in Sri Lanka, Burma (Myanmar), and Tibet. In Sri
Lanka, for example, the arrival in the third century
B.C.E. of Indian monks brought the oral tradition of
the Pali canon to the island. Combining the ideologies
of race, religion, and region, Buddhist states governed
much of the island until 1818, when the Kandyan
monarchy was finally overthrown by the British.
Although Buddhism may have entered Southeast
Asia as early as the time of As ́oka, King Anawrata was
the first to unify Burma into a Buddhist state in the
eleventh century. The king and monks of the capital
city of Pagan combined the Pali Vinayawith Hindu
law and Buddhist treatises to create the dhammasat
and rajasatsecular law codes, which spread in the en-
suing centuries across what is now Burma, Thailand,
Cambodia, and Laos. In Tibet, the first king to be in-
fluenced by Buddhism was Srong bstan sgam po, who,
in the seventh century C.E., sent his minister to Gan-
dhara to develop a written script and bring back Bud-
dhist texts. Buddhism became the state religion in
Tibet in the eight century and strongly influenced the
local legal rules already in place from the period of the
earliest kings. For example, the Ganden Phodrang law
code of the Dalai Lamas, written in the seventeenth
century, is a secular law code of customary practices
filled with Buddhist reasoning, such as factoral analy-
sis, consensus, uniqueness of cases, motivation, and
veracity tests.
Buddhism has been a significant factor, although
not usually the sole or even the central influence, in
the legal structure of many Asian countries. Buddhism
entered these regions at different historical points and
through various sources. For example, Japan first re-
ceived Buddhist monks, texts, and images from Korea,
and although Prince SHOTOKUpromoted Buddhism as
the state religion at the end of the sixth century, the
Confucian and Daoist traditions of East Asia always
accompanied and, some would argue, superseded,
Buddhism’s effect on the legal system of Japan. At the
end of the Tokugawa period (1603–1868), Buddhism
in Japan was also overshadowed by the indigenous
Shintoreligion and worship of the emperor. In Mon-
golia, Buddhism was adopted in the thirteenth century
into a country that already had a strong legal admin-
istrative system based on the Zasag law code of Genghis
Khan. Vietnam had state patronage of several differ-
ent forms of MAHAYANAand THERAVADABuddhism
competing with Hinduism from the tenth century, but
after the fifteenth century, the state ideology of Con-
fucianism led to a decline in Buddhism’s influence on
the legal system. The transplantation, waxing, and
waning of Buddhist influence on law is a large area for
further study.
Basic Buddhist principles, reasoning processes, and
rules may influence law because they are employed by
the population that use the legal system. Thus, a coun-
try may impose a strong socialist law code, such as the
Russian-imported Mongolian codes in force between
1924 and 1992, upon a population whose culture rea-
sons through Buddhist principles. This is true of the
Tibetan population today, which, although it has been
incorporated into the Chinese state, continues to em-
ploy Buddhist reasoning and principles in most of its
decision making.
As Buddhism spread from India to China and
Japan, Pagan, and Sumatra, it had extensive influence
on secular legal systems. Modern scholars have begun
to look more seriously at this influence, as well as the
operation of legal procedures within Buddhist monas-
teries and nunneries. Scholars have also begun to study
the overlay of exogenous legal systems and the trans-
plantation of law codes from other countries onto
Buddhist legal systems. Local-level influence of Bud-
dhism is another interesting area of research. For ex-
ample, in a 1970s study of litigation in Chiangmai,
Thailand, interviews with litigants showed that the
number of injury claims had steadily decreased over a
ten-year period due to a stronger emphasis in the lo-
cal community on reasoning through karmic causes
and their consequences. Combining both BUDDHIST
STUDIES and comparative law, Buddhist law is an
emerging new disciplinary area.Bibliography
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Hinüber, Oskar von. “Buddhist Law According to the Thera-
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Holt, John C. Discipline: The Canonical Buddhism of the
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LAW ANDBUDDHISM