Writing Buddhist Legal Codes (dhammasattha) in Seventeenth-Century Burma

Fernanda Pirie

Professor of the Anthropology of Law, Oxford

Starting in the seventeenth century, Burmese jurists began to rewrite an earlier regional Southeast Asian tradition of Buddhist law codes known in Pali as dhammasattha (“treatise on law”). Their efforts over the course of the following 250 years resulted in a corpus of several hundred Pali and vernacular dhammasattha treatises and related digests and judicial manuals, many of which survive today in thousands of palm-leaf and paper manuscripts from Burma. Despite its virtual invisibility in discussions of Asian comparative law and legal history (and even Buddhist studies), the density of this legal archive connected with the dhammasattha genre is unparalleled within Southeast Asia and, arguably, anywhere else in the Buddhist world during this period.

This presentation will offer an overview of dhammasattha writing in seventeenth-century Burma, addressing the sources, form, jurisdiction, and jurisprudence of the law codes, as well as their relation to other legal and normative texts in Burmese, Pali, and Sanskrit. The discussion will primarily focus on examples from Manusāra-dhammasattha, drawing on ongoing work to prepare a critical edition and English translation of this text. Composed in Pali and Burmese in 1651/2 CE, Manusāra was co-authored by a lay jurist, Kaingza Manurājā (dates unknown), and the monk Tipiṭakālaṅkāra Munindaghosa (1578/9–1652 CE), a prolific commentator on monastic law (vinaya). Although transmitted in manuscripts as a unified treatise, Manusāra comprises two discrete textual segments: i) Manusāra-pāṭha, a monolingual Pali version of the code in verse, in approximately 500 stanzas, and ii) Manusāra-nissaya, a ten-volume vernacular nissaya gloss and commentary. In 1769 CE, Manusāra’s Pali verses were edited and furnished with a revised nissaya gloss by the jurist Vaṇṇadhamma Kyaw Htin, whose interventions will also be discussed.

Christian Lammerts is Associate Professor in the Department of Religion at Rutgers University. His publications include Buddhist Law in Burma: A History of Dhammasattha Texts and Jurisprudence, 1250–1850 (Hawai‘i 2018) and Buddhist Dynamics in Premodern and Early Modern Southeast Asia (Singapore 2015). He is Southeast Asia editor of Brill’s Encyclopedia of Buddhism and co-editor of the journal Buddhism, Law & Society. His research interests include Buddhist law, Burmese and Pali legal texts, and the legal history of Burma and Southeast Asia.