This paper explores how Buddhist monasteries served as calculative spaces in early medieval China (220–589 CE), facilitating state governance over taxation, land and labor. By applying Callon and Muniesa’s (2005) and Callon and Law’s (2005) calculation framework, the study investigates how religious institutions, conventionally perceived as resistant to enumeration, were actively integrated into the state’s fiscal administration. The research aims to understand the dynamic through which monasteries were transformed from autonomous religious spaces into mechanisms of economic visibility and state control, thereby contributing a historical and religious dimension to calculative practice literature.
The study uses qualitative historical analysis, drawing extensively on primary archival sources, including official dynastic records, legal codes and biographical texts from early medieval China. It systematically interprets these texts through Callon and Muniesa’s (2005) and Callon and Law’s (2005) three-step calculation model, comprising detachment, transformation and extraction. The authors integrate textual evidence with contemporary scholarship to reconstruct how Buddhist monasteries became embedded in fiscal governance practices. By contextualizing these practices within the broader socio-political landscape, the analysis highlights the monasteries’ role in enabling state oversight and resource appropriation through systematic enumeration and management of populations, land and wealth.
The study reveals monasteries as active agents in the state’s fiscal apparatus. Specifically, monasteries facilitated the detachment of populations from aristocratic control by providing visible and enumerated alternatives. Through state-appointed monastic bureaucracies, they enabled systematic transformation and manipulation of monastic assets within state-controlled calculative frameworks. Periodic persecution served as the state’s extraction mechanism, appropriating monastic resources for the central administration. These findings challenge conventional views of religious institutions as economically autonomous entities, illustrating instead their critical role as structured sites of economic visibility and state control within historical calculative practices.
This study makes a unique contribution by extending the concept of calculative spaces into historical and religious contexts, which remain underexplored in the accounting literature. Unlike prior research primarily focused on modern corporate and environmental calculative practices, this research demonstrates how Buddhist monasteries in early medieval China functioned as strategic instruments of state fiscal governance. It reveals religion’s paradoxical transformation into a calculative mechanism facilitating state oversight, taxation and resource extraction. By integrating religious studies, historical analysis and the sociology of calculation, the study broadens scholarly understanding of how accounting actively shapes power relations beyond conventional economic domains.
