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In Ming China, there were karma ledgers, so you could keep count of your karmax.com/whyvert/status/1928632768658858235
865 sats \ 11 comments \ @k00b 11h spirituality
In Ming China, there were karma ledgers, so you could keep count of your karma.
A kind of rationalist, more effective altruism?
E.g. one work from 1604 assigns the following merit and demerit points:
The ledgers were printed and arranged a bit like bookkeeping.
The main one was by a scholar called Yuan Huang.
Reciting a sutra after eating garlic: -1 point.
More info here https://serval.unil.ch/resource/serval:BIB_07BFF2E6CC54.P001/REF.pdf
Whenever I encounter the word 'ledger' I think of bitcoin, but who gets what in a money ledger isn't nearly as deterministic as these karma ledgers.
Someone replied to this thread (with another thread) to say that these karma ledgers are still kept.
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63 sats \ 5 replies \ @WeAreAllSatoshi 11h
Isn’t this basically like the Social Credit System?
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32 sats \ 0 replies \ @WeAreAllSatoshi 11h
The national regulatory method is based on varying degrees of whitelisting (termed redlisting in China)
Also I can’t tell if this is someone trolling or if they really call it redlisting
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61 sats \ 3 replies \ @k00b OP 11h
I think this is for personal record keeping primarily. It's like gamifying your morality so you can quantify your enlightenment.
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0 sats \ 1 reply \ @Bell_curve 11h
Did they use an abacus to audit their karma ledgers?
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11 sats \ 0 replies \ @k00b OP 9h
It’s probably not that complicated.
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0 sats \ 0 replies \ @WeAreAllSatoshi 23s
Ah yes, that makes sense. I missed the part that this was a personal effort instead of one by the state
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102 sats \ 0 replies \ @nerd2ninja 5h
This fits with some other things I understand about the Chinese. For one thing I understand that they are very adamant about paying back favors. They take it very seriously. They don't like to accept favors because they know they will need to pay them back.
Now that's something I learned in school, so I'm not sure how kept alive that mindset in modern Chinese is.
I'm keeping this post in my notes for something I'm working on.
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0 sats \ 0 replies \ @Solomonsatoshi 8h
Good idea.
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0 sats \ 0 replies \ @398ja 8h
I used grok for transcription
+100 points: saving a person's life; ensuring a woman's fidelity; preventing infanticide or abortion. +50 points: adopting an orphan; burying an unclaimed corpse; preventing someone from abandoning their village during famine; successfully persuading fishermen, hunters and butchers to find a different profession. +30 points: persuading an evildoer to change; correcting an injustice. +10 points: recommending a virtuous person for office; removing a public harm. +5 points: convincing someone to drop a lawsuit; saving a domestic animal. +3 points: saving the life of a useless animal; asking fishermen, hunters and butchers to seek a different profession. +1 point: praising good deeds; not joining in wrongdoing; curing illness; feeding the hungry; burying a dead animal; saving an insect or aquatic creature; donating money to good causes such as building roads, bridges, wells, temples, or for helping the poor with essentials like tea, medicine, clothes, or coffins. -1 point: each character misread while chanting a sutra; reciting a sutra after eating garlic or onions. -2 points: sex with a prostitute. -10 points: possessing arms to kill; entertaining murderous thoughts; talking back to one's parents; illicit sex with someone of good family. -100 points: raping a woman; sentencing someone to death.
This is the Chinese equivalent of Moses' stone tablets. It's interesting to observe how societies come up with their own moral/ethical rules to ensure their cohesion, how those rules compare to each other, and how they evolve with time...
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0 sats \ 0 replies \ @bitcoingecko 9h
Very interesting. Hope it won't be brought back 😅
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0 sats \ 0 replies \ @nitter 11h bot
https://xcancel.com/whyvert/status/1928632768658858235
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