H-SEAsia Review: Kieffer-Pulz on Lammerts, 'Buddhist Law in Burma: A History of Dhammasattha Texts and Jurisprudence, 1250-1850' Discussion published by Allegra Giovine on Monday, April 6, 2020 Review recently published by H-Buddhism: Review published on Thursday, March 12, 2020 Author: D. Christian Lammerts Reviewer: Petra Kieffer-Pulz Kieffer-Pulz on Lammerts, 'Buddhist Law in Burma: A History of Dhammasattha Texts and Jurisprudence, 1250-1850' D. Christian Lammerts. Buddhist Law in Burma: A History of Dhammasattha Texts and Jurisprudence, 1250-1850. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2018. 304 pp. $65.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-8248-7260-1. Reviewed by Petra Kieffer-Pulz (Academy of Sciences and Literature, Mainz)Published on H- Buddhism (March, 2020) Commissioned by Thomas Borchert (University of Vermont) Printable Version: https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showpdf.php?id=55019 Buddhist Law in Burma is a brilliant study of the history and development of legaldhammasattha literature in Burma from the thirteenth to the nineteenth centuries, demonstrating “the centrality of law as a sphere of Buddhist knowledge and literary production in Burma” (p. 1).[1] It represents the first scholarly engagement with this topic and is an indispensable tool for anyone interested in the development and character of Buddhist law in Burma and beyond. At the same time, it can serve as a guide through the wealth of dhammasattha texts in manuscript sources. D. Christian Lammerts has meticulously investigated these texts, to a large extent unedited and untranslated to date, and uses them as the basis of this study. In doing so, he manages to refute several preconceived notions that have shaped the view of the history of law in Burma in the past, such as the preconception that Buddhism “gave rise to no law aside from the vinaya” (p. 1); or that precolonial Burmese legalism was of an unchanging nature; or that the Burmese dhammasattha genre was born out of the Sanskrit dharmaśāstra literature;[2] or that the Dhammavilāsa dates back to twelfth-century Pagan; or that the anonymous Manu kyay or Manu raṅḥ akyay (before 1782) was the most authoritative Burmese legal treatise of the precolonial era, to mention only a few. The book consists of two parts: “Sources” and “Revisions and Reasons.” The first chapter introduces the topic and discusses it against the background of previous research. Chapters 2-4 (part 1) provide Citation: Allegra Giovine. Review: Kieffer-Pulz on Lammerts, 'Buddhist Law in Burma: A History of Dhammasattha Texts and Jurisprudence, 1250-1850'. H-SEAsia. 04-06-2020. https://networks.h-net.org/node/11444/discussions/6095102/review-kieffer-pulz-lammerts-buddhist-law-burma-history Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. 1 H-SEAsia a thorough and substantial study of dhammasattha literature, starting with traces of dhammasattha between 1250 and 1600 (chapter 2) and dealing in detail with the two oldestdhammasattha texts dating from the seventeenth century, the Dhammavilāsa dhammasat (chapter 3) and the Manusāra dhammasattha (chapter 4). The second part gives an overview of newdhammasattha s, produced between 1681 and circa 1850, their reception of the olddhammasattha s, and new developments (chapter 5). Chapter 6, which functions as the conclusion of the book, begins with a summary of the contents of the preceding chapters. Lammerts then proceeds to look into the questions of why the jurists of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries advocated for the continuous production and use of the dhammasatthas, for whom they were compiled and to what end. The book provides a “Transliteration Table of Old Burmese, Burmese, Pali and Sanskrit Written in the Burmese Script,” an appendix with four dhammasattha bibliographies bolstered by rich notes, a bibliography, and a general index. Precolonial Burma knew a number of forms of law, such as the proceedings ofvinaya courts, collections of monastic judgments vinicchaya( , eighteenth to nineteenth centuries), the Pāli commentarial legal tradition, transcripts of disputes involving laypersons and sometimes monks from the epigraphic and manuscript corpus (twelfth to nineteenth centuries), the royal legal tradition since the thirteenth century, and theupade (Pāli upadesa) legislation by kings Mindon and Thibaw (nineteenth century). It is in the light of this legal diversity that Lammerts studies Buddhist law mainly as represented in the dhammasatthas, but also taking into account other witnesses. His two objectives are, first, “to map and describe the significance of the production, circulation, and transformation of dhammasattha treatises in precolonial Burma,” and, second, “to provide an account of the genre’s general jurisprudence—the way different treatises represent their authority and function, particularly in relation to Buddhism and Buddhist literature—and to examine how and why this jurisprudence changed over time up until the mid-nineteenth century, when British colonial rule began to encroach upon Burmese legal discourse and practice” (p. 2). Although no dhammasattha written before the seventeenth century has come down to us, the many mentions of the dhammasattha in epigraphic, literary, and legal contexts between the thirteenth and early seventeenth centuries indicate that dhammasattha “claimed jurisdiction over Buddhists” and that it was considered the final resort for judgments (pp. 43-44). This probably is based on the fact that (at least in part of the legal tradition) law was considered of cosmic, not man-made, origin, “retrieved off the boundary wall of the universe (cakkavāḷa)” by the seer Manu (p. 51). Manu was the judge of Mahāsammata, the first elected king of the world, and presented the law he had transcribed from the wall to the king. Even if this cosmic law is abbreviated, summarized, or distorted, its essence was considered to have remained unchanged throughout its transmission in these early times. As Lammerts puts it: “Witnesses to the circulation ofdhammasattha in Burma before the seventeenth century testify not to the presence of a corpus of variously authored and titled legal texts and commentaries but to the ongoing transmission of a sole authoritative treatise,” namely, “a dhammasat in the vernacular and associated with a figure named Manu” (p. 46). Chapter 3 deals with the Dhammavilāsa, the earliest securely dated example of the dhammasattha genre from Burma and Southeast Asia, written in the vernacular by an unknown author before 1637-38 (date of the exemplar of a manuscript copy of this text). As shown by Lammerts, the ascription of this text to twelfth-century Pagan goes back to the Monywe Sayadaw Ariyāvaṃsa Ādiccaraṃsī (1766-1834). The Dhammavilāsa is not one of the most commonly transmitted texts and Citation: Allegra Giovine. Review: Kieffer-Pulz on Lammerts, 'Buddhist Law in Burma: A History of Dhammasattha Texts and Jurisprudence, 1250-1850'. H-SEAsia. 04-06-2020. https://networks.h-net.org/node/11444/discussions/6095102/review-kieffer-pulz-lammerts-buddhist-law-burma-history Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. 2 H-SEAsia shows more substantial textual variations than other dhammasatthas, so that it sometimes “becomes hard even to speak of Dhammavilāsa as a single or unified text” (p. 57). Its largely independent recensions in Arakanese, Mon, and Shan manuscripts hint at an even greater variety. An overview of the contents shows the multiple topics covered: election of Mahāsammata and appointment of Manu as his judge; judges; witnesses and evidence; the biography of Manu; the thirteen characteristics of the Dhammasat; and a list of the eighteen titles of law, including the law of debt, deposit, sale without ownership, resumption of gifts, slavery, and inheritance. In several manuscripts the subgroupings are each introduced by a Pāli verse or prose text. The Pāli is followed by anissaya gloss, that is a work in which each Pāli word is translated into Burmese, sometimes also with additional literary or explanatory material (occasionally thisnissaya gloss is also missing). The intention (adhippāya) is then explained in an entirely vernacular passage. The jurisprudence visible in the Dhammavilāsa is at the same time “resembling and differing from figurations preserved in transregional Pali literature” (p. 179). Chapter 4 examines the Manusāra dhammasattha written in Pāli and vernacular, and authored in 1651-52 by a monastic, the Taungbhila Sayadaw Tipiṭakālaṅkāra, and a layperson, the judge Kaingza Manurāja. It is the first Burmese law text to differentiate between monastic (corpus vinaya) and lay jurisdictions (corpus dhammasattha). It consists of a Manusārapāṭha written in Pāli verse (about 525 stanzas; this is the pāṭha text), with a nissaya (the pāṭha text seems to not have been circulated independently). The nissaya in part deviates so much from the pāṭha text that Lammerts suggests the pāṭha to be a recension of an independent earlier work. The “Manusāra is the first dhammasattha to include an explicit discussion of laws regulating the inheritance of property belonging to the saṅgha as a community whose rules differ from those of nonmonastics” (p. 112). These secular laws disagree with the monastic law, a fact referred to by the authors, though no solution is offered. Lammerts provides us with a detailed and highly welcome biography of one of the authors, namely, of the monk Tipiṭakālaṅkāra, who also is the author of the Vinayālaṅkāra, a commentary on Sāriputta’s twelfth- century Vinayasaṅgaha, important for the monastic legal history of seventeenth-century Burma. Part 2 (chapter 5) addresses the reception of the olddhammasattha s in the dhammasatthas that originated between 1681 and the middle of the nineteenth century and discusses changes in the genre. The latter resulted mainly from the evaluation of dhammasattha law in light of the piṭakat (Pāli tipiṭaka). In 1681 the court of Ava had enacted a royal order to create a catalog of the piṭakat (Piṭakat samuiṅḥ) implemented by a number of monks. With the exception of Uttamasikkhā the authors of these catalogs excluded the dhammasatthas from the piṭakat.