Examining Sri Lanka's religious and legal pasts, this is the first extended study of Buddhism and constitutional law.

The Golden Yoke is a remarkable achievement. It is the first elaboration of the legal, cultural, and ideological dimensions of precommunist Tibetan jurisprudence, a unique legal system that maintains its secularism within a thoroughly Buddhist setting. Layer by layer, Rebecca Redwood French reconstructs the daily operation of law in Tibet before the Chinese invasion in 1959. In the Tibetans' own words, French identifies their courts, symbols, and personnel and traces the procedures for petitioning and filing documents. There are stories here from judges, legal conciliators, and lay people about murder, property disputes, and divorce. French shows that Tibetan law is deeply embedded in its Buddhist culture and that the system evolved not from the rules and judgments but from what people actually do and say. In what amounts to a fully developed cosmology, she describes the cultural foundation that informs the system: myths, notions of time and conflux, inner morality, language patterns, rituals, use of space, symbols, and concepts. Based on extensive readings of Tibetan legal documents and codes, interviews with Tibetan scholars, and the reminiscences of Tibetans at home and in exile, this generously illustrated, elegantly written work is a model of outstanding research. French combines the talents of a legal anthropologist with those of a former law practitioner to develop a new field of study that has implications for other judicial systems, including our own.

Buddhism in Court is the first English language study of the legal interaction between Buddhism and the state in China. It uncovers a long-overlooked Buddhist campaign for clerical legal privileges that aimed to make ordained Buddhist monks and nuns immune from facing trials and punishment in the state court.

This volume challenges the concept of Buddhism as an apolitical religion without implications for law.

In the aftermath of the terrorist attacks of September 11, this thought-provoking essay explores the Buddha's teaching to find one prescription: not war, not pacifism but nonviolence.

The study of historical Buddhism in premodern and early modern Southeast Asia stands at an exciting and transformative juncture. Interdisciplinary scholarship is marked by a commitment to the careful examination of local and vernacular expressions of Buddhist culture as well as to reconsiderations of long-standing questions concerning the diffusion of and relationships among varied texts, forms of representation, and religious identities, ideas, and practices. The twelve essays in this collection, written by leading scholars in Buddhist Studies and Southeast Asian history, epigraphy, and archaeology, comprise the latest research in the field to deal with the dynamics of mainland and (pen)insular Buddhism between the sixth and nineteenth centuries C.E. Drawing on new manuscript sources, inscriptions, and archaeological data, they investigate the intellectual, ritual, institutional, sociopolitical, aesthetic, and literary diversity of local Buddhisms, and explore their connected histories and contributions to the production of intraregional and transregional Buddhist geographies.

As the first comprehensive study of Buddhism and law in Asia, this interdisciplinary volume challenges the concept of Buddhism as an apolitical religion without implications for law. Buddhism and Law draws on the expertise of the foremost scholars in Buddhist studies and in law to trace the legal aspects of the religion from the time of the Buddha to the present. In some cases, Buddhism provided the crucial architecture for legal ideologies and secular law codes, while in other cases it had to contend with a pre-existing legal system, to which it added a new layer of complexity. The wide-ranging studies in this book reveal a diversity of relationships between Buddhist monastic codes and secular legal systems in terms of substantive rules, factoring, and ritual practices. This volume will be an essential resource for all students and teachers in Buddhist studies, law and religion, and comparative law.