Burma (Myanmar) has retained more of its source materials on the traditional law, particularly dhammasattha (treatise on law) than other Southeast Asian countries, such as Thailand, Laos, and Cambodia. These source materials mainly include dhammasattha, rājasattha (judicial decisions by the king), prathton (collection of judicial court decisions). Among these, as Lammerts asserts, dhammasattha has not been adequately investigated by scholarship, although it played a vital role in monastic and lay Buddhist intellectual, socio-legal, and textual practice.
This book is thematically divided into two parts: one (chapters 2–4) on “Sources” and the other (chapters 5 and 6) on “Revisions and Reasons” and is organized into six chapters including chapter 1 which is preceded by “Buddhist Law in Burma.”
According to Lammerts, although this book offers an account of the history and dynamic dhammasattha jurisprudence in premodern Burma (c. 1250–1850), it neither purports to provide a comprehensive history of the legal system of the period, nor any individual substantive law in it, but intends to serve as a sort of a preliminary discussion for future studies through his critical engagement with source materials of dhammasattha and related texts. In this sense, this book is the first critical approach and challenge on the study on dhammasattha and its shifting textual repertories and theoretical model.
Critically reviewing hitherto dhammasattha studies in and out of Burma, Lammerts argues that there were multiple, controversial modes on Burmese jurisprudence and legal authority and therefore that these must be assessed in the context of specific intellectual histories and also in relation to local textual and ritual practices. Focusing on the period between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, this book presupposes and substantiates that this approach to the study reveals significant shifts and reorientations in the legal discourse on law and Buddhism during this period. He questions against such view of the British colonialists who regarded precolonial Burmese legalism as the unchanging nature. He regards “Buddhist law” as a colonial terminology which is a new form of Burmese law, neglecting a living, dynamic and self-critical feature of dhammasattha. He asserts that dhammasattha constitutes a tradition of Burmese Buddhist law and jurisprudence so intermingled with Buddhism.
Lammerts aims at two goals: one is to map and describe the significance of the production, circulation, and transformation of dhammasattha in precolonial Burma and he gives importance to historical or philological work with the genre and urges scholars to extensively scrutinize such abundant and complex manuscript archive as a fundamental work. In this regard, he severely criticizes the attitude of colonialists who never really investigated the dhammasattha manuscripts scattered throughout the country: the other is to provide an account of the dhammasattha jurisprudence and complex manuscript archive so that we can examine how and why the precolonial Burmese jurisprudence changed toward the mid-nineteenth century.
Regarding Buddhism and law, Lammerts asserts that it is conspicuous mistake to characterize Buddhist law as mere monastic law, although monks were extremely concerned with writing and authorizing dhammasattha. While denying widespread literary in Sanskrit including dharmaśāstra or Hindu code of law, Lammerts, through his survey of the textual evidence, totally rejects the late outstanding British jurist, Huxley's such assumption that “Pali cultural package” (Reference Huxley1990, p. 70), that is, the literary and intellectual resources of a trans-regional Pali or Theravāda Buddhism in Southeast Asia brought with it in the form of the vinaya for monks but no source of law for laity. Lammerts argues, through his careful study of the earliest surviving dhammavilāsa dhammasattha text that there is a gulf between “Pali cultural package” and the indigenous dhammasattha tradition, emphasizing that sources and repertories of dhammasattha are more complex and more dynamics than Huxley's analysis.
This book begins the history of dhammasattha with “proto-textual” period, examining epigraphic references of the early thirteenth century from Pagan, and demonstrating that dhammasat in vernacular may not yet have functioned as a genre. In the sixteenth century, however, number of vernacular poems dealt with dhammasattha as a genre of judicial guide for kings and ministers. Lammerts has made effort to elucidate the legal circumstances through reading them. He further develops, through evidential records on monastic legal disputes and vinaya decisions, the historical facts of interaction between vinaya and dhammasattha in the seventeenth century, and realizes that many cases involved ordinary monks and lay people.
Lammerts, then examines dhammavilāsa dhammasattha which, he regards as the earliest securely dated surviving dhammasattha (before 1637–1638), seemingly based upon Furnivall's account (Reference Furnivall1940, p. 355). He selected dhammavilāsa because, in his opinion, it is a mirror reflecting a certain discursive state of affairs in the Burmese dhammasattha. He states that such a distinctive jurisprudence identified as dhammasattha, preserved at the boundary wall of the universe was transcribed therefrom and transmitted by preternatural seer Manu to King Mahāsammata, the first Buddhist ruler to make good use of his legal administration. The original dhammavilāsa goes back to the twelfth century Pagan by Forchhammer's view (Reference Forchhammer1885, p. 35) based on Kalyānī inscription (late 15c), but Furnivall casts a doubtful authenticity due to there being no support of the contemporary inscriptions (Reference Furnivall1940, p. 355). Lammerts expects future critical scholarship on the original dhmmavilāsa.
This book deals with two versions of Manusāra-patha (in Pali verse) and nissaya (word for word translation) composed by Tipitaka Lankaara and Kaingza Manuraaja in 1651–1652, although there are considerable differences between them. In this regard, debatably showing objection against Forchhammer (Reference Forchhammer1885, p.35) or Lingat's (Reference Lingat1950, p.18) such view that dhammasattha was compiled in Pali first and then translated into vernacular in nissaya style, Lammerts evidently points out that vernacular texts were sometimes compiled first and then translated into Pali so that Pali can explain more accurate, unambiguous and memorable. He gives importance to the two versions of Manusāra as the first dhammasattha to declare a clear boundary separation between monastic and lay legal jurisdictions and he also significantly indicates that the compilers of Manusāra had begun to explicitly articulate the discrepancies between legitimate or illegitimate textual sources. In this regard, Lammerts declares that there are considerable variations between the account of both Manusāra and dhammavilāsa in the story of legal origin. Dhammavilāsa does not clearly recognize the identification of Mahāsammata and Manu, while Manusāra does recognize it.
In chapter 5 of this book, Lammerts demonstrates that the notion, status and authority should be evaluated in light of the pitakat or Pali scriptures, considering such several significant changes in dhammasattha during the late-seventeenth to mid-nineteenth centuries. In Burma during eighteenth to nineteenth centuries, particularly the first years of Konbaung dynasty (1752–1760) only old dhammasattha texts were redeployed and since then there appeared several distinguished indigenous monks, ministers, or writers on dhammasattha, who took up various topics on dhammasattha treatise. Among these intellectuals, Kemaacaara (Appendix I) Vannadhamma Kyaw Htin (Appendix II), Letwe Sundara (Appendix III), and Monywe Sayadaw (Appendix IV) provided useful information on chronological arrangement of previous dhammasattha. Thus after writing about the works by precolonial Burmese jurists, Lammerts presumes that the dhammasattha as written law was itself an avenue of critique and its historicization and also refers to “Upade” or a new type of written law with the large scale of issuance in the mid-nineteenth century Burma, which was parallelly existed with dhammasattha until the fall of the Konbaung dynasty in 1885.
Lammerts has made painstaking effort to demonstrate that dhammasattha during the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries Burma were utterly historical, dynamic, changeable, and even controversial phenomena. Nevertheless, through available evidence found in colophons of dhammasattha authors, he came to certain general conclusion, that dhammasattha has been characterized not as “moral law” but as “a legal instrument” intended for the benefit for both the judge and litigants; that is, the Judges should protect the wealth and prosperity of litigants to the final goal, the prosperity of Buddhists through their meritorious deeds and of Buddhism. This book conclusively asserts that law and Buddhism are mutually constitutive and inseparable.
Lammerts, eventually implies how much degree Paliization or Theravāda Buddhic-ization and its localization or regionalization occurred in the premodern mainland Southeast Asia. This book emphasizes the importance of not only reexamining primary sources of dhammasattha texts, but also more widely unearthing of contemporary authentic sources. Furthermore, Lammerts offers valuable readings of primary sources, particularly both Dhammavilāsa and Manusāra. His book also shows an exciting development in the scholarship of legal history of Burma, particularly of the dhammasattha legalism and offers a new direction toward understanding it more accurately.
This book takes up various topics to be discussed with elaborate fullness of detail and ordinary readers without somewhat preliminary knowledge will be bewildered. For this commentator two point of issues are cast, although it seems a bit apart from the context of this book: one is that it seems more interesting for readers if this book discusses the relationship between “impermanence” or “law of cause and effect” in Buddhist terminology and transcending nature of the Burmese traditional law; the other is that it will be more concerned for readers to compare between Western concept of “legality” and Burmese tradition of “reasonableness” as a criterion of law.
However, this book is an indescribably valuable work for us to enrich our knowledge of the Burmese traditional legalism and it makes a significant contribution to the scholarship in this field of studies in the future.
