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.
Honestly this reminds me of table top gaming, except for life.
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.
Thats interesting! Make Karma Ledgers Great Again.
Isn’t this basically like the Social Credit System?
I think this is for personal record keeping primarily. It's like gamifying your morality so you can quantify your enlightenment.
Ah yes, that makes sense. I missed the part that this was a personal effort instead of one by the state
Did they use an abacus to audit their karma ledgers?
It’s probably not that complicated.
Also I can’t tell if this is someone trolling or if they really call it redlisting
They musta tossed these at the national level.
I used grok for transcription
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...
Good idea.
Very interesting. Hope it won't be brought back 😅
https://xcancel.com/whyvert/status/1928632768658858235