The Palace Law of Ayutthaya and the Thammasat: Law and Kingship in Siam. Translated

Baker, Chris; Phongpaichit, Pasuk; Jory, Patrick

doi:10.1355/sj32-3g

Cited by 3 publications

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“…Sullivan 2020). The second environment is dhammsattha, a genre of legal treatises apparent in mainland Southeast Asia from the second millennium, which provided rules and jurisprudential principles for kings, judges, and other "good persons" responsible for resolving disputes (Baker and Phongpaichit 2016;Ishii 1986;Lammerts 2018). The third environment is ra ¯jasattha, royal orders that claimed to align worldly rule with Buddhist principles (Huxley 1997;Prasert Na Nagara and Griswold 1992;Zan 2000).…”

Section: Buddhist Lawmentioning

confidence: 99%

Introduction

Ginsburg

Schonthal

2022

Buddhism and Comparative Constitutional Law

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In 2011, the 14th Dalai Lama Tenzin Gyatso announced his intention to complete a major legal transformation that would redefine the government of the Tibetan community-in-exile. In a speech given from his headquarters in Dharamshala, the world's most well-known Buddhist monk confirmed that he would be retiring as the political leader of the Tibetan people. That event would catalyze a dramatic constitutional change: from a system based on the "rule by kings and religious figures," the Tibetan Government-in-Exile was to follow a new Charter that provided for democratically elected leaders, whose authority would be constrained by law (Mills 2018, 155 and passim; see also Brox 2016). 1 The preamble to the new 2011 constitutional text explained that, in spite of the Tibetan people's willingness to accept the continuation of theocracy, "His Holiness the Dalai Lama decided that the time had now come to complete the process of full democratization and that the Tibetan people should no longer remain dependent on a single individual" (Tibetan Parliament-in-Exile 2011, 2). The chapters of the Charter that followed laid out this vision. The "Tibetan People" would continue to promote "the noble Buddhist faith" and respect the Dalai Lama as "the manifestation of [the bodhisattva] Avalokiteshwara in human form . . . the master of all Buddhist teachings" (Article 17(11); Article 1). 2 But they would also uphold fundamental rights and hold elections, maintain a judiciary and bureaucracy, limit executive power, and follow standardized procedures for promulgating laws. Theocracy, in short, would give way to constitutional democracy.This episodewhich attracted more attention among Tibetologists than among scholars of comparative constitutional lawprovides one tantalizing example of the * The authors are particularly appreciative of D. Christian Lammerts and Levi McLaughlin for their comments on a draft of this chapter. 1 A "Constitution for a Future Tibet" had appeared as early as 1963, with another major iteration coming in 1991. 2 We use the spelling of the original. The more common spelling is the Sanskrit, Avalokiteshvara.

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Section: Buddhist Lawmentioning

confidence: 99%

Introduction

Ginsburg

Schonthal

2022

Buddhism and Comparative Constitutional Law

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“…This new form of Buddhist law-which is distinct from the monastic constitutions discussed above-also concerned itself with morally correct governance and even referred to itself using the same word-the "the science of dharma" (dhammasattha, dhammathat, and thammasat in its Pāli, Burmese, and Thai equivalents, respectively). Yet the Buddhist dhammasattha literature parlayed these moral concerns into a more concise, coherent, and directive form, a code that could help kings, magistrates, and other "good people" regulate society in a manner consistent with the teachings of Buddha (Ishii 1986;Huxley 1996;Baker and Phongpaichit 2016;Lammerts 2018). Although Buddhist dhammasattha codes varied within and across the polities located in modern-day Myanmar, Thailand, Cambodia, and Laos, they all claimed to represent the human codification of transcendent legal principles that should be used for governing local populations and administering justice (Lammerts 2018).…”

Section: Religious Constitutions Across Time and Spacementioning

confidence: 99%

The Case for Religious Constitutions: Comparative Constitutional Law among Buddhists and Other Religious Groups

Schonthal¹

2021

Law Soc. Inq.

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This article argues that there is body of governing laws appearing widely throughout the global history of religions that warrants classification as constitutions. Like national constitutions, these religious constitutions present themselves as a form of “higher law” that declare the identity of a given a community, organize its structures of governing power, define its foundational norms, and authorize further acts of rulemaking. In this article, I offer an overview of these texts across several traditions and a defense of their importance in the study of comparative constitutional law. I then draw on fieldwork from Sri Lanka to provide a firsthand account of what a modern religious constitution looks like and how it works to govern one of the country’s largest communities of Buddhist monks. I conclude by urging scholars to view religion and constitutional law not as opposing legal domains but, rather, as homologous forms of social ordering that draw upon similar concepts and logics to address common human dilemmas.

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“…In the earliest states in the territory that corresponds to contemporary Thailand, Buddhism and Brahmanism served important legitimating roles, exalting the head of state as (some combination of) a chakraphattirat (a Buddhist universal monarch), thewaracha (god-king), and thammaracha (righteous ruler), and by associating king-made law with the revealed universal legal principles of the thammasat (Baker and Pasuk 2016). The cosmological treatise Traiphum phraruang ("Three worlds according to King Ruang"), which dates back to the 1340s, served as a central ideological pillar of Thai kingship into the 19 th century, when its worldview was increasingly challenged by the arrival of a rival epistemology, Western in origin and scientific in character (Reynolds & Reynolds 1982, Keyes 1989, Thongchai 2015.…”

Section: Religion and State Formationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Secularisation, secularism, and the Thai state

Larsson¹

2019

Routledge Handbook of Contemporary Thailand

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Forthcoming in Routledge Handbook of Contemporary Thailand, edited by Pavin Chachavalpongpun, (Oxon: Routledge) seeks to justify "the separation of religious and political authority, the expulsion of religious law from the legal system, and sometimes even the exclusion of religion from the public sphere" (Künkler and Shankar 2018, 3).It must be recognized, however, that secularism as state practice rarely results in a clean separation of religion and politics or church and state. On the contrary, some have argued that the modern secular state is characterized less by its separation from than its expanded role in managing "religion" (Asad 2003).According to this line of argument, secularism as political practice should be understood as the modern state's assertion of "sovereign power to reorganize substantive features of religious life, stipulating what religion is or ought to be, assigning its proper content, and disseminating concomitant subjectivities, ethical frameworks, and quotidian practices" (Mahmood 2015, 3). While scholars may disagree on how secularisation and secularism should be understood in relation to the state, they recognize that the politics of secularisation and secularism pivots around struggles that seek to define, to blur, or to deny the very existence of boundaries separating a "religious" domain from that which stands outside it ("the secular").Gorski (2018, 49) helpfully highlights how such boundary struggles typically involve efforts to change either the location of activities from one domain to the other, or the degree of permeability between the religious and secular domains.In light of these conceptual clarifications, Thailand is an ambiguous and contradictory case. It is possible to find evidence of secularisation processes leading to a significant degree of differentiation and separation of religion and state. However, the overarching ideological framework within which a "secular" Thai state has emerged in the course of the 19th and 20th centuries reflects a fundamentally "Buddhist" worldview. Thailand, in short, has adopted a predominant mode of secularism that translates into extensive state control of the religious field.

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The Palace Law of Ayutthaya and the Thammasat: Law and Kingship in Siam. Translated

Cited by 3 publications

References 0 publications

Introduction

Introduction

The Case for Religious Constitutions: Comparative Constitutional Law among Buddhists and Other Religious Groups

Secularisation, secularism, and the Thai state

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