Andrew Huxley: Legal Historian of Burma and Southeast Asia

Transcription

1 The Journal of Burma Studies Vol. 19 No. 2 (2015), pp Center for Burma Studies Northern Illinois University In Memoriam Andrew Huxley: Legal Historian of Burma and Southeast Asia Christian Lammerts As a graduate student in 2003 my advisor handed me a copy of Andrew Huxley s article Buddhism and Law The View From Mandalay. 1 In this and (as I would soon learn) many other publications, and contrary to what almost every textbook on Buddhism or comparative law would have you believe namely, that Buddhists have no culture of written religious law like those found in Brāhmaṇical or Islamic traditions save for the monastic vinaya Andrew argued forcefully, and persuasively, for seeing dhammasattha ( dhammathat in his transcription) as a genre of written religious law that had jurisdiction over non-monastic members of Buddhist society, as a sort of lay counterpart to the vinaya. He writes in the first paragraph of this essay:... the vinaya is nearly as central to the Buddhist religion as the shari a is to Islam. If we were to rank religions in order of legalism, Theravada would come at the legalistic end of the scale, near to Islam and far from, for example, Taoism. But on direct comparison, Islam appears more legalistic, more concerned with regulating the day to day activities of its adherents, than the Ther- 1 Andrew Huxley, Buddhism and Law The View From Mandalay, Journal of the International Association of Buddhist Studies 18, no. 11 (1995):

2 268 CHRISTIAN LAMMERTS avada: it is possible to be a Buddhist without adhering to the vinaya but it is impossible to be a Muslim without following the shari a. Burma presents a challenge to these generalizations about legalism and Buddhism. In Burma this gap between Islam and Buddhism has narrowed perhaps even to the point of disappearance. In pre-colonial Burma the monks adhered to the vinaya while the laity adhered to its own distinctive legal literature, known as dhammathat and rajathat and to the British as Burmese Buddhist law. My main aim in this article is to persuade you that this law for the laity is, in a deep sense, Buddhist. 2 Andrew built on the pioneering work of Robert Lingat, perhaps his closest intellectual ally (insofar as Southeast Asian legal studies is concerned), who made similar points in a rather hushed voice, but never quite gave up the conceit that Burmese (and also Mon, T(h)ai, and Khmer) legal texts were Hindu in origin and essence. In a series of publications beginning in 1990, including the opening article published in the first issue of the Journal of Burma Studies (1997), Andrew creatively marshaled extensive evidence from a large number of dhammasattha and related sources to demonstrate the profound influence of Pali Buddhist literature and thought on Burmese and Southeast Asian legal culture. 3 In 2 Andrew Huxley, Buddhism and Law, Andrew Huxley, How Buddhist is Theravāda Buddhist Law? A Survey of Legal Literature in Pali-Land, in The Buddhist Forum, Vol. 1, ed. T. Skorupski (London: School of Oriental and African Studies, 1990), 41 85; Andrew Huxley, The Reception of Buddhist Law in Southeast Asia 200 BCE 1860 CE, in La Réception des Systèmes Juridiques: Implantation and Destin, ed. M. Doucet and J. Vanderlinden (Bruxelles: Bruylant, 1994), ; Andrew Huxley, When Manu met Mahāsammata, Journal of Indian Philosophy 24, no. 6 (1996): ; Andrew Huxley, The Importance of the Dhammathats in Burmese Law and Culture, Journal of Burma Studies 1 (1997): 1 17; Andrew Huxley, Buddhist Law as a Religious System?, in Religion, Law, and Tradition: Comparative Studies in Religious Law, ed. Andrew Huxley (London: Routledge, 2002), ; Andrew Huxley, Legal Transplants as Historical Data: Exemplum Birmanicum, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 37, no. 2 (2009): ; Andrew Huxley,

3 Andrew Huxley: Legal Historian of Burma and Southeast Asia 269 addition to local customary practices ( the oral law of the rice-plain ), he regarded as the primary source for Southeast Asian law what he called the Pāli cultural package, a felicitous analytical framework that has since gained broader currency in Buddhist and Southeast Asian studies. Given his commitment to the idea that mainland Southeast Asian legal traditions drew on a shared reservoir of Pali resources, it is no surprise that he approached legal history as a discipline that necessarily crossed borders. He wrote about testamentary succession and sanction, as well as the development and cross-fertilization of texts, in comparative perspective. 4 His prodigious scholarship also addressed issues of jurisprudence, 5 the development of Burmese legal institutions, 6 Buddhist kingship and political philosophy, 7 Pāli Buddhist Law in Southeast Asia, in Buddhism and Law: An Introduction, ed. Rebecca R. French and Mark R. Nathan (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014), ; Andrew Huxley, Is Burmese Law Buddhist? in Law, Society and Transition in Myanmar, ed. Melissa Crouch and Tim Lindsey (Oxford: Hart Publishing, 2014), Andrew Huxley, Sanction in the Theravada Buddhist Kingdoms of S.E. Asia, Recueils de la société Jean Bodin 58, no. 4 (1991): ; Andrew Huxley, Wills in Theravada Buddhist S.E. Asia, Recueils de la société Jean Bodin 62, no. 4 (1994): 53 92; Andrew Huxley, Thai, Mon, and Burmese Dhammathats Who Influenced Whom? in Thai Law: Buddhist Law, ed. A. Huxley (Bangkok: Orchid Press, 1996), Andrew Huxley, The Traditions of Mahosadha: Legal Reasoning from Northern Thailand, Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 60, no. 2 (1997): Andrew Huxley, The Burmese Legal Profession , Recueils de la société Jean Bodin 63, no. 2 (1996): Andrew Huxley, The Buddha and the Social Contract, Journal of Indian Philosophy 24, no. 4 (1996): ; Andrew Huxley and Steven Collins, The Post-Canonical Adventures of Mahāsammata, Journal of Indian Philosophy 24, no. 6 (1996): ; Andrew Huxley and Ryuji Okudaira, A Burmese Tract on Kingship: Political Theory in the 1782 Manuscript of Manugye, Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 64, no. 2 (2001): ; Andrew Huxley, Rajadhamma Confronts Leviathan, in Buddhism, Power, and Political Order, ed. Ian Harris (Abingdon: Routledge, 2007),

4 270 CHRISTIAN LAMMERTS law and gender, 8 monastic law, 9 and colonial legal conflict. 10 One of his strong interests was the study of the study of Burmese law, and he wrote several essays on influential colonial-era and post-colonial legal scholars. 11 Andrew s contributions to the field of Burmese and Southeast Asian legal history cannot be overstated. He drew attention to and revitalized the study of textual archives and rich domains of jurisprudence and legal culture that had been nearly, if not in most corners entirely, forgotten. Importantly, his scholarship cleared a space for the study of Burmese law and legal literature within the field of Buddhist Studies, where his influence has been widely felt. When I wrote to him in 2003 after reading Buddhism and Law, his immediate reply was: Welcome to the recherché world of dhammathat studies! His work over the past twenty-five years has demonstrated the importance of that world for diverse areas of historical, religious, and jurisprudential inquiry, and thanks to him it shall remain far less obscure. Andrew passed away on November 29, 2014 at the age of sixty-six. He was Emeritus Professor of Southeast Asian Law at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. 8 Andrew Huxley, Gender and Power in Two Eighteenth-Century Dhammasats, Tenggara 47 (2004): Andrew Huxley, The Vinaya: Legal System or Performance-Enhancing Drug, in The Buddhist Forum, Vol. 4, ed. T. Skorupski (London: School of Oriental and African Studies, 1996), ; Andrew Huxley, Buddhist Case Law on Theft: The Vinītavatthu on the Second Pārājika, Journal of Buddhist Ethics 6 (1999): Andrew Huxley, Positivists and Buddhists: The Rise and Fall of Anglo-Burmese Ecclesiastical Law, Law and Social Inquiry 26, no. 1 (2001): Andrew Huxley, The Last Fifty Years of Burmese Law: E Maung and Maung Maung, Lawasia (1988): 9 20; Andrew Huxley, Is Burmese Law Burmese? John Jardine, Em Forchhammer and Legal Orientalism, Australian Journal of Asian Law 10, no. 2 (2008): ; Andrew Huxley, Hpo Hlaing on Buddhist Law, Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 73, no. 2 (2010): ; Andrew Huxley, Mon Studies and Professor Forchhammer: The Admiration that Destroys, Zeitschrift der Deutschen Morgenländischen Gesellschaft 162, no. 2 (2012):

5 Andrew Huxley: Legal Historian of Burma and Southeast Asia 271 Andrew Huxley: A Selected Bibliography Huxley, Andrew. The Last Fifty Years of Burmese Law: E Maung and Maung Maung. Lawasia (1988): Khaek, Moro, Rohinga The Family Law of Three South East Asian Muslim Minorities. In Islamic Family Law, edited by Chibli Mallat and Jane Connors, London: Graham and Trotman, How Buddhist is Theravāda Buddhist Law? A Survey of Legal Literature in Pali-Land. In The Buddhist Forum, Vol. 1, edited by T. Skorupski, London: School of Oriental and African Studies, Sanction in the Theravada Buddhist Kingdoms of S.E. Asia. Recueils de la société Jean Bodin 58, no. 4 (1991): Wills in Theravada Buddhist S.E. Asia. Recueils de la société Jean Bodin 62, no. 4 (1994): The Reception of Buddhist Law in Southeast Asia 200 BCE 1860 CE. In La Réception des Systèmes Juridiques: Implantation et Destin, edited by M. Doucet and J. Vanderlinden, Bruxelles: Bruylant, The Kurudhamma: From Ethics to Statecraft. Journal of Buddhist Ethics 2 (1995): Buddhism and Law The View From Mandalay. Journal of the International Association of Buddhist Studies 18, no. 1 (1995): When Manu met Mahāsammata. Journal of Indian Philosophy 24, no. 6 (1996): Thai, Mon, and Burmese Dhammathats Who Influenced Whom? In Thai Law: Buddhist Law, edited by A. Huxley, Bangkok: Orchid Press, The Buddha and the Social Contract. Journal of Indian Philosophy 24, no. 4 (1996): Shylock s Bad Karma: The Buddhist Approach to Law. Law and Critique 7, no. 2 (1996): The Vinaya: Legal System or Performance-Enhancing Drug. In The Buddhist Forum, Vol. 4, edited by T. Skorupski, London: School of Oriental and African Studies, The Village Knows Best: Social Organisation in an 18 th century Burmese Law Text. South East Asia Research 5, no. 1 (1997): Studying Theravada Legal Literature. Journal of the International Association for Buddhist Studies 20, no. 1 (1997):

6 272 CHRISTIAN LAMMERTS. The Traditions of Mahosadha: Legal Reasoning from Northern Thailand. Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 60, no. 2 (1997): The Importance of the Dhammathats in Burmese Law and Culture. Journal of Burma Studies 1 (1997): Buddhist Case Law on Theft: The Vinītavatthu on the Second Pārājika. Journal of Buddhist Ethics 6 (1999): Positivists and Buddhists: The Rise and Fall of Anglo-Burmese Ecclesiastical Law. Law and Social Inquiry 26, no. 1 (2001): A Thammasat from Haripunjaya? Tai Culture 5, nos. 1 and 2 (2001): Buddhist Law as a Religious System? In Religion, Law, and Tradition: Comparative Studies in Religious Law, edited by Andrew Huxley, London: Routledge, An Antinomian Allegory. Buddhist Studies Review 19, no. 2 (2002): Gender and Power in Two Eighteenth-Century Dhammasats. Tenggara 47 (2004): Rajadhamma Confronts Leviathan. In Buddhism, Power, and Political Order, edited by Ian Harris, Abingdon: Routledge, Samuhadda Vicchedani: An Overlooked Source on the Dhammathats. SOAS Bulletin of Burma Research 5 (2007): Is Burmese Law Burmese? John Jardine, Em Forchhammer and Legal Orientalism. Australian Journal of Asian Law 10, no. 2 (2008): Legal Transplants as Historical Data: Exemplum Birmanicum. Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 37, no. 2 (2009): Three Nineteenth-Century Law Book Lists: Burmese Legal History from the Inside. Journal of Burma Studies 13 (2009): Hpo Hlaing on Buddhist Law. Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 73, no. 2 (2010): Dr. Führer s Wanderjahre: The Early Career of a Victorian Archaeologist. Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society (Third Series) 20, no. 4 (2010): Mr. Houghton and Dr. Führer: A Scholarly Vendetta and its Consequences. South East Asia Research 19, no. 1 (2011):

7 Andrew Huxley: Legal Historian of Burma and Southeast Asia 273. Lord Kyaw Thu s Precedent: A Sixteenth-Century Burmese Law Report. In Legalism: Anthropology and History, edited by Paul Dresch and Hannah Skoda, Oxford: Oxford University Press, The Anglo-Buddhist War ( ): The Circumstances under which Christians Developed their Theory of Buddhism. Journal of Comparative Law 7, no. 2 (2012): Mon Studies and Professor Forchhammer: The Admiration that Destroys. Zeitschrift der Deutschen Morgenländischen Gesellschaft 162, no. 2 (2012): Pāli Buddhist Law in Southeast Asia. In Buddhism and Law: An Introduction, edited by Rebecca R. French and Mark R. Nathan, New York: Cambridge University Press, Is Burmese Law Buddhist? In Law, Society and Transition in Myanmar, edited by Melissa Crouch and Tim Lindsey, Oxford: Hart Publishing, Huxley, Andrew and Steven Collins. The Post-Canonical Adventures of Mahāsammata. Journal of Indian Philosophy 24, no. 6 (1996): Huxley, Andrew and Ryuji Okudaira. A Burmese Tract on Kingship: Political Theory in the 1782 Manuscript of Manugye. Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 64, no. 2 (2001):