Merit (Buddhism)

• 1. Introduction

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  In 2016, two Taiwanese Buddhists released crabs and lobsters into the sea at Brighton, in the United Kingdom, hoping to make merit. Wildlife authorities fined them fifteen thousand pounds. They were not acting on impulse. They were chasing something Buddhist traditions describe as a beneficial and protective force. This force is believed to shape a person's fortune, character, and next rebirth. What exactly is this force, and why would people risk fines and criticism to gain it? Across Buddhist societies, this same force has legitimized kings, shaped rural economies, and filled ledgers kept for an entire lifetime. This documentary traces what merit is, how people make it, who receives it, and why some still go to such lengths for it.

• 2. What Merit Actually Is

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  The scholar B.J. Terwiel described merit as a beneficial and protective force which extends over a long period of time. Before Buddhism existed, this same force was invoked in Brahmanical sacrifice. Donors believed it would secure their place in an eternal heaven of the 'fathers,' or pitṛ. Buddhism kept the idea of a force created through good deeds, but rejected the eternal heaven. Instead, it treated merit as the product of right action, words, or thought.

  The Theravāda commentator Dhammapāla glossed puñña as 'santanaṃ punāti visodheti,' meaning it cleans or purifies the life continuum. Its opposite is demerit, called apuñña or, more commonly, pāpa, meaning infertile, barren, or bringing ill fortune. Buddhist texts describe an automatic cosmic reaction, a term coined by Brokaw, in which meritorious acts bring good results and demeritorious acts bring bad ones. Some scholars, drawing on the Milinda Pañhā, conclude that merit is inherently stronger than demerit. Richard Gombrich adds that many merits together can push demerits 'to the back of the queue,' though a demerit can never be fully undone.

  Internally, merit is said to make the mind happy and virtuous. Externally, it is credited with good circumstances such as long life, health, and wealth, as well as the character a person is born with. Merit can accumulate over time, but it also has an impermanent character and can run out. The Tipiṭaka states that when people die, they can take nothing with them except whatever merit and demerit they have accumulated. Because merit can run out, Buddhist tradition set out specific ways to keep replenishing it, starting with the simplest of the three bases: giving.

• 3. Ways Of Making Merit

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  The Pāli canon ranks giving as the easiest of the three bases of merit, ahead of virtue and mental development. Giving is said to overcome selfishness and still the mind, preparing it for the practice of virtue. It is also treated as a form of saving, since a future rebirth may return to the giver what they once gave away.

  Virtue covers three of the eight aspects of the Noble Eightfold Path: right speech, right action, and right livelihood. In practice, virtue mostly means keeping the five precepts, which many Buddhists also treat as a merit in their own right. Mental development is the only one of the three bases that can lead to the highest heavenly worlds, or to Nirvana.

  Later commentarial texts such as the Dhammasaṅganī and Atthasālinī expand the three bases into ten deeds for lay devotees. These add honoring others, offering service, and dedicating merit to others. They also add rejoicing in others' merit, listening to the Buddha's teachings, instructing others in them, and straightening one's own views. The commentator Buddhaghoṣa held that all ten still fit within the original three bases. In some Mahāyāna and Vajrayāna traditions, additional merit comes from ritual actions called the 'power of blessed substances,' or rdzas. These are believed to guard against calamities caused by bad karma.

  Some scholars have criticized merit and karma as amoral, egoist, and calculative, pointing to their quantitative, self-interested framing. Others, including Keown, argue that moral action is only possible when it is already preceded by concern for others, as shown by the Buddha's own example. Whether a gift brings little fruit or great fruit depends on one specific factor: who receives it, from an ordinary person up to the Buddha himself.

• 4. The Field Of Merit

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  In pre-Buddhist Brahmanism, Brahmin priests performed sacrifices that generated merit for the donors who funded them. Buddhism transferred that role to the monk, who came to be described as āhuneyyo, or 'worthy of offering,' and dakkhiṇeyyo, 'qualified to accept the offering.' The Sangha itself was described as puññakkhetta, or the field of merit.

  The idea works like a seed planted in fertile ground, which yields more and better fruit than the same seed sown in infertile soil. A gift to a human yields more merit than a gift to an animal. Gifts to a young novice, to a monk, to many monks, and to the Buddha yield progressively greater fruit, in that ascending order. The giver's state of mind matters just as much: a gift given out of greed earns far less merit than one given out of loving-kindness.

  Mahāyāna tradition holds that producing or revering Dharma texts is highly meritorious, a practice Gregory Schopen calls the 'cult of the book.' This same reverence is credited with helping stimulate the development of print technology in China. A Buddha image, too, counts as a field of merit, so that any good deed involving one is considered especially valuable. Deeds aimed at repaying gratitude, such as caring for parents, or done out of compassion for suffering, carry extra weight. Merit given to the whole Sangha yields more fruit than merit given to one favored recipient. Saṅghadāna, giving to the community as a whole, is said to yield even more fruit than a gift to the person of the Buddha. Some of this same generosity can be redirected entirely away from the giver, sent instead to relatives who have already died.

• 5. Transferring Merit To The Dead

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  In the Pāli tradition, this practice is called pattidāna, meaning 'giving of the acquired.' In the Sanskrit tradition, the term is pariṇāmanā, meaning 'bending round or towards.' The transfer itself is done through a simple mental wish, most often directed at deceased relatives.

  Despite the word 'transfer,' the giver's own merit is never diminished by the act. Tradition compares it to lighting one candle from another: the flame passed on takes nothing from the flame that gave it. The deceased relative must still be able to sympathize with the deed to receive it; if they cannot, the giver benefits from the act instead. Merit can also be dedicated to devas, who are believed unable to generate merit of their own. It can also be used to dissolve a bond of revenge between two people.

  The origin of the practice is debated: Heinz Bechert dated its fully developed doctrine to between the fifth and seventh centuries CE. Other scholars find the same idea already present much earlier in the Theravāda tradition itself. A likely root lies in the Mahābhārata, where devas are described transferring a form of power called tejas. Another lies in older Brahmanical Śrāddha rites, meant to carry the dead safely to the pitṛ. Inscriptions across South Asia show the practice was already widespread within the first few centuries CE. In Japan, some temples are still called ekōdera, or temples for merit transfer. That same logic, that spiritual credit could be earned and then handed to someone else, would eventually bind entire kingdoms to their rulers.

• 6. Merit And Kingship

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  The Tipiṭaka frames good governance around the Cakkavatti, or wheel-turning monarch, a king who rules righteously and non-violently by Dharma. This ruler earns his sovereignty through spiritual merit, rather than gaining it by inheritance alone. The Buddha himself, tradition holds, was born a prince, and in an earlier life was even a king, Vessantara.

  Chronicles such as the Mahāvaṃsa and the Jinakālamālī describe royalty performing meritorious acts, sometimes as repentance for past wrongs. The emperor Aśoka appears in these traditions as a major patron of the Sangha. From the tenth century CE onward, Sri Lankan kings took on the role of lay protector of the Sangha. Thai kings did the same during the Sukhothai and Ayutthaya periods, from the fourteenth to the eighteenth centuries. Some kings in Sri Lanka, Thailand, and Burma even described themselves as bodhisattas, with royal language adjusted to match. The Burmese concept of hpone and the Thai concept of barami both tie a king's rise to power to merit built up in past lives. Both ideas have endured into the modern era.

  In Thailand, a yearly festival called the 'Preaching of the Great Life' retold the Vessantara Jātaka and helped legitimate kingship for seven centuries. During the reform period of King Rama IV, the festival was dismissed as not reflecting true Buddhism, and its popularity fell sharply afterward. A related belief produced the Phu Mi Bun, people thought to carry great merit from past lives whose influence could move society at large. Around the turn of the twentieth century, a Thai millennialist movement built around a coming Phu Mi Bun grew into an insurgency. It was later called the Holy Man's Rebellion, and the government suppressed it. Similar Phu Mi Bun-led revolts also broke out against French control of Cambodia. This same belief that merit could be measured and stockpiled also shaped how ordinary households chose to spend their money.

• 7. Merit And The Economy

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  Melford Spiro described Burma's rural economy as 'geared to the overriding goal of the accumulation of wealth as a means of acquiring merit.' Some studies in rural Burma found that people spent up to thirty percent of their income on merit-making. In 2014, when Burma topped the World Giving Index, tied with the United States, scholars linked the result to this same habit of merit-making.

  A 2005 study in Thailand recorded average yearly merit-making expenses of 1,512 baht per person in the Bangkok Metropolitan Area. The same study found 1,032 baht in the Central region, 672 in the North, and 492 in the Northeast. The South averaged 516 baht, against a national average of 804.

  In China, the practice of recording merit dates back centuries before the 'merit ledgers' that emerged under the Ming dynasty. The fourth-century Baopuzi and the twelfth-century Treatise on the Response of the Tao laid out the basics of the system. In the fourteenth century, the Taoist master Zhao Yizhen recommended using the ledgers for self-examination. The ledgers listed good deeds, bad deeds, and the exact retribution attached to each. The practice has survived in China and Japan to the present day. In Sri Lanka, a similar record, the puñña-potthaka, was sometimes kept for years and read aloud in a person's final moments. The custom traces back to the story of King Duṭṭhagāmaṇi.

  Several scholars have described merit as a kind of spiritual currency or bookkeeping system, a comparison Gombrich objects to even as he links merit's rise to the monetization of ancient India's economy. Vernacular Pāli stories of exemplary donors, such as Anāthapiṇḍika and Jōtika, reinforced the link between giving and wealth. Buddhist teaching condemned hoarding wealth or using it wrongly, since taṇhā, or craving, is what keeps a person wandering in Saṃsāra. Some scholars argue merit-making has hurt Buddhist economies by diverting savings away from investment and consumption. Others counter that spending on a temple stimulates growth in its own right, through demand for the goods a temple requires. Critics also charge that merit-making pulls resources away from the poor, though temples typically redistribute much of what they receive back into their communities. By the twentieth century, this same debate over waste and materialism would come to focus on one particular ritual: setting captive animals free.

• 8. Merit Release

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  Fish and birds, freed all at once amid chanting and a formal resolution, are at the center of the ritual. Its origins remain unclear, though it is traced in part to the Mahāyāna Humane King Sutra. In Tibet, practitioners buy animals directly from slaughterhouses in order to release them.

  Studies in Cambodia, Hong Kong, and Taiwan found that the practice can kill a large share of the animals released and threaten already vulnerable species. Researchers also found it can create a black market for wildlife and pose risks to public hygiene. In Thailand, some animals are captured for the specific purpose of being sold for release, often into ecosystems unsuited to them. In Singapore, authorities have fined people for releasing animals during Vesak celebrations.

  The Society for Conservation Biology has since worked directly with religious communities to discuss adaptations, and the organization reports that communities have generally responded well. In 2016, the Canada-based Great Enlightenment Buddhist Institute Society released about six hundred pounds of lobsters into the ocean. The release was arranged in advance with local lobster fishermen. That same year, Wendy Cook of Lincoln, in the United States, bought about 135 rabbits from a farm. She called the event 'The Great Rabbit Liberation of 2016.' Buddhist monastics from Singapore and the Tibetan tradition supported the release. By 2016, merit release had already taken new forms far from Buddhist Asia, from lobsters freed off Canada to rabbits bought back from a farm in the United States, with regulators still working out how to respond.