Legal Ideology in Tibet: Politics, Practice, and Religion

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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.