佛教信仰、商业信用与制度变迁--中古时期寺院金融兴衰分析

Buddhist Faith,Business Credits and Institutional Change:The Vicissitude of Temple Finance in China's Medieval Ages from a New Institutional Economics Perspective

中古时期的寺院金融通过传播佛教信仰来建立商业信用,依靠宗教信仰聚集社会财富并约束借款人,有效节约了组织运作的交易成本。这是寺院金融超越本土金融之处,并使得寺院金融在南北朝隋唐时期兴起并迅速发展,成为中国历史上最早依靠社会财富而不是自有财富放贷的金融组织。之后寺院金融在唐中叶后随佛教热降温而迅速衰落。本文从新制度经济学视角,分析佛教信仰作为非正式制度,如何影响交易成本并导致经济组织的制度变迁;揭示中古时期佛教信仰的兴衰影响寺院金融发展的具体机制,并得到了模型分析的支持。研究发现,佛教信仰可以有效节约交易成本,但长期看单靠宗教信仰建立商业信用是不够的,还要实现非正式制度和法律等正式制度的良性互动,才能进一步提高商业信用的能力。

Religion has played a significant role in the development of global finance.Of the three religious sects in ancient China(Confucianism,Buddhism and Taoism),Buddhism had the biggest temples and the most influential religious financial organizations.The period from the Wei,Jin,Northern and Southern Dynasties to the Sui and Tang Dynasties is defined as China s Medieval Ages,during which Buddhism spread throughout China and temple finance sprang up and reached its zenith.Temple finance was a financial system beyond kinship and stimulated social capital involvement distinct from local traditional financial systems.Temple finance was a pioneer in the history of finance and played a crucial role.With detailed historical materials,this paper depicts the interaction between the development of temple finance and the spread of Buddhism.From the perspective of new institutional economics,this paper tries to analyze how the Buddhist faith,as an informal institution,influenced transaction costs and led to an institutional change in economic organizations.Using mathematical models,this research uncovers the concrete mechanism of how the Buddhist faith in the Medieval Ages influenced the development of temple finance and derives implications of its rise.We find that temples in China s Medieval Ages maintained commercial credits through the Buddhist faith.The Buddhist faith motivated believers to donate their assets and constrained borrowers,exhibiting fundamental differences between temple finance and contemporary local financial systems.This explains how temple finance succeeded in the Northern and Southern Dynasties and became the first financial institution to make loans based on social capital.However,the disadvantage is that the commercial credits built by temple finance were vulnerable.Once the public s passion faded,it triggered a decline in donations and an increase in defaults,causing temple finance to shrink.This hypothesis is proved given that temple finance declined rapidly with the drop in Buddhist fanaticism after the middle of the Tang Dynasty.It was important to establish commercial credit relying on religious beliefs,but that was still far from enough.To keep the commercial credit steady,it was necessary to accept legal supervision and secularization.Enforced by third parties,laws are binding and mandatory for lenders and borrowers,narrowing expectation biases in human-to-human economic transactions,reducing opportunism and promoting cooperation.A good informal system is the“lubricant”of the formal system and can reduce the operating costs of the formal system.Coherent informal and formal systems are mutually reinforcing and can establish well-ordered and low-cost societies and organizations.To this end,it was necessary to enhance commercial credit through pledges,mortgages,guarantees and official laws.This was the target of the Chinese financial industry after the middle of the Tang Dynasty,of the Western financial industry after Martin Luther s reform and of the Islamic financial industry.Although temple finance declined,the temple as a large-scale financial institution established an important precedent.Later generations of local financiers learned from temple finance,which relied on religious belief to establish commercial credits,combining this with their own characteristics.As a result,they were able to surpass temple finance in the establishment and management of commercial credits.This laid a solid foundation for the great economic development of commodity currencies in the Ming and Qing Dynasties.The development of temple finance and local finance systems provides strong evidence that institutional changes that increase the efficiency of economic organizations can arise from positive interactions between informal and formal institutions.This study calls attention to the construction of financial ethics.Financial ethics embody the features of financial institutions,and financial institutions reflect the requirements of financial ethics.This paper fills gaps in the microeconomic literature on China s medieval temple finance and provides an overall picture of temple finance during that period.