Zen Buddhism & Slavery

During my training/employment in the North American Soto Zen Buddhist system - the term 'Zen Slave' was spoken often when describing the 'work/residency'programs common within todays Buddhist systems. Be it a small center or a Monastary within an International system there was a heirachy system that maintained those that are honored and those which serve. The acedmic paper below introduces the documented practice of Slavery within anciet Buddhist organizational system. The question I dare to state: Is North American Zen temples currently practicing a form of slavery? --------------------------- Artical:SLAVERY The definition of the word slavery and the identification of terms such as Sanskrit da!sa and corresponding vocabulary in other languages is contentious. If one understands the concept in terms of obligations, or power relations, however, slaves may be seen as those who owed obligations to many, but were owed few or none by others, thus avoiding the complications introduced by seeing slaves, as in classical law, as things (res). Of course, since the socioeconomic systems of different places and periods vary radically, it is impossible to generalize; in particular, the ties that many people in the premodern world had to the land meant that donations of property to Buddhist monasteries included the labor of those attached to that land. Whether or not such individuals are called serfs, their limited autonomy with respect to the state and to society is clear. In this sense, discussions of slavery can hardly be separated from those of land ownership or practices such as corvée labor, and in each case the whole complex must be investigated in light of thelarge-scale economic systems within which Buddhist institutions existed. While it is important to distinguish actual practices within Buddhist institutions from attitudes toward these practices as found in Buddhist literature, what can be said clearly is that there is almost no indication in any premodern Buddhist source, scriptural or documentary, of opposition to, or reluctance to participate in, institutions of slavery. It is true that the Buddhist monastic codes (VINAYA) of all sects areunanimous in stipulating that it is not permissible toordain a slave, but the reasons for doing so clearly lie not in any opposition to slavery but rather in the wellrecognized reluctance of the Buddhist communities to interfere in previously established relations of social obligation, since it is also forbidden to ordain debtors, those in royal or military service, and so on. Again,when Buddhist texts speak of restrictions on the monastic ownership of slaves, they do so virtually without exception in the context of restrictions on individual rather than corporate ownership of wealth in general, and not with the intention of singling out slave ownership as somehow different from any other type of ownership. Indeed, in Buddhist literature of all varieties, stock descriptions of wealth, even that gifted to the Buddha, regularly include both male and female slaves along with silver, gold, fields, livestock, and soon. Some texts, emphasizing the moral obligation to receive whatever is given in reverence, declare that it is an offense not to accept such offerings, the lists of which regularly include slaves. Although there is a lack of sufficient sources to offer detailed proof, references in the accounts of Chinese pilgrims, as well as several inscriptional sources, make it clear that at least some Buddhist monasteries in India owned slaves. The sources are much better for other areas of the Buddhist world, and here too they are virtually unanimous. There is copious inscriptional and documentary evidence for the institutional monastic ownership of slaves from Sri Lanka, Cambodia, Burma, Thailand, Korea, China, and Japan; Central Asian documents frequently refer to slaves privately owned by individual monks. For example, inKoryo˘-period Korea (918–1392), the Buddhist monastic institution was one of the major slaveholders on theKorean peninsula during the late fourteenth century;the founders of the succeeding Choso˘n dynasty (1392–1910) transferred eighty-thousand monastery slaves to public ownership, leaving “only” one slave for every twenty monks. Slaves were also, however, owned by individual monks, and these remained unaffected by this legislation. Although it is worth stating that the general socioeconomic situation in theocratic Tibet was such that direct parallels are difficult to draw, there can be little doubt that comparable institutions existed there, whether or not the individuals in question were always called bran (slave). Although the details of every circumstance are different, we are compelled to conclude that here, as in so many other cases, individual Buddhists and Buddhist institutions were, much more frequently than not, fully integrated into the societies in which they existed, not challenging the structures or customs of those societies, but on the contrary, often working to strengthen them. See also: Economics; Monasticism; Persecutions Bibliography Agrawala, Ratna Chandra. “Position of Slaves and Serfs as Depicted in the Kharosthi Documents from Chinese Turkestan.” Indian Historical Quarterly 29/2 (1953): 97–110. Law, B. C. “Slavery as Known to Early Buddhists.” Journal of the Ganganatha Jha Research Institute 6/1 (1948): 1–9. Salem, Ellen. “The Utilization of Slave Labor in the Koryo˘ Period: 918–1392.” In Papers of the First International Conference on Korean Studies 1979. Songnam: The Academy of Korean Studies, 1980.