dharma.gift

It answers the relationality problem. love.fund refuses to list what people love (see 🪢relationality) — but then what is the fundable unit? dharma.gift suggests one: a person's calling, as they name it. You don't fund "art"; you fund the specific thing this specific person was handed to do. Dharma is love with a direction — what you love, oriented into work. Funding dharma is funding love in its already-personalized form.

Dana is the prototype flow. In the traditions dharma.gift draws on, teaching is given freely and supported by dana — generosity offered afterward, unprompted, sized by gratitude rather than price. Dana has exactly the properties the 🪷metta analysis calls for: unconditional (the teaching flows regardless), retroactive (you pay for value already received, so there is no purchase, no contract), and relational (the gift goes to this teacher, from this student). Notably, dana is retroactive funding at intimate scale — the same logic as retroactive public-goods funding, discovered centuries earlier (see 🧮quadratic-funding).

The gift frame precedes the money frame. dharma.gift says your purpose is already given — you receive before you ever transact. If love.fund adopts this ordering, funding becomes the second move, not the first: first the recognition of a gift already in motion (someone's calling, someone's care), then money as gratitude for it. Money enters as response, never as incentive — which is precisely the arrangement that avoids the crowding-out trap (🩸crowding-out).