초록 열기/닫기 버튼
Ethical concern for animals and the aspiration to make karmic merit have for centuries inspired Chinese Buddhists to release animals into nature and save them from the butcher’s knife. When performed as a routine communal event sponsored by lay-initiated Buddhist societies, animal release was a costly enterprise that required careful financial planning. Shifting our focus from the doctrinal, social, and ecological aspects of animal release to the less studied economic dimensions, this article explores the financing of communal animal release organized by specialized Buddhist societies. Using documentary sources that shed more light on the actual practice than the rhetoric, this article directs attention to a recurring concern among organizers of communal animal release about building financial security and securing long-term funding. Through an examination of fundraising proposals, accounting reports, and donation records preserved in epigraphical sources as well as modern Buddhist periodicals and newspapers, this article demonstrates that animal-release societies employed a wide range of methods to raise funds. While the use of some age-old fundraising methods attests to continuities in the economy of devotional Buddhist societies, the introduction of specialized endowment funds in the early twentieth century shows how organizers of communal animal release adapted their fundraising mechanism to the changing social, economic, and institutional circumstances in the modern era.
