The Gift_ Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World - Lewis Hyde [39]
The fire, however, was unable to burn even a hair-pore of the Future Buddha’s body. “Brahman,” said the hare, “the fire you have made is exceedingly cold. What does it mean?”
“Pandit, I am no Brahman. I am Sakka, come to try you.”
“Sakka, your efforts are useless, for if all the beings who dwell in the world were to try me in respect to my generosity, they would not find in me any unwillingness to give.”
“Wise Hare,” said Sakka, “let your virtue be proclaimed to the end of this world-cycle.” And taking a mountain in his hand, he squeezed it and, with the juice, drew the outline of a hare on the disk of the moon.
The JĀtaka records 550 stories of the Buddha’s anterior lives; the point of these stories is to record the helical development of Gautama Buddha through the cycles of birth and rebirth. Almsgiving is always a part of the preparation for incorporation into a higher level, and the story of the Wise Hare is, says the JĀtaka, “the acme of almsgiving.” It is a Buddhist version of “Take, eat: this is my body,” the highest gift of the incarnate spirit. It is not a tale of atonement because the gift follows no previous alienation from the spirit world. But the gift connects the Buddha—and any who would follow his spirit—to a higher state. We must all give up the body, but saints and incarnate deities intend that gift, and, through it, establish bonds between man and the spiritual world.
The synthetic or erotic nature of the giving of a gift may be seen more clearly if we contrast it to the selling of commodities. I would begin the analysis by saying that a commodity has value and a gift does not. A gift has worth. I’m obviously using these terms in a particular sense. I mean “worth” to refer to those things we prize and yet say “you can’t put a price on it.” We derive value, on the other hand, from the comparison of one thing with another. “I cannot express the value of linen in terms of linen,” says Marx in the classic analysis of commodities which opens his Capital. Value needs a difference for its expression; when there is no difference we are left with tautology (“a yard of linen is a yard of linen”). The phrases “exchange value” and “market value” carry the sense of “value” I mean to mark here: a thing has no market value in itself except when it is in the marketplace, and what cannot be exchanged has no exchange value.*
It is characteristic of market exchange that commodities move between two independent spheres. We might best picture the difference between gifts and commodities in this regard by imagining two territories separated by a boundary. A gift, when it moves across the boundary, either stops being a gift or else abolishes the boundary. A commodity can cross the line without any change in its nature; moreover, its exchange will often establish a boundary where none previously existed (as, for example, in the sale of a necessity to a friend). Logos—trade draws the boundary, eros—trade erases it.
In his analysis of commodities, Marx gives many examples of useful objects which are the product of human labor but which are not commodities. A man who makes his own tools does not make commodities. Likewise, “in the primitive communities of India … the products of … production do not become commodities.” The materials that circulate inside a factory are not commodities. Marx intends by all of these examples to underline his point that a commodity becomes such when it moves between two separate spheres (without, we would add, abolishing their separation). “The only products which confront one another as commodities are those