Dana is the load-bearing wall of Asian monasticism. The Buddhist sangha was designed to be economically incapable: forbidden to farm, to cook, to hoard, its members were fed morning by morning from the doors of laypeople, and the daily alms round, the silent standing with the bowl, became Buddhism's most visible institution. The exchange was theorized precisely. The layperson gives material support and receives merit, punya, the karmic capital of better rebirth; the monastic, by worthiness of life, functions as a field of merit in which gifts grow, the agricultural metaphor being canonical. Anthropologists note the elegant asymmetry: the monk gives nothing back directly and is forbidden even to express thanks in the transactional register, because a return would close the circuit and cancel the merit; the gift must remain a gift.
On this quiet engine whole civilizations ran. Monasteries from Sri Lanka to Japan were built, fed and endowed by dana; the great universities of Nalanda and Vikramashila were its compound interest; and the rhythm of lay life, feeding monks at funerals, weddings and festivals, wove the economy of giving into every household. Jainism runs a parallel system with its own stringencies, the mendicant accepting only food faultlessly obtained, and Sikhism universalized the principle in the langar, where the gift is cooked and everyone, giver and stranger alike, sits in one line to eat it. In all three, the theology is enacted in the same direction: renunciation is made possible by generosity, and generosity is made meaningful by renunciation.