The Mechanisms of Mutual Support between Merchants and Monastic Communities along the Maritime Silk Road before the Ninth Century

Abstract

This article analyzes the mechanism of mutual support between merchants and monastics along the pre-ninth-century Indian Ocean maritime routes as a structured operational system, rather than a set of incidental supportive relationships. Addressing a gap in scholarship that has traditionally treated trade and religion as separate domains, it examines the material and social conditions that enabled monastic mobility across maritime space, while also explaining the mediating role of merchants in this process.

Building on the “merit – merchant – monastic community” framework, the study demonstrates that the interaction between material capital, symbolic capital, and institutional capital constitutes an integrated exchange mechanism, in which dāna, mobility, and the accumulation of merit operate within a unified network. On this basis, the article identifies three analytical layers: merchants construct the material infrastructure and maritime knowledge base; monastics generate symbolic infrastructure and regulate risk; and monasteries function as intermediary socio-economic institutions within port-city environments. Within this framework, Srivijaya is identified as a paradigmatic case of the institutionalization of merchant–monastic symbiosis, where flows of mobility, knowledge, and symbolic power converge and are structurally reconfigured.

The findings suggest that the pre-ninth-century Indian Ocean network operated as an integrated ecosystem in which trade and Buddhism were not separate spheres but co-constitutive structures. Within this system, the mechanism of mutual support between merchants and monastics constituted a foundational operational logic of the entire maritime order.