A Traveller's Right to an Opinion

Fifty kilometres of flat, scrubby country in rural Cambodia. Most families living in homes built of straw, raised on stilts, without electricity. And every so often, rising out of the rice fields, a temple: freshly painted, gold leaf catching the light, maintained with a level of care nothing else in the landscape seemed to receive.

I was travelling with a guide for the day, out past the usual circuit to the smaller, more out-of-the-way temples, and I asked him why. He told me it was belief - that donating to the temple improves your prospects in the next life. He said this plainly. But there was something underneath it, and when I pressed, he admitted that the same generosity keeping the temples gleaming leaves little behind for other things families need. School fees. Books. A child’s education.

My first reaction was not complicated. Surely the money is better spent on the living than on the next life.

That reaction did not survive long against a second, quieter one. I have never had to weigh this life against the next one with real money on the line. It is easy, from a position of never having had to choose, to import my own certainty about priorities into a belief system I have no standing to judge. I have kept turning the question over since, and it turns out Cambodia is not a special case. It is a single, vivid instance of something that happens, in some form, almost everywhere people have ever been poor and devout at the same time.

The Word Is Merit

What I watched my guide describe has a name and a structure, and it is worth understanding before judging.

In Theravada Buddhism, the practice is dana - giving, specifically giving to monks or to the temple - and it sits inside a larger idea of merit, accumulated through virtuous acts and understood to shape one’s circumstances in this life and the conditions of the next. It is not a side practice. It is one of the central mechanisms by which a lay Buddhist participates in their own religion. A family that gilds a stupa is not making a donation in the sense a Western reader might assume - a discretionary gift, weighed against other discretionary gifts. They are performing an obligation that sits, in their own account of the world, on the same order of seriousness as feeding a child.

This is the piece that is easy to miss from outside. It is not that the paint matters more than the school fees to the people paying for it. It is that, inside their own cosmology, the paint is a form of provision for the child - just not the kind a visitor from a secular country is trained to recognise as provision at all.

Twenty-Seven Tonnes

To see how far this goes, it helps to leave Cambodia and go to Yangon.

The Shwedagon Pagoda, Myanmar’s most sacred site, is currently covered in an estimated twenty-seven tonnes of gold leaf - more gold than sits in the vaults of many national reserve banks. The gold arrives one plate at a time, donated by individuals: a single plate costs several hundred thousand kyat, and the pagoda receives fifteen to twenty of them on an ordinary day, more on weekends. Above the gold sits a crown set with roughly 5,500 diamonds and 2,300 rubies, valued, by one widely cited estimate, at close to three billion US dollars - a sum in the range of five per cent of the country’s entire annual output.

Myanmar is not a wealthy country. The people funding that crown, plate by plate, are largely not wealthy people. And still the gold accumulates, because the logic that put it there is not the logic of a shopping list, where a pagoda competes with a hospital for the next dollar. It is the logic of an obligation that comes first, structurally, and is paid before the rest of the household budget is even considered.

Thirty-Five Per Cent

Bali makes the arithmetic explicit in a way few places do.

Balinese Hindu households devote, on average, around thirty-five per cent of household income to ritual expenses across a given year - daily offerings, temple ceremonies, festival preparations. The largest single obligation is the cremation ceremony, ngaben, and it is not modest: a full individual cremation can run to the equivalent of one to two hundred months of an ordinary worker’s income, which is precisely why most families do not attempt one alone. Villages instead hold mass cremations every few years, pooling families and costs, so that an obligation no single household could meet becomes one a community can.

Thirty-five per cent of a poor household’s income is not a rounding error. It is close to the largest line item most of those households have. And it is spent, year after year, by people who are not confused about what a dollar is worth or what a hungry season costs. They have simply arrived, through a different set of first premises, at a different answer to the question of what the money is for.

A Peasant’s Tithe

It is tempting, standing in rural Cambodia or reading about Bali, to think of this as something that happens elsewhere - to people whose belief systems are, from a comfortable secular distance, unusually absolute. It is worth remembering that Europe did this too, for centuries, at a scale that dwarfs a single gilded stupa.

The great Gothic cathedrals - Chartres among them - rose in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries on the backs of tithes: a tenth of a peasant household’s annual produce or income, handed over as a matter of religious obligation, with the clergy’s own warnings attached that failure to pay endangered the soul. Ten per cent, taken off households that were close to subsistence, and converted into stone, glass, and gold leaf on an altar. When the burden became unbearable, peasants in some regions rioted against cathedral construction in the early thirteenth century. The cathedrals were built anyway, and rebuilt after the riots damaged them, because the obligation that funded them was never really a household budgeting decision in the first place. It was a belief about what a life was for, expressed the only way large convictions get expressed at scale: through money, given up front, before anything else got a turn.

Nobody visiting Chartres today asks whether the money might have been better spent on thirteenth-century school fees. Distance in time does the same work that distance in culture does. It quietly grants people the standing to have believed what they believed.

The Child in the Pond

There is a serious philosophical case against all of this, and it deserves to be stated plainly rather than waved away.

In 1972, the philosopher Peter Singer asked readers to imagine walking past a shallow pond and seeing a child drowning in it. You could wade in and save the child, ruining an expensive pair of shoes in the process. Singer’s argument is that the shoes obviously do not matter, and that this simple case reveals a principle: if it is in your power to prevent something very bad from happening, at no cost of comparable moral significance, you are obligated to do it. He then extended the principle outward. Distance does not change the ethics. A child suffering from lack of food or basic medical care on the other side of the world makes the same claim on us as a child in a pond at our feet. The argument became the founding text of the effective altruism movement, which has since directed billions of dollars toward the most measurably effective interventions against poverty and disease.

Singer’s logic, applied to a Cambodian family’s temple donation, is uncomfortable but not hard to follow: if that money could instead buy a term of school fees, and school fees do more measurable good than gold leaf, the obligation runs toward the school. This is, more or less, my own first reaction in the tuk-tuk, dressed in philosophical clothes.

But Singer’s argument requires one premise that does a great deal of quiet work: that we already know, with enough confidence to override someone else’s professed obligations, what counts as a cost of comparable moral significance. For Singer, a rebirth is not that. For the family gilding the stupa, it may be the single most significant thing at stake in the transaction. The drowning-child argument does not resolve that disagreement. It assumes an answer to it and proceeds.

Whose Arithmetic

This is where the Cambodia question stops being about Cambodia.

The anthropologist Marcel Mauss spent a career arguing that gift-giving in traditional societies is never simply economic - that a gift carries an obligation to give, an obligation to receive, and an obligation to return, all at once, and that refusing this cycle is refused at the cost of one’s place in the community. A donation to a temple is not a transaction competing against a school fee on a single ledger. It is a thread in a much older fabric of obligation, one that includes the ancestors, the next life, and the standing of the household among its neighbours - a fabric a school fee, however important, does not touch.

And there is a second, more uncomfortable layer underneath the first. Development economics has spent decades exporting a very particular idea of what a poor household’s priorities should be - school fees over gold leaf, measurable welfare over metaphysical insurance - and scholars of postcolonial development have argued, with real force, that this idea has travelled less as neutral good sense and more as a Western, secular, technocratic frame quietly presented as universal. The presumption that we know better is not new. It has a history, and the history is not flattering.

The reframe I keep landing on is this: the paint was not evidence of misplaced priorities. It was evidence of a conviction I do not share, held by people spending their own money on their own account of what matters most. That is not the same as saying the conviction is beyond question. It is saying that I am not the one positioned to ask the question on their behalf.

Sitting With It

I still think about the children.

But sitting with that discomfort, rather than resolving it, might be the only honest thing a visitor gets to do. I did not have the standing to tell my guide what his neighbours should do with their money - in Cambodia, or in Bali, or, four hundred years ago, outside a half-built cathedral in northern France. I still don’t. What I have instead is a slightly wider frame than the one I arrived with: proof that this exact tension - devotion against arithmetic, the next life against the present one, gold against grain - has been resolved by ordinary people, in almost every culture that has ever had both a god and a shortage, in favour of the gold. Not because they had done the sum wrong. Because they were doing a different sum.

The Leopard