized the redirection formula between its first and second demonstrations.

[^5]: T1428 *Sifen lü*, fascicle 50, lines 470–486. Anāthapiṇḍika's dedication of 祇樹給孤獨園 (the Jetavana) — attempted as 奉上世尊 (person-directed), redirected by the Buddha to 佛及四方僧 with the identical inviolability clause and stūpa-equivalence.

[^6]: T1428 *Sifen lü*, fascicle 50, lines 661–694. The four-class taxonomic definition of *cātuddisa saṅgha* property, occasioned by the 䩭連 (Kimbila) resident-bhikkhus' pre-emptive partition case. The offense for violation is *sthūlātyaya* (偷蘭遮, a grave offense calibrated one step below *saṅghādisesa* and two below *pārājika*).

[^7]: T1435 *Shisong lü* (*Sarvāstivāda-vinaya*), fascicle 48, 雜誦 (miscellaneous-recitation section), lines 864–895 of the CBETA-derived vault rendering. The Upāli question-and-answer on the four classes of saṅgha property (塔物 / 四方僧物 / 食物 / 應分物) and the inter-class closure. Translated by Puṇyatrāta and Kumārajīva, Later Qin, ca. 404–409 CE.

[^8]: T1435 *Shisong lü*, fascicle 48, lines 586–614. The earlier of the two recitation-stratum renderings of the same Upāli QA, preserving lexical variants (髮指甲 / 髮爪甲; 食物者 / 作食物者; 戶扉 / 戶扇) that evidence independent transmission through two recitation-lineages before collation into the same fascicle. This paper treats the two renderings as collateral witnesses to a single judicial ruling, not as manuscript duplication.

[^9]: T1435 *Shisong lü*, fascicle 34, 臥具法第七 ("the law of lodging-requisites, section seven"), lines 187–291. The longest Chinese-language account of Anāthapiṇḍika's Jetavana donation, organized as a six-scene narrative arc; the present paper excerpts scene 5 (the *koṭi-santhara* gold-covering of the park and Prince Jeta's gateway-dedication) at lines 249–291. The door-god insertion, the midnight-journey verses, the progressive-discourse scene, and the cross-country pilgrimage-station construction — distinctive to the Sarvāstivāda redaction — are acknowledged but not expanded.

[^10]: *Mahāvagga* I.22 *Bimbisārasamāgamakathā*, PTS Vin i 35–40. Bhikkhu Brahmali's English translation (CC0) at SuttaCentral: `pli-tv-kd1` segment 22. The canonical first monastic park (*ārāma*) in the Buddhist tradition; establishes *buddhappamukhassa bhikkhusaṅghassa* as the recipient-dative and *anujānāmi bhikkhave ārāmaṃ* as the allowance for monastic real-property.

[^11]: *Cūḷavagga* VI.4 (*Senāsanakkhandhaka*), especially segments 2.1 *Anāthapiṇḍikavatthu*, 2.2 *Navakammadāna*, and 2.7 *Jetavanavihārānumodanā*, PTS Vin ii 154–162. Bhikkhu Brahmali's English translation (CC0) at SuttaCentral: `pli-tv-kd16` segments 1 through 7. The *anumodanā* verse-triad cited in §2.5 is at Vin ii 159–160.

[^12]: *Visuddhimagga* VII.3, *Saṅghānussatikathā*, PTS Vism 218–221. The stock Nikāya refrain cited in the main text — *supaṭipanno bhagavato sāvakasaṅgho* […] *anuttaraṃ puññakkhettaṃ lokassa* — is independently attested across the *Dīgha*, *Majjhima*, *Aṅguttara*, and *Saṃyutta* Nikāyas as a stable formula and is therefore citable as Nikāya material. Buddhaghosa's fifth-century gloss on each epithet at Vism 218–221 is cited here by reference only, owing to the GRETIL base-text license (CC-BY-SA ShareAlike) being incompatible with the long-quotation use that would otherwise be natural for a commentary of this quality; for an English rendering of the full gloss, see Ñāṇamoli's *The Path of Purification*.

---

## References

### Primary sources

- **Vinaya Mahāvagga I** (*Mahākhandhaka*), especially I.22 *Bimbisārasamāgamakathā*, PTS Vin i 35–40. Bhikkhu Brahmali, English translation (CC0), SuttaCentral: `pli-tv-kd1`.
- **Vinaya Cūḷavagga VI** (*Senāsanakkhandhaka*), especially VI.4 segments 2.1–2.7, PTS Vin ii 154–162. Bhikkhu Brahmali, English translation (CC0), SuttaCentral: `pli-tv-kd16`.
- **AN 8.36** *Puññakiriyavatthusutta*, PTS AN iv 241. Cited from DANA-P08 carryover; Bhikkhu Sujato, English translation (CC0), SuttaCentral.
- **T1428** *Sifen lü* (四分律, *Dharmaguptaka-vinaya*), fascicle 50 (房舍揵度) and fascicle 43 (迦絺那衣揵度), T22.1428. Translated by Buddhayaśas, Zhu Fonian, et al., Later Qin. CBETA electronic edition.
- **T1435** *Shisong lü* (十誦律, *Sarvāstivāda-vinaya*), fascicles 34 (臥具法) and 48 (雜誦·優波離問佛), T23.1435. Translated by Puṇyatrāta, Kumārajīva, et al., Later Qin. CBETA electronic edition.
- **T1421** *Wufen lü* （五分律， *Mahīśāsaka-vinaya*), fascicle 25 （房舍法）， T22.1421. (Cited for four-vinaya convergence in §3.3.)
- **T1425** *Moheseng’qi lü* （摩訶僧祇律， *Mahāsāṃghika-vinaya*), fascicle 27 （房舍法）， T22.1425. (Cited for four-vinaya convergence in §3.3.)
- **T1442** *Genben shuoyiqieyoubu lü* (根本說一切有部律, *Mūlasarvāstivāda-vinaya*), fascicle 12 (造房法式), T23.1442. (Cited for four-vinaya convergence in §3.3.)

### Commentary

- Buddhaghosa, *Visuddhimagga* VII.3 *Saṅghānussatikathā*, PTS Vism 218–221. Cited by reference only; the pāli base-text is available via GRETIL under CC-BY-SA 4.0, whose ShareAlike clause is incompatible with long-quotation use under this paper's CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 licensing. For an English rendering of the full gloss, see Bhikkhu Ñāṇamoli, *The Path of Purification* (Buddhist Publication Society, Kandy).

### Modern scholarship

- Mauss, Marcel. *Essai sur le don: forme et raison de l’échange dans les sociétés archaïques*. First published in *L'Année Sociologique*, second series, vol. 1, 1923–1924 (Paris, 1925). Standard English translation: *The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies*, translated by W. D. Halls, introduction by Mary Douglas, Routledge, 1990.
- *Statute of Charitable Uses* 1601 (43 Eliz I, c. 4). Cited for the canonical opening of the common law charitable trust tradition in §IV. Standard reference: any English legal history handbook; see also the discussion in *Halsbury's Laws of England*, charitable trusts volume.
- For the technical legal terms of the common law trust (*settlor*, *corpus*, *beneficiaries*, *trustee*, *cy-près*), standard reference: *Black's Law Dictionary*, current edition. For *biens de mainmorte*, standard reference: any French legal history of medieval ecclesiastical property (the politically vexed reception history is not entered into here; only the structural legal form is cited).

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## Cross-Series Index

- **DANA-P04** *The Eight Bases of Giving* — motivation-and-quality axis of *dānamaya*; AN 8.31 and T0125 *juan* 37 sevenfold complete causation. Cross-referenced in §I's P08-bridge and §3.4's DĀNA volume-thesis lineage.
- **DANA-P05** *Velāma and the Apex of the Ladder* — rank axis of the giver; AN 9.20 *Velāmasutta* as the narrative concretization of the three-base container, *anupubbikathā* as the fixed pedagogical order including *dānakathā* in first place.
- **DANA-P06** *Sīha Sutta and the Four-Plus-One* — temporal axis of fruit; AN 5.34 *Sīhasenāpatisutta* as the *sandiṭṭhika* / *samparāyika* epistemic partition operating within *dānamaya*.
- **DANA-P07** *Dakkhiṇāvibhaṅga Sutta and the Category Switch* — recipient-category axis; MN 142 as the canonical distinction between the fourteen personal gifts and the seven saṅgha-bound gifts. The recipient-category distinction of P07 is the proximate precursor to the class-beneficiary structure of P09.
- **DANA-P08** *The Three Bases of Meritorious Activity* — three-base container (*puññakiriyavatthu*); *dānamaya* as the volitional entrance, the twin-engine observation of the sense-sphere realm at AN 8.36, and the cross-sectarian stability of 施業 / 平等業 / 思惟業. Direct forward-bridge to P09's institutional extension of the entrance-function.
- **DANA-P10** *Abhayādāna: The Gift of Fearlessness* — Part III second paper; the structural counterpart for non-material giving. The provisional thesis (see P09 §VI open-question): *abhayādāna* institutionalizes through the *sīla* (virtue) layer rather than the property layer.
- **DANA-P11** *From Dāna to Dāna-Pāramitā* — Part IV opening; the Mahāyāna turn in which the institutional structure of P09 is re-registered as the internal vow-horizon of the bodhisattva's *dāna-pāramitā*.
- **DANA-P30** *What You Just Walked Through* — Part IX volume-closing synthesis. The DĀNA volume-thesis (giving as *ahaṁkāra*-loosening) culminates here; P09's institutional landing is one of its structural foundations.


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## Footer

*Paper:* DANA-P09 · *The Saṅgha as a Field of Merit* · **DĀNA · Part III · Vinaya and Early Schools**
*Author:* 釋慧鏡 (Shi Huijing) · *Project:* 指月 / Pointing-at-the-Moon · *Series:* The Six Practice Gates （六行門）
*License:* CC BY-NC-SA 4.0
*CBETA collation:* All Pāli citations verified against Bhikkhu Brahmali's CC0 Vinaya translation at SuttaCentral (https://suttacentral.net). All Chinese citations verified against CBETA-derived Obsidian vault exports of the corresponding Taishō fascicles; electronic base-text is CBETA (Chinese Buddhist Electronic Text Association, https://www.cbeta.org).
*Repository:* https://github.com/pointing-at-the-moon/six-practice-gates