1. Buddhist Law in Burma: A History of Dhammasattha Texts and Jurisprudence, 1250–1850. By D. Christian Lammerts. University of Hawai’i Press, 2018. 288 pages. $65.00 (hardcover), $24.99 (e-book).
2. Reviewer Affiliation: University of Texas at Austin, USA
摘要
This book is original, corrective, and foundational. It immediately becomes the touchstone for all future work on the early legal history of Burma because of the depth and nuance of its research into the codicological and historical development of the genre of texts in both Pali and Burmese called dhammasattha. It is also a compelling account of the varieties of Buddhist law in Burma and an argument for the academic recognition of Buddhist law as more than just monastic law. The terminological issues around “Buddhist law” open the book. First, Lammerts seeks to show that it is a “gross error to characterize Buddhist law as coextensive with monastic law or vinaya” (6). At the same time, he argues against the idea that “Buddhism has some necessary relation to law,” using the collocation “Buddhist law” to “call into question current presuppositions about both law and Buddhism while providing a general rubric for comparison with other contexts of religious law discourse” (10). Having wrestled with comparable issues in the study of Hindu law, I sympathize with Lammerts’s dilemma and affirm his insistence that conceptual criticism ought not to lead to academic isolation, even if no precise word exists for “Buddhist law” in either Pali or Burmese. The English neologism serves as both an insistence that something real exists and as a provocation to refine our understanding of its meaning and history. Both are good for Buddhist studies and legal studies.
