Andrew Huxley: Legal Historian of Burma and Southeast Asia

As a graduate student in 2003 my advisor handed me a copy of Andrew Huxley’s article “Buddhism and Law—The View From Mandalay.”¹ In this and (as I would soon learn) many other publications, and contrary to what almost every textbook on Buddhism or comparative law would have you believe—namely, that Buddhists have no culture of writt en religious law like those found in Brāhmaṇical or Islamic traditions save for the monastic vinaya—Andrew argued forcefully, and persuasively, for seeing dhammasatt ha (“dhammathat” in his transcription) as a genre of writt en religious law that had jurisdiction over non-monastic members of Buddhist society, as a sort of lay counterpart to the vinaya. He writes in the first paragraph of this essay:

. . . the vinaya is nearly as central to the Buddhist religion as the shari’a is to Islam. If we were to rank religions in order of legalism, Theravada would come at the legalistic end of the scale, near to Islam and far from, for example, Taoism. But on direct comparison, Islam appears more legalistic, more concerned with regulating the day to day activities of its adherents, than the Theravada: it is possible to be a Buddhist without adhering to the vinaya but it is impossible to be a Muslim without following the shari’a. Burma presents a challenge to these generalizations about legalism and Buddhism. In Burma this gap between Islam and Buddhism has narrowed—perhaps even to the point of disappearance. In pre-colonial Burma the monks adhered to the vinaya while the laity adhered to its own distinctive legal literature, known as “dhammathat and rajathat” and to the British as “Burmese Buddhist law.” My main aim in this article is to persuade you that this law for the laity is, in a deep sense, Buddhist.²

Andrew built on the pioneering work of Robert Lingat, perhaps his closest intellectual ally (insofar as Southeast Asian legal studies is concerned), who made similar points in a rather hushed voice, but never quite gave up the conceit that Burmese (and also Mon, T(h)ai, and Khmer) legal texts were “Hindu” in origin and essence. In a series of publications beginning in 1990, including the opening article published in the first issue of the Journal of Burma Studies (1997), Andrew creatively marshaled extensive evidence from a large number of dhammasattha and related sources to demonstrate the profound influence of Pali Buddhist literature and thought on Burmese and Southeast Asian legal culture.³ In addition to local customary practices (“the oral law of the rice-plain”), he regarded as the primary source for Southeast Asian law what he called the “Pāli cultural package,” a felicitous analytical framework that has since gained broader currency in Buddhist and Southeast Asian studies.

Given his commitment to the idea that mainland Southeast Asian legal traditions drew on a shared reservoir of Pali resources, it is no surprise that he approached legal history as a discipline that necessarily crossed borders. He wrote about testamentary succession and sanction, as well as the development and cross-fertilization of texts, in comparative perspective.⁴ His prodigious scholarship also addressed issues of jurisprudence,⁵ the development of Burmese legal institutions,⁶ Buddhist kingship and political philosophy,⁷ law and gender,⁸ monastic law,⁹ and colonial legal conflict.¹⁰ One of his strong interests was the study of the study of Burmese law, and he wrote several essays on influential colonial-era and post-colonial legal scholars.¹¹

Andrew’s contributions to the field of Burmese and Southeast Asian legal history cannot be overstated. He drew attention to and revitalized the study of textual archives and rich domains of jurisprudence and legal culture that had been nearly, if not in most corners entirely, forgotten. Importantly, his scholarship cleared a space for the study of Burmese law and legal literature within the field of Buddhist Studies, where his influence has been widely felt. When I wrote to him in 2003 after reading “Buddhism and Law,” his immediate reply was: “Welcome to the recherché world...