{"id":221,"date":"2025-12-30T11:09:07","date_gmt":"2025-12-30T11:09:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/aeris.baby\/?p=221"},"modified":"2026-01-11T09:39:48","modified_gmt":"2026-01-11T09:39:48","slug":"could-we-both-be-the-oxen-debt-agency-and-care","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/aeris.baby\/?p=221","title":{"rendered":"Could We Both Be the Oxen? Debt, Agency, and Care"},"content":{"rendered":"
Since I’d been thinking about Graeber earlier, I opened Debt again. There was a parable that struck me as unusual this time. I’m quoting it at length because there’s a contradiction within the passage that I don’t think survives excerpting:<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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Other religious traditions have different perspectives. In medieval Hindu law codes, not only were interest-bearing loans permissible (the main stipulation was that interest should never exceed principal), but it was often emphasized that a debtor who did not pay would be reborn as a slave in the household of his creditor—or in later codes, reborn as his horse or ox. The same tolerant attitude toward lenders, and warnings of karmic revenge against borrowers, reappear in many strands of Buddhism. Even so, the moment that usurers were thought to go too far, exactly the same sort of stories as found in Europe would start appearing. A Medieval Japanese author recounts one—he insists it’s a true story—about the terrifying fate of Hiromushime, the wife of a wealthy district governor around 776 AD. An exceptionally greedy woman,<\/p>\n\n\n\n
she would add water to the rice wine she sold and make a huge profit on such diluted saké. On the day she loaned something to someone she would use a small measuring cup, but on the day of collection she used a large one. When lending rice her scale registered small portions, but when she received payment it was in large amounts. The interest that she forcibly collected was tremendous—often as much as ten or even one hundred times the amount of the original loan. She was rigid about collecting debts, showing no mercy whatsoever. Because of this, many people were thrown into a state of anxiety; they abandoned their households to get away from her and took to wandering in other provinces.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
After she died, for seven days, monks prayed over her sealed coffin. On the seventh, her body mysteriously sprang to life:<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Those who came to look at her encountered an indescribable stench. From the waist up she had already become an ox with four-inch horns protruding from her forehead. Her two hands had become the hooves of an ox, her nails were now cracked so that they resembled an ox hoof’s instep. From the waist down, however, her body was that of a human. She disliked rice and preferred to eat grass. Her manner of eating was rumination. Naked, she would lie in her own excrement.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Gawkers descended. Guilty and ashamed, the family made desperate attempts to buy forgiveness, canceling all debts owed to them by anybody, donating much of their wealth to religious establishments. Finally, mercifully, the monster died.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The author, himself a monk, felt that the story represented a clear case of premature reincarnation—the woman was being punished by the law of karma for her violations of “what is both reasonable and right.” His problem was that Buddhist scriptures, insofar as they explicitly weighed in on the matter, didn’t provide a precedent. Normally, it was debtors who were supposed to be reborn as oxen, not creditors. As a result, when it came time to explain the moral of the story, his exposition grew decidedly confusing:<\/p>\n\n\n\n
It is as one sutra says: “When we do not repay the things that we have borrowed, our payment becomes that of being reborn as a horse or ox.” “The debtor is like a slave, the creditor is like a master.” Or again: “a debtor is a pheasant and his creditor a hawk.” If you are in a situation of having granted a loan, do not put unreasonable pressure on your debtor for repayment. If you do, you will be reborn as a horse or an ox and be put to work for him who was in debt to you, and then you will repay many times over.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
So which will it be? They can’t both end up as animals in each other’s barns.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n
I understand that Graeber’s intention here wasn’t to actually answer the question, but to express how debt morality forces one to carry moral fault and confusion. That said, I think it makes perfect sense how both the creditor and debtor could end up reborn in each other’s barns. What changes if we read this parable not as moral accounting<\/a>, but as a problem of agency?
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