What is Buddhist monastic law? How should one think about its key texts, institutions and principles? This chapter answers these questions in the context of Sri Lanka and other parts of South and Southeast Asia, focusing especially on ideas of unity and diversity in law. The first part of this chapter summarises key ideas and principles found in the ancient code of monastic law, the Vinaya Piṭaka, which is thought to be the cornerstone of monastic legal texts and practices. The second (longer) part of this chapter introduces readers to a range of monastic legal sources outside the Vinaya Piṭaka, which also play key roles in the practice of monastic law in contemporary Sri Lanka. These sources include commentaries, constitutions, handbooks, judicial manuals, statutes, case law, social expectations and other normative sources produced by monks, state officials and Buddhist laypersons.

Positing the question concerning the meaning of life in terms of "how should one live so that the value of life be accessible to one," my claim is that Kierkegaard’s answer to this question is "by loving." To explain this answer, I focus on the idea of "God as a middle term" that Kierkegaard presents in Works of Love. Further to interpreting this as saying that one’s relationship with God provides a deeper basis for loving, I claim that one’s relationship with God provides a deeper basis also for living. Having God as "the middle" in love, I suggest, is in fact to experience goodness, and by this to affirm one’s existence as valuable. Experiencing this goodness, however, depends on becoming oneself, which, for its part, depends on loving another. Thus, in the context of loving, one in fact sustains three sets of relationships: with God, with the beloved, and with oneself. In the chapter I demonstrate the interdependency of these relationships, and how they constitute a meaningful life.

The conclusion reviews the major developments observed in the early Meccan Qur’an, leading up to the revelation of fifty suras. It looks forward as well to the later Meccan and Medinan stages and affirms that apocalypticism remained fully present as a theme to Muhammad and the believers.

Why do similar conditions of legal pluralism lead to conflict in one setting and compromise in another? This chapter addresses this question by approaching legal pluralism not as an empirical condition – a multiplicity of legal orders that individuals navigate – but as a set of practices that bring order, structure and meaning to the obligations, codes and norms that one confronts. Drawing on three relatively recent case studies, this chapter demonstrates how the same set of normative artefacts – the same texts, norms, institutions, and authorities – can be assembled, interpreted, and mobilised in profoundly divergent and even agonistic ways. The first case study involves a monk’s attempt to gain a driving license. The second involves the issuing of identity cards for Buddhist nuns (bhikkhunīs). The third relates to a parliamentary bill designed to recognise monastic constitutions (katikāvatas) in law.

The project’s focus is on the calendar of republican Rome and the Julian reform, and its chief concern is its cultic and juristic significance. Cult rested most directly on rites, but it also involved law, which identified who might legitimately perform certain acts and where and when they might do so, and ideas about how the world worked, which might be implicit and poorly defined. The calendar’s days, months, and year were the crucial units, and all were tied in complicated ways both to the heavens and the activities of Rome’s priests and magistrates. In the ancient world, polities often sought to establish a homology with the heavens, ruled by the gods, and here calendars were crucial instruments. Studies of the Roman calendar often obscure these relationships, and studies of cult often devalue the importance of law.

Extra Help with Basic Sentences: present tense, nominative and accusative. Extra Material focusses on the different contexts in which Greek uses the present tense.

In this chapter, our attention will shift from narratives to the law materials present in the Pentateuch. These portions include the Book of the Covenant, tabernacle instructions, purification laws, holiness legislation, and a collection of priestly laws. The laws of Torah, better understood as instruction, represent the central feature of living in covenant relationship with Yahweh. Most notable are the Ten Commandments, whose value has remained virtually unsurpassed in the human history of ethics. These “Ten Words” (Hebrew), combined with Israel’s narrative story and covenant with Yahweh, set the trajectory for the rest of the Bible.

The form in which the independent lists of laws were originally preserved in ancient Israel closely parallels that of other known law codes in the ancient Near East. Israel’s Torah instruction also exhibits certain affinities with later Greek developments, particularly in its expansion and placement within the narrative framework. Importantly, the emphasis on the writing of the covenant law marks a turn from preliterate ancestral religion to a literate Mosaic faith, and helps ensure the preservation of a sacred text for all time.

This chapter surveys the structure of the republican calendar and the ways that it was tied to actions. It also seeks to establish its relationship with various celestial phenomena, which has often been contested; this link will prove to be highly abstract, which was sometimes the case with other ancient calendars. The lack of an obvious tie between the calendar and the heavens has also obscured the degree to which Roman practice sought to link public and cultic activities to a range of abstract models of the celestial order, each of which was attached to a different priestly college.

How does the encounter between monastic law and colonial law look from the perspective of Buddhist monastics? The chapter offers an alternative legal history of the nineteenth century, drawing on a largely unstudied archive of Sinhala- and Pali-language legal sources written by Buddhist monks. Using these sources, I highlight the creativity and productivity of Buddhist monastic lawmaking during the nineteenth century. A close analysis of monastic legal texts from this period also reveals key differences in the ways that monastic jurists understood and enacted legal pluralism when compared with colonial officials. Rather than treating the laws of the Buddha and the laws of the Crown as conflicting, as the British tended to do, monastic jurists purposefully aligned them. Rather than hardening legal boundaries between monastic and colonial regulation, monastic jurists pushed in the direction of integration, borrowing and exchange between local and imported laws.