Despite his gentle demeanour and frail frame, Venerable Dhammaratana was a formidable presence. For half a century, he had served as a judge in Sri Lanka, adjudicating disputes and writing decisions. Now in his seventies, his pace was slowing, yet he continued to hear cases, each one represented by a thick brown folder overflowing with files. A stack of these folders peeked out from a locked glass cabinet in the corner of his concrete-floored office. From his desk, Dhammaratana could see the whitewashed entrance of the small Buddhist temple where he resided. It was one of many temples he had lived at since becoming a monk in his youth, when he first shaved his head, donned saffron robes and began going by his monastic name, meaning ‘Jewel of the Teaching’.Footnote ¹

Dhammaratana’s legal work, like his life, was deeply rooted in Buddhist traditions. As a monastic judge, Dhammaratana rarely set foot in Sri Lanka’s state courtrooms, where the architecture of bar and bench alerted visitors to the English-style common law that prevailed there. Instead, when he took the ‘seat of judgment’, he did so in temporary ‘adjudication halls’, rooms of temples, monasteries or monastic schools that were periodically set aside for the solemn task of judging. Although many of his cases were minor – petty disagreements among monastic peers – some were more serious, ranging from conflicts over temple property to accusations of serious misconduct, like theft or inappropriate contact with women.

In judging these cases, Dhammaratana used sources and principles whose origins stretched across millennia: he consulted the ancient disciplinary instructions promulgated by the Buddha, known as vinaya; he reviewed the modern constitution of his monastic fraternity, known as a katikāvata; he read commentaries and handbooks on jurisprudence written by eminent monks; and he studied the legal opinions penned by other monastic judges. All of these he considered to be important parts of bhikṣu nītiya – a Sinhala phrase that I translate in this book as ‘monastic law’.

Yet Dhammaratana dealt with more than just monastic law. His work also intertwined with the work of civil courts and government departments. In Sri Lanka, these institutions also make decisions about monastic law and ‘Buddhist affairs’. From time to time, even Sri Lanka’s Supreme Court gives opinions on vinaya – when monastic disputes appear to touch on constitutional rights or the government’s legal obligations ‘to protect and foster Buddhism’.Footnote ²

The diversity and overlapping nature of these laws – some emanating from the monastery and others from the state – made Dhammaratana’s job tricky. Although monks rarely questioned his expertise in vinaya or katikāvata, frustrated litigants occasionally challenged his verdicts in civil courts using civil law. In those courts, Dhammaratana’s written opinions counted as evidence but not as binding judgments.

Dhammaratana knew that state courts regularly ignored the verdicts of monastic judges like himself, so he wrote his opinions carefully with an eye towards two audiences. For monastic litigants, he cited the words of the Buddha, passages from his fraternity’s constitution and the opinions of famous monks. For civil judges, he documented evidence, provided witness names and stressed the regular, systematic nature of his inquiry.

Much depended on Dhammaratana’s skill in composing judgments. When written well, Dhammaratana’s opinions could construe monastic and civil law as an integrated whole, each law supporting the other. He could assure monastic litigants that they were treated fairly and that appeals to the civil courts were unlikely to succeed. If not written with care, Dhammaratana’s words might alienate readers of one type or another. Civil court judges might deem Dhammaratana’s rationales to be irregular or inconsistent. Monastic litigants might see his words as too bureaucratic, too distant from vinaya.

Worse outcomes were also possible, given that the universal laws of karma also applied to Dhammaratana’s work. According to karma, and its cosmic rules of cause and effect, Dhammaratana’s judicial decisions impacted not only litigants’ lives but also his own life and prospects for reincarnation. An unfair verdict delivered in this life could send a careless jurist to hell in the next rebirth.

I learnt about Dhammaratana’s work during an interview that I conducted with him in 2019. It took place at his temple, a small compound of modest buildings hidden down a palm-fringed lane that meandered off the coastal highway between Colombo and the southern port city of Galle. We met on a shady veranda near his office. It was late in the morning and already quite hot.

Dhammaratana spoke for more than an hour about the multiple laws and interests that he navigated as a judge. Towards the end of the conversation, my mind was swimming in details. At one point, as though noticing my confusion, he looked up and said:

*

This book begins where Dhammaratana left off. What he intended as an answer, I approach instead as a series of questions. I ask: what does it mean to be ‘bound’ by more than one law, to be obliged to state law and monastic law together? How have Buddhist monastics, some of the world’s largest and oldest clerical communities, come to acquire the complex web of ‘responsibilities’ and ‘pressures’ about which Dhammaratana speaks? Moreover, what can the experience of Buddhist monks tell us about how human societies throughout the world manage the multiple traditions of law that shape their lives?

In posing these questions, I connect the study of Buddhism and law in Sri Lanka with broader scholarly conversations about legal pluralism, the phrase most commonly used to denote the coexistence of multiple laws in a given place.Footnote ⁴ Through examining the lives of Buddhist monastics – communities that have navigated legal multiplicity for more than 2,000 years – this book argues that legal pluralism implicates not one feature of human experience but two. Not only does legal pluralism encompass the complex pool of ‘legal liabilities’ that persons like Dhammaratana confront, it also implies a set of practices that one uses to bring structure and sense to those liabilities in the first place. More than just something one encounters, legal pluralism is something one does.Footnote ⁵

This twofold character of legal pluralism has significant consequences for how scholars, lawmakers and jurists ought to approach situations like that of Dhammaratana. It implies that those who wrestle with legal pluralism in courts, parliaments or universities – those who create policies to address it, programmes to promote it or theories to describe it – ought to think of themselves as confronting two distinguishable phenomena. Firstly, they confront a diverse collection of normative artefacts, sources and standards that purport to be the ‘stuff’ of law: things like codes, customs, canons, obligations, expectations, tribunals, institutions, duties, principles, procedures and norms. Secondly, they confront a diverse set of practices, actions and enunciations that collate or divide those artefacts into categories, identify their essential features and coordinate their relative influence and authority over human communities.

This book demonstrates how one field of normative artefacts can sustain a multitude of different practices. Dhammaratana’s experience of multi-legality changes depending on how one renders the various liabilities that he confronts: as ‘discipline’ or as ‘law’, as one system or two, as voluntary or obligatory, as human or more-than-human, as conflicting or aligning, as a collection of pure sources or a miscellany of hybrid ones. It depends on whether one treats imperatives (Judge fairly!) as emanating from the Buddha, or from his monastic fraternity, or from the state or the universe, or some combination thereof. Artefacts alone do not explain legal diversity. Equally vital are the ways that humans bring order and meaning to those artefacts by grouping and consolidating them, ranking and distinguishing them, reconciling and contrasting them – that is, by practising legal pluralism.

The Laws of the Buddha and the Laws of the Land

In 2018, hundreds of saffron-robed monks occupied the central transportation hub in downtown Colombo. They gathered to denounce the arrest and imprisonment of a famous Buddhist monk on charges of contempt of court. What they condemned was not the charge itself but the conditions of the monk’s detainment, specifically the clothes he was made to wear. As with other convicts, prison officials required the monk to remove his saffron robes and wear the standard prison uniform of white pants and a jumper. At the time of his conviction, Sri Lanka’s prisons held fifteen other Buddhist monks, all of them dressed that way.Footnote ⁶ Yet the monk was popular, and his supporters were adamant: this was an assault on monastic law.

Politicians appealed to the protesting monks. There was no malice intended, they stressed, only the routine application of a neutral ordinance. Some even pointed to vinaya, noting that the Buddha himself allowed monks to reside without robes under conditions of duress.Footnote ⁷ But the arguments had little effect. In the space of weeks, matters escalated into national demonstrations, with protestors alleging an all-out conflict between monastic law and state law. In their speeches and placards, protestors spoke about more than just clothes. They declared that ‘jumper-gate’Footnote ⁸ – as the affair came to be known – was proof that monastic rules were not compatible with Sri Lanka’s penal code. The sacred laws made by the Buddha could not function alongside criminal laws inherited from the British. They chanted slogans and carried banners, including one that read: ‘Don’t let a son of the Buddha, who is bound by the Buddha’s law, be attacked by white persons’ laws’.Footnote ⁹

Jumper-gate cast a national spotlight on two opposing ways of practising legal pluralism in Sri Lanka today.Footnote ¹⁰ On the one end are those, like the politicians, who stress compatibility, harmony and banality in the relationship between monastic and state law. On the other end are those, like the protestors, who stress the antagonism of monastic and state law, and demand that the former be protected from the latter. In between are a variety of blended positions that make use of the same normative artefacts to offer differing visions of multi-legality.

Those who stress the separation of monastic law and state law point to certain historical precedents. Early Buddhist legal texts proclaim monastic law’s distinctiveness from ‘the laws of the world’.Footnote ¹¹ These texts say that when persons like Dhammaratana join the community of monastics, the sangha, they commit to observing the Buddha’s rules of monastic discipline (vinaya), as embodied in a text called the ‘Basket of Discipline’ or Vinaya Piṭaka.Footnote ¹² That text (the Vinaya Piṭaka) and those disciplinary norms (vinaya) purposefully separate monastic behaviour and appearance from that of non-monastics, called laypersons, or ‘householders’. The Pali-language version of the Vinaya Piṭaka, which is observed by monastics in South and Southeast Asia, including in Sri Lanka, requires that monastics shave their heads, wear saffron-coloured robes and live in monasteries set off from other human settlements. It instructs monastics to ‘beg’ for their food rather than prepare their own meals as householders do. A significant number of the Vinaya’s 227 rules for monks and its 331 rules for nuns purport to preserve the moral and physical separation between monastics and laity.Footnote ¹³ These monastic rules include prohibitions against speaking deceptively, engaging in business or trade, congregating with laypersons, preaching to soldiers, using gold or silver, consuming intoxicants, and ‘travelling by vehicle’.

Despite this ancient ideal of separation, monastic law and state law merge together in many ways in modern Sri Lanka. As with other ‘semi-autonomous social fields’, the field of Buddhist monastic law has, over the past two millennia, intermeshed with the laws of the kingdom, the colony or, for most of the past century, the modern nation-state.Footnote ¹⁴ This merger can be seen, among other places, in the modern lexicon of state law in Sinhala, the language spoken by three-quarters of Sri Lankans and the language in which most laws are drafted and interpreted.Footnote ¹⁵ A variety of modern Sinhala legal terms can be traced to Pali terms taken from the Vinaya Piṭaka. When jurist monks like Dhammaratana speak about courts (adhikaraṇa), accusations (cōdana) or adjudication (viniścaya), they use terms that are appropriate both to the Sinhala-language vocabulary of contemporary state law and to the Pali-language protocols of monastic law.

The merging of monastic and state law is also visible institutionally. Although conducted according to Vinaya standards, monastic ordinations must also be registered with government departments. Those who wear monastic robes must obtain government-issued ID cards and have proof of their monastic residence. Failing to do so, one can be charged with the crime of illegally ‘hold[ing] [one]self out as a monk’.Footnote ¹⁶ Monastics must declare pious donations made to their temples and keep accounting records for periodic auditing by Sri Lanka’s Department of Buddhist Affairs. That Department also administers a national statute relating to ‘Buddhist property’ (bauddha dēpaḷa) called the Buddhist Temporalities Ordinance. Alongside monastic courts, civil courts also adjudicate disputes among monks and produce common law doctrine concerning the rules of monastic succession or the nature of temple property. These doctrines, which build on the jurisprudence of British colonial courts, are known today as Buddhist Ecclesiastical Law – a body of law that, in many ways, epitomises the dynamics of integration and separation that characterise the relationship between the Buddhist sangha and the Sri Lankan state.

Theories and Practices of Legal Pluralism

No single portrait of legal pluralism perfectly captures this mixture of legal influences, even though almost everyone agrees about the major artefacts of law in play. (A broad list of these can be found in Table 1.1.) At times, Sri Lanka’s monastics, state officials and everyday citizens treat these sources of law as distinct or in conflict. Other times, they treat them as interwoven and aligned.

This situation is not usual. Like Dhammaratana, people throughout the world navigate the multiple ‘legal liabilities’ and ‘pressures’ that they face in diverse and dynamic ways. This dynamism, however, remains submerged in many policy papers and scholarly articles on legal pluralism. That is because, in most cases, analysts approach legal pluralism as a stable construct, treating legal multiplicity as a structural condition within which humans operate. Analysts reflect on how a finite set of legal systems function and interact. They consider how such systems change over time and move across space, exchanging ideas, terminology and officials.Footnote ¹⁷ More recently, scholars have highlighted ‘interlegal’, ‘hybrid’ and ‘entangled’ forms of legality that, although built from legal systems, are not reducible to any one of them.Footnote ¹⁸

Tracing how legal systems change and evolve is a crucial part of understanding how legal pluralism manifests in the world. However, to focus only on these high-level dynamics is to miss the unstable and often competing ways that normative multiplicity is expressed on the ground. Where scholars speak about hybridity or borrowing across systems of law, legal actors frequently voice anxiety about protecting law’s purity or fidelity to the past. They may worry that a tradition is vulnerable to outside influences that could distort or damage it. Where academics emphasise the inevitability of legal blending, many legal actors speak of ‘their’ laws as independent and autonomous.Footnote ¹⁹

In this, scholarly debate and real-world legal reasoning mirror each other. As with academic accounts of legal pluralism, monks, judges, bureaucrats, officials and others living in Sri Lanka employ their own schemas to make sense of the legal diversity they all agree exists. Everyone accepts the presence of multiple laws, yet they carve up and characterise those laws in diverging ways, producing a plurality of legal pluralisms.

Sometimes, legal actors construe the island’s laws as opposing systems whose integrity depends upon their separation. Other times, they celebrate laws’ similarity and interweaving – or suggest their shared embodiment of some higher-order principle (such as due process or moral restraint). Yet other times, distinctions between bodies of law matter less than the internal distinctions within supposedly unified legal regimes. Frequently, legal multiplicity is regarded as unremarkable, a fact of life that requires little reflection at all.

Those who live in multi-legal worlds adopt many frames of classification and strategies of action – many practices of legal pluralism – for bringing order and meaning to their lives. Those practices communicate different messages about the boundaries, nature and essence of laws: their integrity or porousness, complementarity or incommensurability, purity or adulteration, and their endurance or transformation over time. I track each of these relational pairs in the chapters that follow.Footnote ²⁰

By centring the human dimension of legal pluralism – the importance of legal pluralism as a practice – I seek to bridge the gap between scholarly models of legal pluralism and the numerous, shifting paradigms expressed by legal actors themselves. Rather than giving a better high-level account of legal systems – one that ‘gets the ontology right’ – I call attention to the ways that laws’ users, themselves, give structure and meaning to the ‘stuff’ of law.Footnote ²¹ I treat monks like Dhammaratana not merely as subjects of legal pluralism, but as theorists of it, agents who produce their own systemic accounts of laws and how they interact.

Such accounts are not just interpretations of an otherwise singular legal pluralism. They are enactments, consequential expressions of multi-legality that do things in the world. When pronounced by important people or in important contexts, practices of legal pluralism have power and authority. They shape events and influence others. They produce the realities of which they speak. They make things ‘law’.

New insights about law and society emerge when one attends to practices of legal pluralism. A focus on practices reveals the numerous, overlapping paradigms of multi-legality that coexist at any one time, each carrying its own consequences for governance and coexistence – each implying its own calls to action (Protect! Reject! Recognise! Reconcile!). These practices may appear in written policies, such as the formalised ‘tertiary rules’ or ‘inter-polity laws’ designed to bridge legal regimes and sovereignties.Footnote ²² Yet, they can also be seen in informal and episodic practices, such as the protest marches described above.

Examining the multiple practices of legal pluralism operating in a given setting allows one to test academic theories while also acknowledging the significance of legal reasoning on the ground. It calls attention to the interests that underlie one view of legal multiplicity or another, along with the material stakes of purportedly neutral observations about law’s nature and diversity. It makes clear that legal relations, like kinship, can be segmented or unified at different levels, such that same normative artefacts – a prohibition appearing in a katikāvata, an injunction in the Vinaya Piṭaka, a norm of ethical judging – can be treated as cosmic law or monastic law or fraternity law or Sri Lankan law, each of which entails its own possibilities for human action and communal autonomy.

Paying attention to practices of legal pluralism illuminates the relative (but not infinite) freedom of persons to influence and define their multi-normative worlds. Even where the normative artefacts seem fixed, or relatively so, humans nevertheless produce multiple scales of value and recognition, multiple acts of merger or opposition, and multiple projects for narrowing or widening the gaps between, in this case, the laws of the Buddha and the laws of the land.

Buddhism and Monastic Law in Contemporary Sri Lanka

Practices of legal pluralism and debates about monastic law are not marginal events in Sri Lanka. Legal contests and protests like those described above occur regularly and often generate widespread publicity. This is because Buddhist monastic law is not just any form of law: it is the law that sits at the centre of the religion that sits at the centre of discussions about Sri Lankan national identity.Footnote ²³

Although one of several religions in Sri Lanka, Buddhism has tended to dominate Sri Lankan life demographically as well as politically. Over 70 per cent of Sri Lanka’s population identify as Buddhist on national censuses, compared with 12.7 per cent, 9.7 per cent and 7.6 per cent identifying as Hindu, Muslim or Christian.Footnote ²⁴ These religious identities overlap with ethnic and linguistic ones. Most Buddhists identify as ethnically Sinhalese (75% of the total population) and are Sinhalese-speaking; most Hindus identify as ethnically Tamil (15% of the population) and speak Tamil;Footnote ²⁵ most Muslims identify their ethnicity as ‘Moor’ or ‘Malay’ (9.3% and 0.2% of the population respectively) and speak Tamil, Sinhala or both.Footnote ²⁶ Christianity alone crosscuts ethnic and linguistic backgrounds.

For more than a century, Sri Lankan politicians have made use of these demographic features to advance a particular vision of nationhood that privileges one religion (Buddhism), one ethnicity (Sinhalese) and one language (Sinhala). Politicians, artists and writers have portrayed Sri Lanka as an ‘island of dharma’ that joins Buddhism with Sinhalese-ness in a single civilisational vision.Footnote ²⁷ Activists and entrepreneurs have drawn on this nationalist vision to shape politics and villainise minority groups, contributing to the island’s three-decade-long civil war as well as to various other incidents of anti-Muslim, anti-Christian and anti-Tamil violence, which have occurred regularly since the Sri Lankan army’s brutal military defeat of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) in 2009.

The political and cultural centrality of Buddhism in Sri Lanka means that Buddhist monks exert an influence on public life far greater than mere population numbers would suggest. Although there are only 42,000 registered monks (out of a general population of 22 million),Footnote ²⁸ their status as protectors and embodiments of Buddhism endows monastic groups with special authority and prestige. This can be seen, among other places, in the honorific terms and deferential gestures used to address monks in daily life.Footnote ²⁹ It can also be seen in monks’ outsized influence on national issues. As in other parts of Asia, Sri Lankan monks do more than just pursue nirvana. They play visible roles in politics, media and law, serving as lobbyists, campaigners and legal activists. Monks form pressure groups, hold press conferences and engage in what I’ve called ‘Buddhist-interest litigation’.Footnote ³⁰ When monks issue statements, politicians pay attention; when they organise protests, people show up. In recent decades, monks in Sri Lanka have even formed their own political parties, contesting – and sometimes winning – public office. In 2004, one such political party, consisting entirely of Buddhist monks, managed to win nine (of 225) seats in the island’s parliament.Footnote ³¹

The esteem given to Sri Lanka’s monks comes, in no small part, from the important role they play in sustaining Buddhism on the island. Symbolically, monks evoke a direct link to the Buddha as part of an unbroken chain of ordinations beginning with the Buddha’s first disciples. Through this chain, they pass down the Buddha’s dharma, his teachings about the nature of the cosmos, and his advice for how living beings can escape the stressful cycles of rebirth that characterise normal human existence. (This escape, or ‘extinguishing’, is known as nirvana.) Monks are charged with disseminating this dharma, while also administering the key rituals of Buddhist life, such as donation (dāna), blessing (pirit), merit-making (piṅkamma) and funerary rites. As ‘sons of the Buddha’, monks are thought to guard the Buddha’s textual, material and institutional legacies in the world, ensuring the continuity of artefacts that preserve the dharma: monasteries, shrines, relics, stories, instructions, manuscripts, ordination lineages and other things – a mass of physical treasures and cherished teachings collectively referred to as the sāsana.

The elevated status of Buddhism and Buddhist monks in Sri Lanka means that the topic of monastic law features regularly in the island’s newspapers and political discussions. Buddhists care about monastic law because only a disciplined, law-abiding sangha can secure the religion in its purest form. Sri Lankans care about monastic law because of its role in defining the parameters of monks’ influence on public life. Unwanted forms of monastic activism are often blamed on the weakness or corruption of monastic law. In the 1940s and 1950s, for example, public voices pushed for the ‘purification’ of monastic law as a way to stop leftist activism among younger monks. In recent decades, critics have blamed laxity in vinaya standards for the rise of monk-led nationalist groups and political parties. Far from an arcane feature of Buddhist doctrine, then, it is fair to say that in Sri Lanka monastic law is a topic of national importance.

Pluralism within ‘the’ Sangha

Although it is common to refer to ‘the sangha’ as a singular entity, in reality, Sri Lanka’s monastics affiliate to multiple groups and subgroups, each with their own body of laws. These affiliations divide monastics by ordination status, fraternity, sub-fraternity, gender and a variety of other markers such as place of origin, caste or teacher lineage. Not every person can ordain into every monastic community.

As in other parts of the Buddhist world, Sri Lankan monasticism consists of two levels of ordination. A typical monastery contains both novice monastics, who tend to be younger than twenty years old, and fully ordained monastics who must be twenty years of age or older. Fully ordained men are called bhikkhus; fully ordained women are called bhikkhunīs. Novices undergo a simple form of ordination called ‘going forth’ during which they shave their heads, put on saffron robes and vow to observe ten basic precepts.Footnote ³² Fully ordained men and women undergo a more complex ordination rite called ‘acceptance’ (in Pali, upasampadā). During this, they formally take on a monastic teacher, gain admission to a fraternity and commit themselves to following the Buddha’s instructions.

In Sri Lanka, most monastics belong to one of three major fraternities, or nikāya, each with its own lineages, hierarchies, ordination traditions, network of temples and legal customs. These major fraternities are the Siyam Nikāya, the Amarapura Nikāya and the Rāmañña Nikāya.Footnote ³³ The Siyam Nikāya, headquartered in the ancient royal capital of Kandy, is the oldest, largest and most influential fraternity, accounting for nearly half of the island’s monks and most of its temples (~57%).Footnote ³⁴ The Amarapura and Rāmañña Nikāyas make up roughly 28 per cent and 18 per cent of the island’s monks and temples, respectively, and have headquarters located on the southwest coast, where the two fraternities first gained prominence during the nineteenth century.Footnote ³⁵ In 2019, the Amarapura and Rāmañña Nikāyas formed a union called the ‘United Sangha Council’.Footnote ³⁶

Undergirding these nikāya differences are other distinctions based on regional identity, teacher-student lineages, familial ties and caste. Current divisions among monastic fraternities first emerged during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, following the reintroduction of higher ordination traditions to the island after a period of absence.Footnote ³⁷ Segmentation occurred for several reasons. Some fraternities arose to accommodate monks who were excluded from other fraternities because of their caste. Others evolved following disputes over ordination rituals, or temple property, or the interpretation of the Vinaya Piṭaka. These divisions endure not only across the Siyam, Amarapura and Rāmañña Nikāyas but also in the existence of sub-fraternities that have their own proper names, organisational structures and legal protocols.Footnote ³⁸ According to official statistics,Footnote ³⁹ the Siyam Nikāya contains eight subgroups, while the Amarapura Nikāya contains twenty-one.Footnote ⁴⁰ Officially, the Rāmañña Nikāya is unitary, although it also includes a separate ‘system’ (saṃsthāva) of ascetic forest-dwelling monks, who have their own constitution and customs (Table 1.2).Footnote ⁴¹

Table 1.2Sri Lanka’s officially recognised monastic fraternities

Table 1.2Long description

The details are as follows.

• Siyam Nikaya, founded in 1753, is the largest, with eight recognised subgroups, including the important Malvatu and Asgiri chapters which are the oldest and largest.

• Amarapura Nikaya, founded in 1803, is the second largest, with twenty-one recognised subgroups, since the 1950s run as a confederation organised around a single Supreme Great Leader, uttaritara mahanayaka. Joined as Amarapura-Ramanna United Sangha Council since August 2019.

• Ramanna Nikaya, founded in 1864, is the third largest, most of which functions as a single body, alongside a smaller group of highly ascetical, forest-dwelling monks. Joined as Amarapura-Ramanna United Sangha Council since August 2019.

All fraternities register their members with the Department of Buddhist Affairs. Yet the total number of monastics and monastic groups on the island is likely larger than official statistics suggest for two reasons. Firstly, in addition to the registered monastic fraternities, Sri Lanka also has a small number of self-ordaining monks who do not affiliate directly with any of the three major nikāyas mentioned.Footnote ⁴² Secondly, and more importantly, official statistics do not fully record the levels of female monasticism on the island. Along with other governments in Southeast Asia, the Sri Lankan government does not recognise communities of fully ordained nuns (bhikkhunīs). The reasons for the government’s position are complex and the topic of ongoing debates, some of which I explore in Chapter 8. Although not recognised by the government, Sri Lanka is home to an estimated 3,000 bhikkhunīs who trace their lineage to ordinations sponsored by Taiwanese nuns and Sri Lankan monks. There are also large, government-recognised communities of renunciant women called ‘precept mothers’, who lead lives very similar to bhikkhunīs but refuse that title.Footnote ⁴³

Research Methods

The research for this book occurred between 2014 and 2024, a period of considerable social, economic and political change in Sri Lanka. It was also a time of renewed debates about monastic law, due, in part, to the rise of new monastic nationalist groups whose bellicose rhetoric and unruly protests raised questions about the vitality of monastic discipline on the island.Footnote ⁴⁴ Newspapers printed stories about monastic law. Politicians introduced bills promising to buttress katikāvatas using state law. Talk shows hosted roundtables on the topic. Major academic institutions sponsored conferences. Some monks took to the streets.

It was in this context that I researched Dhammaratana’s legal landscape, the tracks of which pointed in many directions at once: to ancient texts and modern ones, to colonial lawmakers and post-colonial politicians, to monastic jurists and ordinary monks who encountered the law as students and subjects of its discipline. Also important were non-monastic actors – judges, lawyers, bureaucrats, donors and ordinary citizens – whose interests and actions overlapped and intersected with monks like Dhammaratana.

Given the diversity of voices and sources, I adopted a research strategy designed to blend grounded detail and high-level overview while covering a broad historical period. For grounded details, I relied on archival work, ethnographies and interviews with monastic jurists. For the high-level overviews, I drew on broad institutional histories and codes written by monastic and state officials. I also conducted a large, national survey of 1,669 fully ordained monks drawn from across the country – the first of its kind to my knowledge.

Archival Research

Given the importance of written sources for the practice of monastic law, archival research played a large role in this book. The written sources that form the basis of the study were composed in the languages of English, Sinhala and Pali – and often in a mix of the latter two. Some sources came from personal and public collections.Footnote ⁴⁵ Others came from university and national archives in Sri Lanka, the United States and the UK.Footnote ⁴⁶ These texts, about which I will say much more in subsequent chapters, cover a long swathe of time as well as a wide variety of authors, formats and styles: some from the nineteenth century are written in the traditional form of ola manuscripts, composed on dried palm leaves with a metal stylus; others appear as handwritten letters or old-style block-print pamphlets; still others take the form of modern, bound, folio-style books printed by a commercial press. Further details appear in Table 1.3.

Table 1.3Texts consulted

Table 1.3Long description

The details are as follows.

Monastic Legal Texts include the following.

• Vinaya Pitaka

• Commentaries

• Condensations

• Rulebooks

• Handbooks

• Treatises

• Manuals

• Compendia of monastic law

• Constitutions or katikqvatas of individual fraternities

• Decisions and orders written by monastic judges and executive councils

An overview of these sources can be found in Chapter Two.

Colonial Records include the following.

• Communications

• Court decisions

• Administrative reports

• Commissions of inquiry and associated evidence

• Gazetteers

• Diaries

• Hansard transcripts

Post-Independence Records include the following.

• Drafting documents

• Hansard transcripts

• Committee reports

• Determinations and decisions from courts

• Legal submissions

• Other documents preserved at court registries

• Files from ministries and departments

Other Written Sources include the following.

• English and Sinhala newspapers

• Journals

• Pamphlets by monastic and political bodies written from the early 19th century to the present

Multimedia Texts include the following.

• Television talk shows

• Recordings of press conferences

• Online news video clips

Locating these texts was not always easy. In some cases, it meant looking expectantly through large archival boxes with the goal of finding something relevant. More than once, I took to the strategy of investigating items that seemed likely to be monastic legal texts, submitting request-slips and waiting for archival files, in the hope that the designated ‘order paper’ or ‘charge sheet’ came from a monastic court. I found more recent monastic sources (those from the 1940s onwards) by speaking with monastic jurists, scholars, booksellers and colleagues. I also frequented shops (and sections of bookstores) that carry textbooks designed for monastic college students and asked monastic judges if I could see copies of (non-confidential) legal materials. To a lesser degree, I also searched for multimedia ‘texts’ about monastic law on Sinhala-language television shows and online sites.

Survey Research

This book also draws on a third method of research, which does not feature commonly in studies of Buddhism in Southern Asia: a large-scale survey of Buddhist monastics. The survey gathered substantial responses across several categories, including age, monastery location and fraternity. Responses came from 1,669 bhikkhus, comprising approximately 9.5 per cent of the total population of fully ordained monks. The survey itself contained eight open-answer questions and seventy-six closed-answer questions, which were honed through three focus groups and two pilots (of twenty and a hundred monks, respectively). Surveys were distributed and collected in all provinces between July and October 2017, with data entry running from November 2017 to March 2018. All of this was done with the help of an experienced survey team located in Colombo, members of which also helped with coding the open-answer questions and cleaning data.Footnote ⁴⁸

In addition to general information about a respondent’s age, education and other things, questions in the survey covered five main areas. One group of questions was about the types of legal texts that monks used and with what frequency. A second group queried respondents’ opinions about the nature and purpose of monastic law, rendered in Sinhala as ‘vinaya laws and traditions’ (vinaya nīti saha sampradāya). A third set of questions examined monks’ attitudes towards particular issues of monastic comportment, such as ‘is it appropriate for monks to prepare horoscopes for lay persons?’ The last two groups of questions queried bhikkhus’ feelings about the relationship between Buddhist legal traditions and state law and the challenges facing Buddhism at that time. Data and findings from this survey appear throughout the chapters that follow. Although not forming the core of my analyses, survey findings provide an important feature of this study, helping to contextualise and confirm at scale many of the dynamics I observed on the ground (Figure 1.1).

Figure 1.1 Survey sampling percentage (n = 1669) by province (black), compared with total population percentage (grey) and monastic population percentage (patterned) in 2017.

Figure 1.1Long description

The grouped bar chart shows three data series for each of the nine Sri Lankan regions, Northern, Eastern, Central, Western, North-Western, Uva, Sabaragamuva, North-Central, and Southern. The three data series are Population 2017 represented by a grey dotted bar, Survey represented by a solid dark grey bar, and Monastic Population represented by a white bar with diagonal black stripes.

In the Northern region, the Population 2017 bar is around five percent, the Survey bar is just above one percent, and the Monastic Population bar is close to zero percent. In the Eastern region, the Population 2017 bar is just above seven percent, the Survey bar is slightly above five percent, and the Monastic Population bar is below three percent. In the Central region, the Population 2017 bar is about twelve percent, the Survey bar slightly higher at around thirteen percent, and the Monastic Population bar close to twelve percent.

In the Western region, the Population 2017 bar peaks at around twenty-nine percent, the Survey bar is about twenty-one percent, and the Monastic Population bar is around twenty-two percent. In the North-Western region, the Population 2017 bar is about twelve percent, the Survey bar is just above ten percent, and the Monastic Population bar is higher at roughly thirteen percent.

For the Uva region, the Population 2017 bar is slightly above six percent, the Survey bar is just over five percent, and the Monastic Population bar is near eight percent. In the Sabaragamuva region, the Population 2017 bar is close to nine percent, the Survey bar is around five percent, and the Monastic Population bar is just above ten percent.

In the North-Central region, the Population 2017 bar is just over six percent, the Survey bar is slightly higher at about seven percent, and the Monastic Population bar is also around seven percent. Finally, in the Southern region, the Population 2017 bar is just above twelve percent, the Survey bar is the highest among all regions at around twenty-eight percent, and the Monastic Population bar is slightly above twenty percent.

Organisation of the Book

In the chapters that follow, I examine the diverse practices of law employed by Buddhist monastics, colonial officials and contemporary lawmakers in Sri Lanka. I highlight developments and clashes among those practices, while also casting light on the social, political, economic and other factors connected to one practice or another – such as caste dynamics, colonisation, nationalism, civil war, party politics, property concerns, technological innovations and other things. Through all of it, I draw on, while holding lightly, the categories of state law, monastic law, Buddhist law and vinaya, treating them, on the one hand, as important rubrics used by actors to engage their normative worlds and, on the other hand, as unstable categories that artificially freeze law in context, producing a rhetorical unity that obscures underlying multiplicities.Footnote ⁴⁹

The book unfolds in three parts, each tackling a different time period. Part I (Chapters 2 to 4) focuses on the premodern and colonial periods, examining practices of legal pluralism evident in two bodies of sources: monastic legal texts compiled in ancient and modern periods; and monastic and colonial legal sources composed during the nineteenth century. Chapter 2 covers nearly 2,000 years of history, introducing readers to the key principles and sources of monastic law, while posing a question: how and why has this diverse collection come to be treated as a single system? Chapter 3 turns to the period of British colonial control (1798–1948) to consider colonial practices of legal pluralism as expressed in attempts to define and preserve ‘Buddhist law’, while also isolating it from the ‘secular’ laws of state. Chapter 4 also examines the colonial period, but using an alternative archive of Sinhala- and Pali-language sources written by Buddhist monks. Those sources suggest an entirely different way of practising legal pluralism: one that purposefully aligns the laws of the Buddha with the laws of the sovereign.

Part II of the book, Chapters 5 and 6, considers the situation of monastic law in Sri Lanka today, focusing especially on the institutions, texts and present-day opinions of monks in the island’s third-largest monastic fraternity, the Rāmañña Nikāya. These chapters look closely at the practices of legal pluralism operating within a modern monastic institution. Chapter 5 draws on archival and ethnographic research to explore how monastic judges like Dhammaratana practise legal pluralism in ways that enhance the autonomy and efficacy of the Rāmañña legal system. It considers the subtle kinds of legal ‘double speak’ that jurists use to simultaneously acknowledge and reject the commensurability of monastic law and state law. Drawing on similar sources, but emphasising a set of sixty interviews with specialist monastic judges, Chapter 6 investigates a second practice of legal pluralism visible among Rāmañña Nikāya jurists, one that contrasts the regulatory dimensions of monastic law with its larger soteriological mission of protecting the sāsana and facilitating the attainment of nirvana.

Part III, Chapters 7 and 8, considers a period running from the 1940s to the present, examining the impacts of government policies on the way that monks, politicians, lawyers and judges practise legal pluralism. Chapter 7 tracks a significant (and ongoing) series of attempts made by Sri Lanka’s leading intellectuals, educators, monks and legislators to ‘legalise’ monastic law (S: nītigata kirīma) by creating some form of statute, tribunal or bureaucratic body that could blend monastic and state-legal authority. Chapter 8 focuses on several recent attempts to practice legal pluralism using constitutional law and litigation relating to Chapter II of the Sri Lankan Constitution, which obligates the state to ‘protect and foster the Buddha Sāsana’.

The practices of legal pluralism visible in these chapters, although differently expressed, draw disproportionately on four sets of attributions, four relational pairs, used to frame encounters with legal multiplicity. The actors examined in Part I stress the importance of laws’ separation or integration and the pluralism that emerges through processes of drawing or dissolving boundaries within and between monastic and state laws. The voices highlighted in Part II focus primarily on monastic law’s commensurability or incommensurability with state law, its inherent compatibility or incompatibility with the legal rules and principles authorised by the government. The political, legal and monastic actors in Part III speak largely about laws’ purity or adulteration, the refining or corruption of law that happens when one brings monastic and state authorities into proximity. Running throughout all chapters are claims about legal continuity or rupture, laws’ links with the past and endurance over time. These four relational pairs – separation/integration, commensurability/incommensurability, purity/adulteration, and continuity/rupture – serve as leitmotifs in the practices of legal pluralism that I examine in this book. They are recurring pairs of qualifiers that shape the ways persons negotiate normative complexity.

The Goals of This Book

Authors often write the books they want to read, and so it is with this one. It was during the end of the research for my first book on religion and constitutional law that I first came to appreciate the intricacies of monastic law in Sri Lanka and the normative richness of Dhammaratana’s world. It is this richness and the diverse ways it is engaged that I aim to convey. Like Dhammaratana, I write for two audiences: the general reader, without special knowledge of Buddhism, Sri Lanka or legal theory; and the more expert audience, excited by the particularities of monastic law or analyses of legal pluralism. What follows, therefore, is a blend of big ideas and small details, English translations alongside Pali and Sinhala transliterations (in brackets or footnotes), technical footnotes for the specialist and broad framings designed to lead the general reader through unfamiliar terrain. I offer the account of monastic and state laws that I wished had existed when I began this project a decade ago.Footnote ⁵⁰ In so doing, I hope to push Buddhist studies and socio-legal studies closer together. I suppose that I am also practising legal pluralism by trying to connect law-and-society scholarship with the perspectives of those who pursue justice and nirvana together.

*

An interesting thing happened at the very end of my interview with Dhammaratana, as we were packing up to leave. I had developed my own impressions about legal pluralism as I listened to him distinguish the Buddha’s instructions for monks from other kinds of law. Hearing about all these norms and authorities, I started to practise legal pluralism myself. Putting the pieces together, I composed a portrait of conflict and antagonism. After all, I had read about the protests at the transportation hub only six months earlier, with their placards pitting Buddhist law against state law.

To wrap things up, I offered what I assumed was an obvious summary of the matter. ‘So the situation is one of conflict (gäṭena avasthā) between vinaya law and state law, right?’ I was surprised when Dhammaratana disagreed:

Dhammaratana described his normative universe as divided but not at odds. He spoke of the laws affecting him as distinct but not competing: monastic law was monastic law; civil law was civil law; karma was karma. What had been proclaimed as a monumental clash of laws on the streets of Colombo was, in Dhammaratana’s opinion, an unremarkable state of affairs. Moreover, he pointed out, there was little chance of state law altering the laws of the Buddha: ‘Governments may promulgate laws’, he said, ‘but we can never change the constitution (vyavasthāva) established by the Buddha’.Footnote ⁵³

It was these discussions with Dhammaratana that pointed me towards the plurality of legal pluralism. It was after speaking with him that I looked again at the many frames and categories that people used to engage their multi-legal worlds. And it was because of this that I conceded, somewhat reluctantly, that the book I had intended to write was not, in fact, possible: there was no big story – no master narrative – that summed up how monastic law and state law related. Instead, there were many laws and many frames of interpretation. There were multiple accounts of multiplicity, plural practices of legal pluralism. Each grew out of and called forth different kinds of actions: protest and conciliation, protection and repair, integration and separation, purification and recognition. Harmonious legal pluralism was not over the horizon. It was not to be found in sharper legal reasoning or a utopia of laws to come. Harmony existed already – alongside inveterate conflict – as two among many practices through which people brought order to and elicited action in their complex normative worlds. It is to these practices that I will now turn.