In 1681 a monk under the patronage of the royal court at Ava was requested to compile a bibliography of authoritative Buddhist scripture. Uttamasikkhā was tasked with cataloguing which texts then circulating in Burma were part of the Piṭakat or Buddhist ‘canon’, most likely in connection with a project to copy a new set of manuscripts for the king's merit.Footnote 1 This canon was defined for him as comprising those texts that contained ‘the profound and venerable speech (nhup nak tau) of the Lord Buddha, Solitary Buddhas (paccekabuddha), or the Enlightened (arhat)’, as opposed to those that were ‘the work of deities, sages (ṛṣi), or unenlightened masters learned in the scriptures’.Footnote 2 The bibliographical project he faced presupposed an ideal literary hierarchy as well as a practical uncertainty about the relative authority of texts lying in Burmese manuscript libraries. After itemising in detail what he considers to be the legitimate contents of the Piṭakat, Uttamasikkhā turns his attention to works written by deities and sages. Here he provides a list of several texts and genres — comprising law, astrology and alchemy, Sanskrit grammar, and politics (nīti)Footnote 3 — and singles out thirteen legal treatises by name. Among these thirteen is included the Gold Line Dhammasat of Manusāra, which was compiled less than thirty years prior under the guidance of a celebrated monk, Tipiṭakālaṅkāra Munindaghosa. Uttamasikkhā concludes his bibliography by cautioning that these legal and other treatises were written by sages and wise men and that they are excluded from or ‘outside’ (bāhira) the category of canon — they are ‘not Buddhist texts (sāsanā tau kyamḥ ma hut) and pose a danger (antarāy) to the path and fruition of nibbāna’.Footnote 4
How is it that a legal text, and one compiled with the help of a famous monk no less, might pose a danger to Buddhist enlightenment? What were the taxonomies of authoritative scripture or countervailing ideologies of law that could enable such a criticism? These questions raised by Uttamasikkhā's bibliography are important not only for the history of Burmese law, they relate to fundamental uncertainties in the minds of monastic commentators about the legitimacy of the heterogeneous corpora of Buddhist texts and their associated practices in premodern Burma. Debates about the proper boundaries of Buddhist scripture characterise a significant proportion of seventeenth through nineteenth-century Burmese monastic writings. The prevalence of such debates shows clearly that the scope of the canon was not universally fixed, and that the classification of Buddhist texts as belonging to or excluded from the Piṭakat was in the process of ongoing formulation. According to ‘Theravāda’ tradition the contents of the Pāli canon or Tipiṭaka were established by the early fifth century CE when Buddhaghosa, a monk who was an affiliate of the Sinhalese Mahāvihāra fraternity, explicitly demarcated its limits in certain of his commentaries.Footnote 5 Although there is strong evidence that this authoritative Mahāvihārin framework of understanding the parameters of scripture was known in Burma from the thirteenth century (for there is evidence that Buddhaghosa's texts were transmitted in Burma then) we can be equally certain on the basis of later evidence that it was not universally accepted, but rather exerted varying degrees of influence on Buddhist culture at different times and places. Thus the presence or absence of notions of textual authority must be approached as the outcome of specific intellectual histories and in relation to local textual and commentarial practices.Footnote 6 The principles guiding the inclusion of a text in the category of Piṭakat are not fully explicit or standardised across seventeenth through nineteenth-century Burmese literature; however, the majority of authors who discuss the issue follow the Pali commentaries in taking the criterion of saṅghāyanā taṅ (Pali, saṅgīti-ārūḷha, ‘presented at a recitation’) — whether a text was recited during the first three Buddhist Councils or ‘Communal Recitations’ (saṅgīti) and thus worthy of the status of the ‘word of the Buddha’ (Buddhavacana) — as primary.Footnote 7 To accommodate other works as Piṭakat, secondary criteria based on authorship — whether a text was spoken by a Buddha, arhat, or specialist in the scriptures — or consonance with Buddhavacana were invoked.Footnote 8
The genre of written law called into question by Uttamasikkhā is known as dhammasattha (literally, ‘treatise on law’), a corpus genealogically related to broader South and Southeast Asian written legal traditions — of which Sanskrit Brāhmaṇical dharmaśāstra literature is the most famous example — which are excluded from Buddhaghosa's paradigmatic catalogue of authoritative scripture, as well as all bibliographies of Piṭakat in Burma.Footnote 9Dhammasattha is not once mentioned by name in the Pali canon or commentaries of the Mahāvihāra tradition, although it has an attested history of transmission in Burma and other parts of Buddhist Southeast Asia throughout the course of the second millennium CE, and is cited as an authoritative source of law in countless records of judicial disputes beginning from the mid-thirteenth century.Footnote 10 It was one of the most popular and widely copied forms of literature in the region; thousands of unstudied Pali, vernacular, and bilingual dhammasattha and related texts (commentaries, digests, tribunal reports, etc.) survive in Burmese manuscripts alone, and there are numerous witnesses in manuscript libraries in contemporary Yunnan, Laos, Arunachal Pradesh, Cambodia, and Thailand.
Since the late nineteenth century this genre has been characterised in multiple ways. Early colonial judicial officials embraced dhammasattha as a deceptively anodyne and unproblematic repository of what they called ‘Burmese Buddhist Law’; a transmogrification of ‘Hindu’ dharmaśāstra that was testament to and a lingering residuum of the early ‘Indianisation’ of Southeast Asia overlain with local custom and modified to harmonise with ‘Theravādin’ Buddhist ethics.Footnote 11 Drawing on such discourses, within nationalist and postcolonial circles in Burma dhammasattha was and is still seen as a privileged archive of authentically Burmese Buddhist customs and traditions or indeed as a national ‘common law’.Footnote 12 Beginning with the comparative work of Robert Lingat in the 1930s on the relationship between monastic vinaya and dhammasattha in Burma and Thailand, scholars started to explore in more detail the considerable influence that particular texts and ideas from the Pali Tipiṭaka and commentaries have had on the formation and development of certain treatises.Footnote 13 Recent scholarship has downplayed the local or customary aspects of the genre altogether to suggest that the varieties of written law encountered in precolonial Southeast Asia — whether dhammasattha, royal law, or vinaya — are united in frictionless consensus about the nature of law, equally conditioned and legitimated by a vision of Buddhism derived from the Pali canon and its commentaries.Footnote 14 To date no one has seriously questioned the uniform acceptance and authority of dhammasattha as a ‘Buddhist’ genre in Southeast Asian history, nor examined precisely how it was understood in premodern or early modern debates about law and scriptural canon. As Uttamasikkhā's remarks suggest, dhammasattha was not regarded as an uncontroversial written record of local Buddhist legal culture, but as a non-Buddhist literature that was opposed to alternative visions of scripture and law rooted in canonical authority.
This article shows how closer attention to dhammasattha and other local ‘extra-canonical’ literatures, and especially to the debates surrounding them, helps us to develop more complex understandings of premodern and early modern Southeast Asian religio-legal, intellectual, and literary histories, which were neither diachronically static nor synchronically uniform. In doing so it reorients towards law a now familiar analytical tradition in Southeast Asian and Buddhist Studies that has sought to counter received narratives of the conformity of regional Buddhisms with Pali canonical norms or what John Strong, Victor Lieberman, and others have called ‘Theravāda Orthodoxy’.Footnote 15 As Lieberman has argued, from the mid-second millennium CE onward we witness the increasing salience and appeal in parts of Burma and elsewhere in Buddhist Southeast Asia of strict, canonically inflected interpretations of what counts as authoritative religious practice and culture.Footnote 16 According to such models, the construction of this orthopraxy or orthodoxy and its pursuit was particularly intense in locations surrounding centres of royal power and among monks associated with the court or its clients. While this trajectory is in part supported by evidence presented below, it must be qualified by the fact that there were a range of alternative forms of vernacular and Pali Buddhist thought and activity — the writing and reading of dhammasattha literature among them — that either resisted this trend or could participate in it only after undergoing significant reform and reinterpretation. Thus we cannot assume simply because certain individuals in Burma preserved, honoured, and reproduced the Pali Tipiṭaka and its commentaries that legal actors were therefore motivated primarily by concepts of order and law derived from that corpus, or that the shape of law in the region was congruent with the norms it prescribed.Footnote 17 As the example of dhammasattha makes clear, this was not always the case, and in fact there were multiple and competing conceptualisations of law in play.
The present account shows that we cannot consider precolonial Burma to have possessed a univocal ideology of law or mode of legal expression. The history of Burmese jurisprudence is instead characterised by diverse and at times conflicting legal ideas and practices that ask us to redraw with more precision some of our basic assumptions about the relationship between religion, law, and the state in premodern Burma and mainland Southeast Asia. This relationship was defined by tension rather than commensurability, and jurisprudential, as well as textual, innovation and change was often driven by attempts to resolve ideological, conceptual, or literary conflicts. Over the past several decades proponents of legal pluralism have argued that multiple and dissonant regimes of law are a standard feature of legal cultures everywhere.Footnote 18 For anthropologists and comparative law theorists such arguments have been foundational for critiques of positivist accounts of law's monism and essential connection with state-centric models of legislation derived from modern European jurisprudence.Footnote 19 However, analyses of legal pluralism remain largely focused on the coordinated interaction between local or ‘traditional’ and colonial or international legal regimes, paying far less attention to the analysis of premodern normative diversity or disjunction in history, especially in Asia.Footnote 20 The present essay therefore has suggestive comparative implications for thinking about legal culture in Burma at other times — concerning, for example, competing visions of law under colonialism or in the current theatre of legal ‘reform’ (pru praṅ pronḥ lai mhu) — as well as in other regional contexts such as Indonesia or Vietnam where imported Islamic, Chinese, or European legal ideas and practices historically contended with, and were translated by, discordant local and/or regional visions and voices of law.
Getting at the diversity of legal thought at work in Burma during this period is difficult business, however. We are fortunate to have extensive and in many cases published documentation of seventeenth through nineteenth-century debates that critique the authority and status of dhammasattha from the multiple perspectives of an elite monastic culture intimately associated with royal patronage, several examples of which are discussed below. But the jurisprudence represented by the dhammasattha tradition itself is more elusive and covert. A significant problem here is practical, since nearly all surviving dhammasattha texts exist only in manuscript versions in Burmese libraries, and the few texts that were published or translated by the British colonial judicial office in the late nineteenth century are defective and unreliable to the point of being unusable. A more substantive analytical obstacle consists in the significant fact that dhammasattha texts are not conspicuously theoretical. Some amount of reflection on the authority of law is a hallmark of most written legal cultures, and in South and Southeast Asia the dharmasūtras, dharmaśāstras, Buddhist vinaya literatures, and their commentaries, all grapple with questions of what makes a rule legitimate as law, often through a consideration of the sources of law.Footnote 21Dhammasattha devotes less space to the explicit theorisation of such matters, but a careful reading reveals that the genre has much to say about them.
Early dhammasattha texts usually begin by telling a myth that provides a narrative account of the genesis of written law. There are several versions of the myth found across the genre, but they all depict tales of a sage named Manu (or ‘Manusāra’ or other variants) who copies the already written text of the law off the boundary wall of the universe and presents it, uncorrupted and unabridged, to a king named Mahāsammata. Mythic narrative is one of the key features that sets dhammasattha apart from other forms of written law in premodern Burma and Southeast Asia, such as royal edicts, which date to the Pagan-era (eleventh–thirteenth centuries CE) and have analogues throughout South and Southeast Asian political history,Footnote 22 or the administrative (upadesa) laws of the late Konbaung Dynasty (1752–1885), which were themselves a unique amalgamation of dhammasattha, king-made law, and early modern European juridical models. It is also one of the more notable formal differences between dhammasattha and Sanskrit Brāhmaṇical dharmaśāstra, most examples of which devote far less space to narrative accounts of law's origins.Footnote 23
Although they have been read as such, these narratives were not employed to articulate what Maine referred to as a ‘legal fiction’, a device used by legislators to obscure the fact that law was made by human hands.Footnote 24 Given the paucity of explicit reflection on or theorisation about law in dhammasattha materials, if we are to achieve any traction on precolonial Burmese jurisprudence it is necessary to approach such myths as ‘ideology in narrative form’, to use Bruce Lincoln's succinct phrasing.Footnote 25 Seen in this light myth lays the theoretical groundwork and establishes the basis for the effective capacities of dhammasattha law. Myth's fundamental conceptual propositions reflect back on the ways dhammasattha narrators and audiences conceptualised law. Mythopoeic narratives concerning the celestial discovery of the written text of the law and its uncorrupted appearance in the world due to the intercession of sages charged with supernormal powers encode important jurisprudential insights about legal authority. As Lincoln warns, it is important not to approach such narratives as narrowly structuralist, but rather to track their historical modulations in response to various contextual demands and interests. This approach enables a number of compelling trajectories for research on dhammasattha jurisprudence. One of these would be to trace substantive and formal variations in dhammasattha narrative over time.Footnote 26 Another, which is the methodology advanced below, is to explore the variety of reactions and criticisms dhammasattha narrative — as expressed in one text or across multiple texts — elicited in its audiences. As I show below, in addition to their extra-canonical or bāhiraka status, and precisely due to the distinctive variety of legal ideology they advanced, such narratives confronted elite, royally connected audiences with anxieties and uncertainties. They were read as incongruous with orthodox conceptions of the proper origin and character of Buddhist legislation, which they regarded as a fundamental prerogative of kings. Monks as well as laypersons learned in the texts of the Piṭakat argued for the exclusion of dhammasattha from that scriptural corpus. Critics of the genre invoked an alternative model of legal and textual authority which attempted to redescribe dhammasattha as a variety of Buddhist royal legislation sanctioned by the Piṭakat, something wholly alien to the jurisprudence presupposed by dhammasattha itself.
The authors of the Manusāra
Of the thirteen dhammasattha treatises named in Uttamasikkhā's bibliography only four can be identified in known manuscripts.Footnote 27 One of these, the vernacular Dhammasat of Thera Dhammavilāsa, is undated in extant versions, but had reached its current form sometime before 1628.Footnote 28 Two others, the Manosāra and Manussika dhammasats, each have only a single undated witness, both copied in the nineteenth century.Footnote 29 The remaining treatise, which forms the basis for the following discussion, is entitled the Gold Line Dhammasat of Manusāra (hereafter Manusāra) and was redacted in 1651 on the basis of earlier materials. Manusāra exists in two complementary versions: a Pali verse text written in the ubiquitous vatta metrical style of eight syllables per line, and a bilingual prose Burmese-Pali nissaya commentary on the Pali text.Footnote 30 The Pali Manusāra has the distinction of being the earliest of several dhammasatthas written entirely in Pali. Of the twenty-one known manuscripts of Manusāra, only four include the Pali version along with the nissaya, while the other seventeen include only the nissaya. It thus appears that at least during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries — our earliest manuscript of Manusāra was copied in 1745, the latest in 1877 — the Pali text did not circulate independently of its nissaya commentary.
As Uttamasikkhā correctly identifies, the text was written during the reign of King Pindale (fl. 1648–61) by a jurist styled as Manurājā, the ‘Eater’ of Kaing Village, under the guidance of the monk Tipiṭakālaṅkāra Munindaghosa. Authorial colophons found within most manuscripts confirm that both the Pali and nissaya texts were simultaneously redacted or ‘purified’ (sodhita) by these individuals. There are three authorial colophons interspersed at the end of various sections of Manusāra and only one of these mention Tipiṭakālaṅkāra's involvement, so it is possible that his role in producing the text was more limited than that of Manurājā.Footnote 31 From the same colophons it would seem the project to redact the text was initiated by King Pindale, although his involvement is not mentioned by standard chronicle accounts of his reign, and some later materials attribute the Manusāra to the reign of his father and predecessor King Thalun (fl. 1633–48).Footnote 32
About Manurājā very little is known from contemporary seventeenth-century documents. According to the colophons noted above he was a judge (akkhadassa) and, as his Pali title balibhogin suggests, the ‘Eater of Taxes’ for the village of Kaing. This village was probably located in the Myingyan district on the east bank of the Irrawaddy near its confluence with the Chindwin River. Although there is no information on Kaing in seventeenth-century sources, by 1783 it had fallen under the broader authority of the town headman of Kyauksauk.Footnote 33 A Royal Order of 1788 states that the asaññ (tax-paying freemen) inhabitants of Kaing were under the jurisdiction of the governor of the nearby town-district of Taloke.Footnote 34 Alternatively, it is possible that the Kaing in question may have been located elsewhere, on the west bank of the Irrawaddy along the route between modern-day Pakokku and Myaing, although even less is known about the precolonial history of this site. The formal office of ‘village eater’ (rvā cāḥ) meant that the jurist was an appanage holder who had the right to all the crown taxes, including judicial fees, collected in the village. This privilege would have been bestowed on him by the court, in return for some ministerial or other service he performed; he may have also been related to the royal family by blood. More important, appanage holders were typically allotted entire town-districts (mrui.), which in their stock description included a fortified town, market, and sometimes a number of attached villages. That he was entitled only to the taxes of Kaing suggests he was not too high in the administrative hierarchy, even though his title would have placed him far higher in status than local village officials and certainly the villagers themselves. The relative insignificance of the grant of Kaing's taxes is also attested to by the fact that we do not find it mentioned in records documenting the bestowal of sizeable appanages in the early seventeenth century.Footnote 35 His other title, Manurājā, also signified an official role connected with the court, or at least that the title itself was conferred by a king. We find Manurājā used in an epigraphic reference to an official associated with the Pagan-era king Klacvā already in the mid-thirteenth century.Footnote 36 Although we can speculate that this title probably had some connection with the mythic lawgiver Manu, it is not encountered in legal or administrative documents regularly enough to say much more. The Eater of Kaing was also responsible for another legal work, a lengthy compendium of royal jurisprudential principles which survives under several different names (most commonly, The decisions of Manurājā or The extended great treatise on royal law). This too was purportedly written with the assistance of Tipiṭakālaṅkāra, sometime during the reign of King Thalun, and thus prior to Manusāra.Footnote 37
By contrast there is ample, if not in certain instances apocryphal, documentation concerning Tipiṭakālaṅkāra Munindaghosa, who was one of the more important figures of seventeenth-century Burmese monasticism.Footnote 38 According to more or less congruous chronicle accounts written between circa 1706 and the late nineteenth century, he was born in Salin in 1578 and regarded as an incarnation of the sayadaw (‘abbot’) of the Zidaw (Wild Plum Forest) Monastery who died in 1569. Zidaw was himself the son of a tax-paying freeman from Salin, born during the reign of Dutiya Mingaung (fl. 1482–1501), who was raised in part at the capital of Ava, where he received his education as a novice with the support of the royal family. Zidaw is said to have been of the lineage of Chappada, a monk who, according to the late fifteenth-century Mon and Pali Kalyāṇī inscriptions and later Burmese chronicles based on them, received ordination in Laṅkā in the late twelfth century and is credited with importing an iteration of Sinhalese ordination lineages to Pagan.Footnote 39 Eight years after his death, the mother of the future Tipiṭakālaṅkāra had a dream in which the Zidaw Sayadaw came to her and entered her womb. Ten months later Tipiṭakālaṅkāra was born. At the age of 15 he moved to Prome and studied with and later received higher ordination under Abhisaṅketasāra. This ordination inserted him into a lineage of disciples at Prome that stretched back to Mahāsāmi and Saddhammacārī, the latter a monk said to have received ordination in Laṅkā and responsible for a re-importation of Sinhalese lineage to Prome during the lordship of prince Minye Kyawswā in the early fifteenth century. Chronicle accounts also state that the ordination would have connected him to Sadhammaṭṭhiti, Mahāsāmi's teacher and Minye Kyawswā's preceptor, who was a disciple of Sāradassi from the Sagāḥ Monastery complex at the former Burmese capital of Pinya. The seven important monasteries of this complex were donated by King Uzanā (acc. 1322), and comprised the seat of Guṇābhirāma and other monks who gave instruction in the ‘doctrine of the lineage of Ānanda’, one of the four monks who had brought the Sinhalese lineage from Laṅkā with Chappada. Thus in terms of both the narrative of his incarnation as the former abbot of Zidaw as well the accounts of the multiple foreign influences in his ordination lineage, Tipiṭakālaṅkāra is remembered as an early seventeenth-century representative of the Prome-based branch of a Laṅkā-derived lineage whose members are often credited as purveyors of Buddhist texts, practice, and doctrine orienting themselves towards Laṅkā as an authoritative icon or ideal.
In 1608, when he was thirty years old, King Anaukphetlun (fl. 1578–1628) seized control of Prome and brought Tipiṭakālaṅkāra to his capital at Ava, where he gave him the title dhammarājaguru (Preceptor of dhamma-kings). In a submission to this king that year Tipiṭakālaṅkāra personally represented himself as belonging to the illustrious tradition of Chappada and the Laṅkā-derived ‘Mahāvihāra’ fraternity by virtue of his ordination into the lineage of Saddhammacārī.Footnote 40 In this submission Tipiṭakālaṅkāra connects his membership in this lineage with his ability to safeguard kings, invoking a comparison with the Mahāvaṃsa's account of the protection Sakka, the king of the gods, provided at the Buddha's request to Vijaya, the mythic first king of Laṅkā. In 1618 Anaukphetlun's brother, the Eater of Salin, donated a four-storey monastery located along the bank of the Irrawaddy near Sagaing to the monk. At the age of sixty he gave up his monastery and established himself in the practices of the solitary ‘forest austerities’ (araññakaṅ dhutaṅ), and passed away in 1651, the very year he is alleged to have been involved in the redaction of the Manusāra. It is clear from self-identifications in the colophons to certain of his works that he envisioned himself as a bodhisatta or ‘future Buddha’.Footnote 41 In addition to his role in the compilation of legal texts with the Eater of Kaing, his many surviving works include the Vinayālaṅkāra-ṭīkā, an important sub-commentary on the Vinayasaṅgaha, a treatise on monastic law written in late-twelfth-century Laṅkā, several nissayas to Pāli vinaya and abhidhamma texts, vernacular poems about the former lives of the Buddha, collections of apotropaic verses and mantras and, especially, a number of medical and alchemical treatises.
Might any aspects of Tipiṭakālaṅkāra's biography have motivated Uttamasikkhā's condemnation of the Manusāra? After 1706, at least twenty-five years after the compilation of his bibliography of the Piṭakat, Uttamasikkā wrote a lengthy monastic chronicle entitled the Treatise on the lineage of Tisāsanadhaja. Tisāsasanadhaja was an important monk active in the mid-sixteenth century regional communities of Ava and Sagaing to whom Uttamasikkhā traced his own lineage. He is also represented with a pedigree that descended from Chappada and his Pagan-era Sinhalese fraternity.Footnote 42 In his Treatise Uttamasikkhā provides a number of details concerning Tipiṭakālaṅkāra's career, stating that he studied in Prome with Abhisaṅketasāra and later in Ava with Dhammarājaguru, monks belonging to Tisāsanadhaja's line, and that it was due to this that Tipiṭakālaṅkāra became famous as an author of Buddhist texts.Footnote 43 Uttamasikkhā, however, connects Tipiṭakālaṅkāra only indirectly with the prestige of this lineage, not celebrating Tipiṭakālaṅkāra's dhammasattha, mantra, or alchemical treatises, but his vinaya sub-commentary and vernacular manual on the Dhammapada, Jātaka, and other Piṭakat texts entitled Narratives for the increase of glory (Yasavaḍḍhana-vatthu). Footnote 44 That is, according to Uttamasikkhā, Tipiṭakālaṅkāra is to be remembered only for his discipleship with members of Tisāsanadhaja's lineage and his writings that engage with perceived authoritative scripture, not for his activities as a legist or alchemist. But there is nothing about the Treatise that suggests Uttamasikkhā regarded Tipiṭakālaṅkāra himself as an outsider or, still less, a heretic, despite the fact that he was by this time already aware of his authorship of the Manusāra, a work that he clearly viewed as non-Buddhist. Rather, Uttamasikkhā's earlier denunciation of dhammasattha was motivated by scholastic concerns rooted in his understanding that the genre is excluded from authoritative definitions of what counts as legitimate Buddhist scripture. Such concerns were of course not purely scholastic; they had important political implications since the promotion of textual orthodoxy was intimately connected with the valorisation of the legislative powers of Buddhist kingship. As we shall see below, dhammasattha was criticised not only because it was regarded as standing outside the Piṭakat, but because its narrative ideology argues for a jurisprudence that is decidedly at odds with orthodox accounts of the origins and authority of written law and its essential relationship with royal legislation and Buddhist statecraft.
Manusāra’s narrative argument
What was this narrative ideology? Manusāra begins with a long introductory section that recounts the mythic arising or biography (atthuppatti) of the legal text.Footnote 45 This inventive narrative commences by stating that successive kings, beginning in the era of Mahāsammata up to sixteenth-century Burma, have been responsible for the preservation and transmission (though not the authorship of) dhammasattha law:
Mahāsammata, king of men at the beginning of our world-cycle, desired the welfare of all mortal beings. Wise in all matters, he sought to know the law. Starting with king Mahāsammata the succession of sovereigns spread out over the surface of Jambudīpa. In Sunāparanata, Pagan, the crown of the island of victory, the royal lineage arrived with the coronation of king Pyū Maṅ Thīḥ. So that the law of the dhammasat treatise would be well understood, this king, together with Sakka, king of the devas, and a ṛṣi — three noble men possessing great power (tan khuiḥ) — set down an abridgement of it, from pure Pali into pure Pali. When the dhammasat arrived in Rāmañña Country from Upper Burma, it was translated into Mon by a virtuous individual {named Raṇṇavaṃsa} residing in the Kyoṅ Ūḥ Vihāra. During the reign of the dhammarāja, Chaṅ Prū Myāḥ Rhaṅ (Bayinnaung, fl. 1551–81), the first-born son of that lord of white elephants, great king of the law, lord of life, his crown prince, wise and eager for the welfare of his subjects, requested Mahāthera Buddhaghosa to compile a dhammasat treatise {from the old Mon dhammasat}, whose judgments were in accordance with the law, so that it would be well understood.Footnote 46
The text continues to offer a detailed account of the origin of dhammasattha during the primordial reign of Mahāsammata, describing how a deity referred to as Brahmadeva transmigrates from the Brahmaloka heaven and is born into the world as a member of the ‘family’ (kula) of royal counsellors in the lineage of the sovereign. Brahmadeva hears accusations among men intent upon condemning one another and then gives up his householder status and decides to ordain as a sage (isi-pabbajjaṃ karitvā). He withdraws to the Himavanta Mountains to dwell in a cave near the Mandākīnī Lake ‘in accordance with the practice of the sages of the Diamond Mountain’.Footnote 47 There he begins to engage in fire worship and practices concentration meditation on an earth formation (kasiṇa). As a result he gradually achieves the states of meditative absorption (jhāna), including the eight levels of attainment (samāpatti) and the five psychic powers (abhiññā), comprising the divine eye, the divine ear, supernormal abilities (iddhi), knowledge of other minds, and knowledge of former births. At the beginning of the following rainy season, a divine Gandhabbī-kinnarī nymph is caught in a storm while playing in the lake with her fellow celestials. Afraid of both the strength of the storm and of the alchemists and wizards (vijjādhara) who inhabit the area, she seeks refuge at the door of Brahmadeva's rock-cave and begs him to protect her. Because she is a woman and thus forbidden to practising ascetics he initially refuses, but then due to her pleading concedes to let her enter the cave. Upon entering the cave she warns him not to look upon her beauty.
During the evening as Brahmadeva performs his fire-worship he catches a glimpse of the Gandhabbī's body in the flicker of the fire. He is overcome by desire and sexual passion, which causes him to lose concentration and abandon his mundane absorptions (lokiya-jhāna) to the defilements (kilesa). He carries her into the depths of the cave to have sex with her. Here the rhythm of the narrative shifts somewhat, and the text turns to address the audience directly about the dangers of sexual temptation:
Surely, when there is great sexual desire, the virtuous (sīlavā) is like a moth enticed by the glow of a flame; pervading pleasure suffuses his entire body and his psychic powers are destroyed.Footnote 48
As a result of their continued conjugal cohabitation the Gandhabbī bears Brahmadeva two sons. The first of these they name Subhadra (auspicious one) because he is ‘endowed with all good signs’. The second son is born three years later, and because he spoke words which were pleasing (manuñña-vākya) he is called Manusāra, ‘the essence of [that which is pleasurable to] the mind’.Footnote 49
When Manusāra is ten years old his father informs him and his brother that his parents plan to return to their separate abodes connected with their respective clans: he will travel assisted by meditation back to the Brahmaloka heaven, while their mother will go to the realm of the divinities to dwell upon the Gandhabba Mountain with her kindred. Weeping, the two sons ask their father, ‘what is our lineage and family?’, to which Brahmadeva replies that they are of the lineage and family of man, which lives upon the surface of Jambudīpa. He exhorts them saying ‘if you have the desire to see your own kind, become ṛṣi-monks and cultivate the jhānas!’ The two brothers thus become ṛṣi-monks and gradually attain the jhānas and achieve the psychic powers. Brahmadeva passes from his bodily form, and after cremating their father in a sandalwood fire the two fly to the boundary wall of the universe (cakkavāḷassa pākāra) that surrounds Jambudīpa. Off the wall Subhadra transcribes the text of the yantra, mantra, and vedāṅga (aṅḥ mantra vedāṅga) which contains the ‘essence of worldly phenomena’ (lokiya-sāra).Footnote 50 Manusāra copies the text of the dhammasattha. Then the narrative of the origin of the text of the law concludes:
Carrying that which is of benefit to the entire world, the two brother-ṛṣis flew on clouds through the sky until they reached the dwelling of King Mahāsammata. When he saw them, the king provided them with a throne, and, bringing his hands together in the lotus-form as a gesture of respect, asked why they had come. The brothers replied that they had come because they belonged to the lineage of Mahāsammata, and then showed him the text of the yantra, mantra and vedāṅga, the logic of all worlds, and the worldly (lokiya) dhammasat text. A hunter of the forest who was present told Mahāsammata about the marriage of minister Brahmadeva to the gandhabbī-maiden, and that the two ṛṣis were his sons. King Mahāsammata gave them some excellent food and they ate. May the texts of the yantra, mantra, and vedāṅga and the dhammasat be repeated as they were preached by the sages!
The initial sections of this narrative of the origins of dhammasattha law encourage certain comparisons with Pali commentarial accounts of Buddhist kingship and legislation, although there are several critically important differences. Comparisons are especially suggestive with the Discourse on what is primary (Aggañña sutta), the locus classicus for canonical representations of King Mahāsammata. Briefly, this discourse of the Buddha recounts how, in the prelapsarian utopia beginning the cyclic generation of the world, beings gradually became greedy, began to indulge in impurities such as sex, and, due to their greed and laziness, began to amass surplus stores of food. One being stole another's share of rice, marking the emergence of theft, which was followed closely by accusation, lying, and punishment. Responding to the emergence of such ‘bad things’, the beings came together and decided to appoint one individual as king to ‘criticize whoever should be criticized, accuse whoever should be accused, and banish whoever should be banished’.Footnote 51 In later Pali commentarial accounts that date between the sixth to twelfth centuries CE, Mahāsammata is equated with Manu, and said to be responsible for setting the ‘limits’ or ‘boundaries of conduct’ among men in the world. Perhaps the earliest work to assert the identity of the two figures is the commentary on the canonical Stories of heavenly abodes (Vimāna-vatthu) by Dhammapāla (c. sixth century CE), in a passage that is found elsewhere in later sub-commentaries and lexical texts:
The worldly (lokiyā), however, say [people] are [called] ‘humans’ (manussā) because they are the offspring of Manu. Manu is the name of the one at the beginning of the world-cycle who was the first to judge (vidhāyako) what is and is not beneficial regarding the conduct of men (loka-mariyādā) and was established as the father of beings. In the [Buddhist] teaching he is called ‘Mahāsammata’. Beings who are established in the instruction of his exhortation, either first-hand or by virtue of lineage, are called ‘humans’ (manussā) because they are like his sons. Indeed, because of this those beings are also designated as ‘men’ (māṇavā) or ‘born of Manu’ (manujā).Footnote 52
Here it is important to underscore the commentator's acknowledgement that the figure of Manu has a double career. ‘In the Buddha's teaching’ he is referred to as ‘Mahāsammata’ while among those who are ‘worldly’ or ‘mundane’ (more on these terms below) he is known as ‘Manu’. As Collins notes, this identity is reiterated in the sub-commentary on the Ambaṭṭha sutta (c. eighth–twelfth centuries) in a very important series of verses that, as we shall see below, are remobilised by later Burmese critics of dhammasattha:
There was a powerful king called Mahāsammata, born into the family of the Sun, a man of flawless excellence.
(He was) the eye of the world, his good qualities blazing like rays, he shone like a second Sun, dispelling the darkness.
Out of concern for the world he set up boundaries [mariyādā] among people [loke]; once they were established, people could not transgress them.
Illustrious, brilliant, guardian of the boundaries [sīmā] among people, (they) call this primordial great hero ‘Manu’.Footnote 53
As the figure associated with the primordial imposition of loka-mariyādā or ‘worldly boundaries’, Mahāsammata/Manu is thus represented as the first Buddhist lawmaker. The connection in both of these passages between Manu/Mahāsammata and the fixing of boundaries is especially significant. Mariyādā in Pali often refers to boundaries, but is also a term signifying ‘custom’, ‘discipline’, or ‘rules’. According to the Pali lexicographical tradition mariyādā is a synonym of both sīmā (boundary, boundary marker) and ācāra (conduct, discipline).Footnote 54
In Manusāra, by contrast, Mahāsammata is acknowledged as the primordial king at the beginning of the world, but we are not offered a tale of his appointment by the people to ensure against bad practices among men. Nor is he ever identified as Manu. Rather, it is Brahmadeva who is initially responsible for recognising and taking action against human impropriety. Manusāra does not tell us why Brahmadeva chose to transmigrate from the Brahmaloka heaven to be reborn as a counsellor in the lineage of Mahāsammata, nor anything much that can help us identify him with further specificity. Of course Brahmadeva is an epithet of Lord Brahmā who quite famously according to the Mahābhārata and other Brāhmaṇical works was the author of the mythic first legal treatise entitled Daṇḍanīti (Guide to Punishment) that was later abridged by Bṛhaspati.Footnote 55 But there is little else in the Manusāra's narrative to suggest further parallels with Sanskrit accounts of Brahmā's authorship of law, and nowhere in canonical Pali literature are similar accounts attested. In contrast to other seventeenth-century dhammasatthas such as the Dhammavilāsa that state that ‘Manu’ is appointed as a counsellor by Mahāsammata, here we encounter the somewhat elusive figure of Brahmadeva.Footnote 56 As in the Discourse on what is primary, the desire for an order of law originates in the recognition of its absence. Men existed in a lawless state where they accused one another of wrongdoing and Brahmadeva, hearing these recriminations, relinquishes his householder status and withdraws from the world. However, because he sacrificed his ascetic powers to carnal desire, it is not Brahmadeva himself but his son Manusāra who is powerful enough to retrieve the cosmic text of the law. Manusāra and Subhadra achieve access to their respective corpora of worldly treatises via jhānic practice unimpeded by sexual temptation. Although the texts they collect from the boundary wall are deemed beneficial for humankind, their motives derive from a desire to be united with their own family or race.
Most importantly for present purposes, the Manusāra narrative provides a vivid dramatisation of the central proposition of dhammasattha jurisprudence that asserts that the law is cosmic, without author, and ‘worldly’. Written law is cosmic insofar as it is literally inscribed in the heavens and carried down to earth in uncorrupted transmission through the intercession of a sage charged with supernormal powers. We are not told who wrote this text presumably because it has no author. It was not composed by a sovereign, even though it may be destined to serve the administration of righteous kings, and it is not characterised as or authorised by the words of the Buddha. The law is authoritative because it is written on the wall of the universe,Footnote 57 hidden to ordinary humans and accessible only via ascetic practice, and no further justification for its effective capacities is necessary. It would be incorrect to see here close parallels with conceptions of ‘divine law’ or ‘natural law’ derived from European theological formulations, in which a universal and eternal law bestowed by God is apprehended through revelation or the exercise of reason. Despite its remote and cosmic origins, dhammasattha law is repeatedly defined as ‘worldly’ or ‘mundane’ or as encoding the essence or logic of worldliness.
This characterisation of dhammasattha as ‘worldly’ and its relationship with other mundane genres such as yantra, mantra, and vedāṅga is important. In Burma as elsewhere in premodern Asia, law and the production of legal literature participated in a broader set of literary and disciplinary practices which were rarely pursued or envisioned in isolation. Those who compiled law treatises, whether monks or laypersons, were often also alchemists, poets, grammarians, historians, and astrologers. Understood as a written discipline (sattha) or technical art (sippa), law comprised one of the eighteen ‘worldly branches of knowledge’ (Pali vijjāṭṭhāna, Burmese atat), a schematisation attested in Pali Buddhist literature no later than the Milindapañhā (c. fourth century CE), if not earlier under slightly different guises.Footnote 58 The past several decades have witnessed studies of the importance of the related Sanskrit terms śāstra and vidyāsthāna to the history of education and disciplinary practices in South Asia, although scholars working on Pali Buddhist societies in Southeast Asia have been slow to explore their comparative salience in systematising precolonial knowledge there as well.Footnote 59 There is ample evidence that by the fifteenth century this classificatory scheme was pervasive in Burma, and that law and the other branches of knowledge were reckoned as ‘worldly’ or ‘mundane’ (lokiya or lokika) disciplines, as opposed to those that were characterised as ‘otherworldly’ or ‘supermundane’ (lokuttara).Footnote 60 As is well known, this dichotomy is not limited to Pali Buddhism but has a long and varied history within all Buddhist traditions in Asia.Footnote 61 Among other things, it was mobilised as a taxonomic principle by early Pali commentators in categorising different Buddhist texts in terms of their content, aims, and varying degrees of authoritativeness. The term ‘supermundane’ was applied to texts that dealt with the soteriology of nibbāna, its techniques for attainment, and the qualities of the religious adept, while ‘mundane’ described those that related to worldly existence, ethics, kamma and its result, and rebirth. When used in this way these labels imply claims about a text's cosmological, theological, and practical significance.Footnote 62
In one of his verse homilies composed around 1500 CE, a poet-monk of the Royal Monastery of Kandaw asserts that the ‘good person’ (sū tau) should mindfully cultivate learning in the eighteen mundane disciplines, and that such learning is conducive to worldly prosperity.Footnote 63 He expresses a similar notion in another poem entitled Epistle of instruction, saying that one should ‘continuously strive to acquire learning in the branches of mundane knowledge’ and that doing so ensures future worldly material benefit.Footnote 64 In a commentary to this work written in 1733, the sayadaw of the Royal Monastery at Taungdwingyi describes what is meant by ‘branches of mundane knowledge’. He explains that knowledge is of two types: ‘that which is done for the world’ (lokavatta), comprising ‘the eighteen-fold mundane knowledge concerned with the livelihood of men’, and ‘that which is done for the dhamma’ (dhammavatta), comprising forms of knowledge enshrined in the ‘Tipiṭaka which contain the ordinances of the Buddha’.Footnote 65 In a list that closely parallels that found in the Milindapañhā, he goes on to enumerate the eighteen worldly disciplines, which include dhammasattha as well as mantra and vedāṅga.
Dhammasattha and its discontents
It is in fact the relationship of this mundane law to the supermundane dhamma expounded by the Buddha and enshrined in the Piṭakat that constituted the principal jurisprudential problem faced by authors of and commentators on dhammasattha in seventeenth through nineteenth-century Burma. In a sense, their problem echoes that encountered by Indian mīmāṃsaka theorists in medieval India, who saw their task relative to Brāhmaṇical dharmaśāstra law as in part the exigetical harmonisation of the legal texts with the injunctions of the Vedas. Yet the difficulties of the Burmese were more acute. Dhammasattha treatises like Manusāra do not invoke the Buddha as legislator or characterise his teaching as a source of law in the same way that dharmaśāstra explicitly orients itself toward the Veda as a principal authority. Moreover, as we saw with the example of Uttamasikkhā's bibliography, that dhammasattha was excluded from Mahāvihārin taxonomies of authoritative scripture could constitute grounds for rejecting the genre as non-Buddhist. Other authors were not so harsh as Uttamasikkhā, however. They attempted to redescribe the status of dhammasattha and the other mundane disciplines in terms that sanctioned them in light of the Piṭakat. Thus we find authors who refer to such works as anavajja-lokiya or ‘faultless mundane’ treatises. This approach is exemplified in an epistle sent in 1784 by the monk Ñāṇābhivaṃsa to King Bodawhpaya (fl. 1782–1819).
Ñāṇābhivaṃsa served as Bodawhpaya's royal preceptor from 1788 and was one of the more influential court monks of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In 1812 he was compelled to disrobe by the king due to his failure to prevent dissension in the saṅgha and subsequently served as a minister to the court under the title Mahādhammasaṅkraṃ.Footnote 66 He is best known due to his authorship of two important vernacular religious chronicles, and his participation in the committee to compile the Glass Palace chronicle during the reign of Bodawhpaya's successor, Bagyidaw (fl. 1819–37). However his activities additionally encompassed the writing of sub-commentaries on abhidhamma and the compilation of nissayas on a wide range of Pali and Sanskrit materials.Footnote 67 Ñāṇābhivaṃsa was particularly productive in glossing in Pali certain Sanskrit astronomical texts imported from locations in India and Laṅkā, some of which still survive in manuscript. In 1784 he explained the significance of a recent shipment of Sanskrit texts that had arrived in Burma as follows:
The Omniscient Buddha accomplished the perfections over the duration of four universal-cycles and one hundred thousand world-cycles. During that period the faultless mundane sciences (anavajja-loka-sippas) were known to him. It is stated in the Asātamanta Jātaka, the Tibedaka-tittira Jātaka, and elsewhere that by attaining perfection in practices conducive to the benefit of the world (lokattha-cariya) he became omniscient, the pinnacle of the three worlds. As a bodhisatta who would become omniscient and the pinnacle of the three worlds, Mahāsammata worked to perfect his wisdom. According to the scriptures, he designated the boundaries (apuiṅḥ akhrāḥ) of worldly practice, which persisted for a long time from generation to generation. The faultless sciences are enumerated in the righteous teaching of the dhamma of the Buddha. Thus their study is related to the propagation of that teaching. Comprising the ornament of the world, the following treatises which enable the propagation of the teaching have been collected from various points [in India], including Majjhimadesa, the Kāsika Country, Vārāṇasī, Navadīpa, etc. They were written by the ten sages, namely Aṭṭhaka, Vāmaka, Vāmadeva, Aṅgīrasa, Bhagu, Yamadaggi, Vāsiṭṭha, Sāradvāja, Kassapa, and Vesāmitta […].Footnote 68
Ñāṇābhivaṃsa goes on to enumerate one hundred and seventy śāstric works recently brought to Burma from India, of which eight are labelled as dhammasattha. These are all rather common Sanskrit dharmaśāstra titles dealing with marriage and inheritance, and it is striking that one of them, the Dāyādhikāra, may have been written only one or two decades before its importation to Burma.Footnote 69 It is important to note that Ñāṇābhivaṃsa makes no distinction whatsoever between these Sanskrit dharmaśāstra texts brought from South Asia and Burmese or Pali dhammasattha treatises compiled in Burma. For him they all originate in the primordial legislative activity of the Buddhist king Mahāsammata, and his model was followed by later sages.Footnote 70 Here Ñāṇābhivaṃsa connects the ‘authorship’ of dhammasattha with the ten ancient sages of the Brahmins mentioned in the Discourse on Ambaṭṭha and elsewhere in the Tipiṭaka and commentaries, where they are represented as the compilers of the Vedic mantras and the six-fold vedāṅgas (chaḷaṅga) necessary for their performance (i.e., ritual rules, grammar, etymology, phonetics, prosody, and astronomy).Footnote 71 Nowhere in the Tipiṭaka or its commentaries are these sages connected with the writing of law texts specifically, but Ñāṇābhivaṃsa utilises these figures to provide authoritative justification for worldly genres in general. He claims that these faultless mundane sciences are not to be rejected despite their exclusion from the canon; rather, they are sanctioned by the ‘teaching of the dhamma’ and engagement with them is in fact a mode of supporting and propagating the teaching. This constitutes a very persuasive argument in favour of the Buddhist appropriation and continued application of dhammasattha as well as other Sanskrit Brāhmaṇical texts in Burma.
The distance of Ñāṇābhivaṃsa's account of the faultless mundane sciences from Uttamasikkhā's condemnation of dhammasattha is symptomatic of the varying perspectives on the legitimacy of these texts and their associated practices in premodern Burma. The repeated attempts by different writers trying to account for the existence of dhammasattha in light of Pali canonical and commentarial narratives suggests strongly that the proper Buddhist credentials of dhammasattha were widely and persistently regarded with suspicion. In a work recording seventy-nine different questions on various matters submitted between 1758 and 1762 by the minister Letwe Naurathā U Nay to Sayadaw Khaṅ Krīḥ Phyau Ñāṇālaṅkāra the abbot of the Taungdwin Monastery, several interesting perspectives on dhammasattha are addressed.Footnote 72 In these cases Letwe Naurathā's questions are somewhat more revealing than Ñāṇālaṅkāra's answers. In one of these, dated 1758, the minister asks: ‘Does the narrative found in the dhammasat texts concerning the sages Manu or Mano at the beginning of the world have any support in the scriptural texts containing the Words of the Buddha (Buddhavacana) [recited] at the Buddhist Councils?’Footnote 73 The question again implies an uncertainty as to the status of dhammasattha relative to the canon, defined here as those texts included in the Council recitations. Ñāṇālaṅkāra answers that ‘the entire distinctive system of worldly duties were set forth by King Mahāsammata. It is said in the authoritative Buddhist texts only that in the world Mahāsammata was called “Manu”. Nothing further is stated regarding the details of the sages Manu, Mano, or others’.Footnote 74
Some fifty years later the status of dhammasattha was still an issue of concern. In 1811 the matter reappears in a series of questions asked to Ādiccaraṃsī, the sayadaw of Monywe, by the monk Sirimālā. Ādiccaraṃsī was closely allied with the royal court like all the other monks we have surveyed, and was also one of the chief compilers of the Glass Palace chronicle. The majority of his surviving works are poems, many of which explicitly deal with lokiya-classed knowledge such as astrology, and he is also remembered for his learning in Sanskrit, oneiromancy, and vedāṅga.Footnote 75 Sirimālā asks the abbot how, if the dhammasattha, mantra, and vedāṅga texts were copied off the boundary wall of the universe as they claim, can there be variations among different texts. If the narrative of the sages Manusāra and Subhadra and their presentation of these texts to Mahāsammata were true, then all the surviving texts should be in agreement, but in fact ‘they do not agree with one another in terms of their content or their comprehensiveness’.Footnote 76
This question is particularly interesting because it refers directly to the mythic narrative of the origin of written law in the text of the Manusāra itself. Ādiccaraṃsī begins his response by stating that he has searched through numerous cosmological and other texts that describe the boundary wall of the universeFootnote 77 but has been unable to find in any of them a single mention of dhammasattha or vedāṅga inscribed on it. Furthermore, an investigation of certain vedāṅga texts themselves does not support that they were copied from the boundary wall, but that they were compiled by various sages — including several whom Ādiccaraṃsī lists by name — after the primordial reign of Mahāsammata. He cites a passage verbatim from the Pali text of the Manusāra which reads: ‘from the boundary wall Subhadra copied the texts containing the essence of worldliness, and Manusāra copied the dhammasat, [they both] collected these written records of practices’, and comments that this narrative cannot be accepted as true since the Piṭakat does not mention it.Footnote 78 He then states:
If the extant dhammasat texts did not originate from the boundary wall of the universe then where did they come from? Since the commentary on the Ambaṭṭha sutta says that King Mahāsammata laid down judgments as to the boundaries between men, he was the first. We should understand that reference as suggesting that later wise kings, ministers, judges, sages, and monks gave judgments [as to the law] also. Especially, [there is the reference] in the Tuṇḍila jātaka, where the Pig-King, the bodhisatta Mahātuṇḍila, sits on the seat of judgment and determines the law. After the king of Vārāṇasī dies the Pig-King caused his rulings to be written down in a palm-leaf manuscript (pe), and said ‘the law should be determined according to these rulings’. As the people cried he and his brother disappeared together into the forest. The instruction (ovāda) contained in the judgments of the Pig-King bodhisatta are said to have endured for sixty-thousand years. Similarly, King Ādasamukha in the Gāmaṇicanda jātaka, King Candakumāra in the Khaṇḍahāla jātaka, King Senaka in the Sattubhasta jātaka, Mahosadhā in the Mahā-ummaga jātaka, and the sage Mahābodhi in the Mahābodhi jātaka, were all skilled in legal rulings (thuṃḥ sādhaka) and passed judgment about the law. But these all took place very long ago. In later times, rulings were also made. In Śrī Kṣetra there were the rulings of Kings Duttabaung and Bherinda, in Arimaddanā [Pagan] there were the rulings of King Pyū Maṅ Thīḥ, in Muttama [Martaban] the rulings of King Wagaru (Vārīyū), in Chiang Mai the rulings of King Ku Nā (Arakunā). Still later there were many such rulings made by wise kings, ministers, judges, sages, and monks. As support for the writing down of laws by the kings of old we note the Sattubhasta jātaka, which says ‘Vohāra-suci means that which is pure (suci) in the established ruling of the law (vohāra) that has been written down (likhapetvā) by former righteous kings (dhammikarāja). [They are pure] in the sense that, having abandoned that which is contrary to dhamma, [those kings] make rulings which are in accordance with dhamma’. Or, in the Tesakuṇa jātaka it says ‘[the king, saying] “may this ruling endure” wrote his judgment that was in accordance with dhamma on gold-leaf and went into the forest'. It is said that his instruction endured for forty-thousand years. It is in this way that those who are wise put down their judgments in writing […]. Accordingly, we know the manner in which such rulings were written by former kings.Footnote 79
In this fascinating passage, perhaps the longest sustained commentary on the nature of written law from premodern Burma, we witness Ādiccaraṃsī's attempt to harmonise dhammasattha jurisprudence with accounts of royal legislation in the Piṭakat that he regards as of ultimate authority. Here he cites tales from a variety of commentaries on Jātaka that show that written law is enacted by righteous Buddhist kings. Not once does he dismiss the legitimacy of the genre as a form of law, even if he might accuse it of untruths: dhammasattha did not originate as a cosmic inscription on the boundary wall of the universe, but is a product of human law-making, and specifically the activity of kings. Mahāsammata was the first to pass judgment about the law, and his legislative model was followed by later sovereigns. Ādiccaraṃsī displays a deep familiarity with perceived canonical textual passages that relate instances of king-made law, and he mobilises this learning to redescribe dhammasattha as a form of royal Buddhist legislation sanctioned by the Piṭakat. As we have seen, this redescription is decidedly at odds with representations of the authority of written law narrated in the Manusāra's origin myth.
Dhammasattha as Buddhist royal legislation
This article began with Uttamasikkhā's late-seventeenth-century rejection of dhammasattha as a properly Buddhist genre on the grounds that it was excluded from definitions of Piṭakat or scriptural canon he regarded as authoritative. It then investigated whether that rejection may have been motivated in part by any aspects of the biographies of the compilers of the Manusāra in the context of the monastic histories that were in the process of coalescing in seventeenth-century Ava. Evidence suggests that, on the contrary, Uttamasikkhā recognised Tipitakālaṅkāra as descended from his own line of religious teachers, and that the critique of dhammasattha he advanced rested instead on scholastic or ideological concerns. To define the challenge dhammasattha posed its critics, we explored the jurisprudence encoded in the narrative myth of the Manusāra. That text represents written law as originating on the boundary wall of the universe, authoritative because of its cosmic derivation and the fact that it can be accessed only by certain individuals who have attained supernormal powers through ascetic and meditative practice. In this account dhammasattha is not framed as a legislative pronouncement in the same way that a royal order or decree might be, nor is it in any obvious sense promulgated by an authority, such as a king, a Buddha, or an inspired sage, who fulfils the role of legislator. Here we encounter — as did our Burmese critics of the genre — the crucial difference between the jurisprudence presupposed by monastic law, royal law, and dhammasattha law. In the context of monastic law Gotama Buddha's legislative acts implicitly sanction all rules for the saṅgha. Dhammasattha, by contrast, was not enacted by a Buddha or by kings, ministers, or jurists, and claims a genealogy independent of the ‘state’ or other legislative institutions.Footnote 80 Some scholars of Burmese law have attempted to characterise dhammasattha and the premodern legal culture more generally as a system of Buddhist morality.Footnote 81 Robert Taylor has asserted that in precolonial Burma ‘law and custom were little distinguished and legal codes were intended more as guides to moral conduct than as principles of decision and right’.Footnote 82 Yet just as it is incorrect to view dhammasattha as a variety of royal legislation, it is inaccurate to see it as a distillation of general normative principles, as the legal instantiation of a Buddhist moral order or abstract conception of dhamma that guarantees the legitimacy of law. There is no legislative source that stands behind written law; the law is the text of the law.
Criticism of the genre was motivated by two interconnected prejudices. The first and arguably primary critique was empirical, and stipulated that dhammasattha was excluded from the Piṭakat as an aspirational scriptural ideal. The second was ideological, and maintained that the cosmological and textual sanction dhammasattha claims for itself conflicts with theories of properly Buddhist legislation drawn from that canon. In this latter sense dhammasattha represented a heterodox literature. Yet precisely what was to be done about dhammasattha remained an open question. Uttamasikkhā was untroubled in rejecting the genre as a ‘danger’ outright. For Ñāṇābhivaṃsa and Ādiccaraṃsī the vast corpus of the Piṭakat provided extensive literary and conceptual resources which could be used to anoint and justify dhammasattha in terms of that corpus itself. This process, however, required an essential redescription of the genre in light of canonical jurisprudential ideals: dhammasattha became what it had never been before; namely, a variety of royal discourse, an expression of sovereign legislation in a tradition initiated by Mahāsammata, the first Buddhist dhamma-king.
Given that they were levied from a standpoint intimate with royal prerogatives, such redescriptions of the genre were arguably proportionate to the challenge written law was seen to pose not only to ideas concerning scriptural authority, but to the Piṭakat-derived political theory of Buddhist kingship as well. Historically and conceptually, dhammasattha had never been a form of written law that emanated from the state or any individual lawgiver. Its genealogy, which traces back to the early, and still imperfectly understood diffusion of Indo-Southeast Asian dharmaśāstra literature in the first millennium C.E., is distinct from that of royal orders or edicts, which have a separate history and set of justifications in local and regional theories of statecraft. In light of the Piṭakat narratives of legislation that in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries exerted significant influence over elite Buddhist discourse in Burma, however, any genre of ‘mundane’ written law that claimed to originate outside the figure of the king was regarded as lacking theological sanction and therefore invalid. As the arguments of Ñāṇābhivaṃsa and Ādiccaraṃsī show, only the sovereign and clients of the state are authorised to act as law-makers.
During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries dhammasattha continued to be written and applied in juridical contexts. Many of these later treatises were written by monks closely associated with the royal court of the Konbaung Dynasty (1752–1885) who were involved in other projects aimed at providing Burmese kingship with a range of textual and symbolic conduits of power. An extension of the analysis presented here would turn its attention to the comparative investigation of treatises produced during this period to explore how the above criticisms of the genre were addressed by or incorporated into these new dhammasattha compilations. For the most part they were answered by various attempts at concession. After the middle of the eighteenth century, for example, narratives of the cosmic derivation of law all but disappear as a core feature of dhammasattha jurisprudence. Compilers for the first time felt the need to assert the genre's proper credentials by bringing their depictions of legal authority in line with Pali commentarial accounts of the royal origins of worldly legislation, often citing extensive passages from the Piṭakat to redefine dhammasattha as the work of Buddhist kings and an emblem of sovereign right. In substantive areas, too, the impact of a heightened sensitivity to the demands of scriptural normativity is apparent. Instances of dissonance between laws for monks in dhammasattha and in the monastic vinaya raised troubling questions for compilers. Any such laws that could not be harmonised with perceived canonical monastic legal provisions (which are themselves often cited verbatim and at length by eighteenth and nineteenth-century dhammasattha) were rejected.Footnote 83
In precolonial Southeast Asia trends in the direction of the reform of dhammasattha as a mode of Buddhist royal discourse were not limited to Burma. In neighbouring Siam in 1805 King Rama I initiated the compilation of a massive compendium of Ayutthayan royal law known as the Kotmai tra sam duang (‘Three seals code’) in an explicit attempt to provide a legislative basis for his new dynasty based in Bangkok. It is not incidental that the process of revising the law is represented in Siamese chronicle literature as occurring in tandem with the revision of the Tipiṭaka.Footnote 84 The committee tasked with editing this new law ‘code’ was instructed by the king to survey legal texts that had survived the Burmese destruction of Ayutthaya and to reject those provisions that were not in accord with authoritative scripture (‘Pāḷi’).Footnote 85 The first section of their compendium is prefaced by an undated version of a dhammasattha treatise that serves as the organisational framework for the ensuing presentation of laws enacted by historical Siamese monarchs which comprises the major part of the text's content.Footnote 86 The structure and legal provisions of dhammasattha serve as an index to this royal legislation. That is, in the case of its appropriation by the Three Seals Code, dhammasattha became both textually and jurisprudentially interwoven with king-made law to the point that the boundaries between them became almost indistinguishable.Footnote 87 Such a thoroughgoing assimilation of dhammasattha into the royal legislative idiom never occurred in Burma, despite the increasing redefinition of the former in terms of the latter over the course of the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries.
