Buddhist monasteries made donations legally unspendable to fund themselves forever

Buddhist monasteries in ancient India relied on donations to fund ongoing operations — feeding and housing monks, maintaining buildings, supporting festivals — but a single one-time gift, however generous, only covered expenses until it ran out. Donors who wanted to support a monastery's operations indefinitely, not just for a season, had no straightforward way to guarantee their gift would still be doing work years or generations after they made it, since a monastery under financial pressure could always simply spend down whatever it had been given.

Simply asking a monastery to be responsible with a large gift wasn't a real guarantee, since good intentions don't bind future administrators facing a genuine financial shortfall; the temptation to dip into a large principal sum during a hard year would always exist unless the terms of the gift itself made that structurally impossible.

Donors and monasteries developed the akshaya-nivi, or 'imperishable gift': a donation whose principal was legally and religiously forbidden from ever being spent or reduced, and could only be loaned out at interest, with the interest alone funding the monastery's operations in perpetuity.

Made the principal legally and religiously untouchable, so it could only be loaned out at interest, with the interest alone funding operations in perpetuity.

The principal was legally and religiously forbidden from being spent, so no future administrator could consume it.

Only the interest from loans funded operations, so the gift generated income indefinitely.

Written loan contracts added an enforceable record on top of the religious prohibition.

This structural constraint worked without relying on anyone's ongoing discipline or good intentions.

To make a gift last forever, bind the principal with legal or religious rules so only the yield can be spent, not trust future stewards.

The structure let a single donation continue funding monastic operations indefinitely, generation after generation, without depending on any future administrator's discipline or good judgment — the same principal-versus-yield distinction that defines a modern institutional endowment, codified into religious and contractual practice roughly two millennia before university endowments existed in anything like their modern form.