Legal Ideology in Tibet: Politics, Practice, and Religion

The relationship between law and religion is one of the great themes of historical legal scholarship, yet the legal realm of Tibet's theocracy has barely been considered from a socio-historic perspective. Nor has it been brought into comparison with scholarship on Islamic, Indic, Christian, and Chinese legal traditions. This project is tracing the different strands that emerged in Tibetan legal thought during one of its formative periods. These are being considered in their social contexts and analysed comparatively, in relation to broader themes in historical legal scholarship.
Tibet's theocratic state was founded in the seventeenth century on the basis of harmony between religion and politics. Buddhism, introduced a millennium earlier, provided ideas and concepts with which Tibetan writers developed political and legal ideologies. An ideal of religious law emerged in historical narratives and in lawcodes created for the later government of the Dalai Lamas; legal ideas in theory legitimated both political power and the administration of 'crime' and punishment. Legal thought remained unsystematic, however, largely distant from practice, complicated by a multiplicity of ideas and texts introduced from India, and tensions between the demands of penal practice and Buddhist ethics. While detailed scholarship has been undertaken on individual texts, particularly from later periods, no successful attempt has yet been made to map out broader strands in Tibetan legal thinking.
The members of this project are examining texts, ideas, and ideologies dating from a formative period in the development of Tibetan legal thought, the eleventh to the seventeenth centuries. They are tracing the different sources and strands of legal thinking, exploring tensions between them and attempts to reconcile religious, ethical, and jurisprudential ideals. The approach is socio-historical, involving close examination of textual sources, but considering legal, ethical, and religious ideas in their social and political contexts. They are investigating the constraints on, and goals of, Tibetan writers during a long period of Mongol domination, and the influence of these legal ideas on subsequent governmental and administrative texts, culminating in the establishment of Tibet's theocratic government under the Dalai Lamas.
Socio-historical and anthropological insights are being brought to bear on a field dominated by textual scholarship, with the goal of developing new perspectives on Tibetan legal thought. The members of the project are working closely with Tibetan scholars, with leading experts on Tibetan legal texts, and with members of an emerging network of social historians to ensure that their conclusions and publications have maximum resonance with, and impact upon, related strands of Tibetan and legal scholarship. They are also undertaking cross-cultural comparison with other legal traditions, in order to explore what is distinctive about Tibet's legal realm and ideologies, and to contribute to wider scholarship on legalism and legal thought.
As well as publications on Tibet's legal tradition, this project will culminate in the establishment of a web-based resource, which will incorporate copies, summaries, translations, and indexes of the relevant documents, currently scattered throughout different archives and collections. With summaries in both English and Tibetan, this will represent a collection of valuable material for other scholars and Tibetans, themselves, concerned to understand their history and legal traditions.

Source texts on Tibetan laws will be made accessible to a large audience, primarily through the project web-site. An important audience is Tibetans, themselves, in the UK, in China, and in exile. For those seeking to understand Tibet's traditions and history on their own terms, an accessible collection of primary sources will make it easier to avoid the mistakes associated with well-meaning efforts to record traditional laws of 'indigenous' people elsewhere. These have often resulted in the 'invention' of tradition in ways that distort indigenous forms of thought and social organisation. The project material will presented in ways that help avoid the interpretation of historic Tibetan ideas, texts, and legal practices as if they were cognate with western (positivistic) law.
The most direct beneficiaries will be those who form, or have links with, organisations established by the Tibetan community in exile dedicated to the preservation of their culture and heritage. These include the Amnye Machen Institute, the Library of Tibetan Works and Archives, and the Central Tibetan Administration, all of which are located in Dharamsala, India. The Applicant and Researcher already have links with these institutions and will spend time in Dharamsala during the course of the project. During this period they will be sourcing documents and discussing issues of translation and interpretation with Tibetans, and they will simultaneously be able to establish in what ways their research can be of maximum benefit to the whole exile community and the different individuals and groups within it.
Tibetans in China are often not easily able to travel or to access the resources of the organisations established by the exile community. Nevertheless, they include historians and others interested in their own history and legal issues, who may seek access to documents and information via the E. Gene Smith Library at the Southwestern University for Nationalities in Chengdu, and the web-sites of the SHTS network (www.tibetanhistory.net/), the Tibetan and Himalayan Library (THL) (www.thlib.org/), and the International Association for Tibetan Studies (www.iats.info). The project web-site will establish links with all these institutions.
A secondary object of the project is to disseminate its findings about the ways in which Tibetans thought historically, in order to contribute to contemporary debates about Buddhist ethics, violence, and law. A large, and growing, number of western Buddhist organisations is concerned with the practical implications of Buddhism and its ethical demands in the contemporary world. The Network of Buddhist Organisations UK (www.nbo.org.uk) connects over 1,000 UK Buddhist groups, including many concerned with 'socially engaged Buddhism', while others, such as the Buddhist Prison Chaplaincy Organisation (www.angulimala.org.uk) have specifically pastoral aims, also extending to higher education, the armed forces, health services, and so on. The project's material will provide insight into the ethical issues surrounding punishment, statecraft, warfare, and political authority, as they were experienced and addressed by Buddhists in historic Tibet, providing valuable context for contemporary debates.
The project will also provide material for wider reflection on what Buddhist attitudes to law and legal ethics might offer in today's multi-cultural societies. Current debates amongst policy-makers and within international organisations over the relationships between state and international laws, justice, and ethical considerations are vivid, and brought into focus by current developments in the Islamic world and the needs and demands of religious minorities. The perspectives that can be offered by different world religions are important to these debates and a thorough understanding of historical configurations is needed to take full advantage of the possibilities they offer.