Buddhism and Law: Third International Conference

FRIDAY

9:00 A.M. – 10:00 – Breakfast and Opening Remarks

Rebecca R. French and Todd Brown, Dean of UB School of Law

D. Christian Lammerts – Continuing to Build the Field of Buddhism and Law: Remarks of the New Editors of Buddhism, Law, and Society

10:00 A.M. – 12:00 – Tibet

Berthe Jansen – Law in the Tibetan Buddhist Imaginaire: Mediation and Adjudication in this Life and the Next

Miguel Álvarez Ortega – The Separation of Church and State and the Basis of Legislation in Khenpo Tsultrim Lödro

Martin A. Mills  – The Role of Moral Biography in the Legitimation of Tibetan Law

12:00 P.M. – 1:00 – LUNCH

1:00 P.M. – 3:00 – Governing the Monastery in the Vinaya

Gerjan Altenburg – Voyeurism in the Monastery: The Case of Jack Hillie III

Annie Heckman – The Limits of Commentarial Authority for Monastic Law in Tibet: How Bu ston Rin chen grub Departed from Guṇaprabha’s Presentation of the Rules for Nuns.

Anna Phipps-Burton – Protector of the Monastery: The Vihārapāla and Its Role in Buddhist Monastic Security in the Mūlasarvāstivāda-vinaya

3:00 P.M. – 4:20 – Structures and Narrative in the Vinaya

Christopher Handy – Automated Alignment of Vinaya Texts: An Evolutionary Strategy

Chris Emms – Organizing the Vinaya: Śākyaprabha’s Arrangement of Novice Precepts and Offenses, and its Influence in Tibet

4:20 P.M. – 5:40 – Vietnam/Laos

Guilhem Cousin-Thorez – Nation-Building and Religion in Modern Vietnam: The Unified Buddhist Church of Vietnam (1964-1975) Ambiguous Position Toward State Secularism

Gregory Kourilsky – Offense, Sentence and Status: A Preliminary Study of the Lao Soy Say Kham Code of Law

SATURDAY

9:00 A.M. – 11:00 – China and Korea

Gilbert Chen – The Hybrid Court at Work: The Legal Practice of Buddhist Clerical Officials in Late Imperial China

Cuilan Liu – Being a Bad Buddhist: Religion, Law, and Legal Governance in China and Tibet  

Mark Nathan – Korean Buddhist Temples and Organizations as Legal Entities: Does a Juridical Person (法人) Have Buddha Nature (佛性)?

11:00 A.M. – 12:20 – Thailand/ Southeast Asia

Tomas Larsson – Buddhism and Law in Thai Electoral Politics

Thomas Borchert – Monastic Views on Buddhism as a National Religion in 2010s Thailand

12:20 P.M. – 1:00 – LUNCH

1:00 P.M. – 3:30 – Burma and Sri Lanka

Matthew Walton – Dynamics of Participation and Inclusion in a Theravāda Moral Universe

Tony Scott – The Right Robe at the Wrong Time: Debates about Kaṭhina and the Role of Commentary in the Monastic Courts System of Post-colonial Burma

Roshan de Silvia-Wijeyeratne – War, Violence, and Dhamma in Buddhist Thought: On the Triumph of Righteousness

Ben Schonthal – The “Practical Canon” of Buddhist Law in Contemporary Sri Lanka

3:30 P.M. – 5:00 – Legal Questions and Legal Reasoning in the Vinaya

Jens Borgland – The Naiḥsargika Section of Guṇaprabha’s Vinayasūtra and Auto-Commentary

Shayne Clarke – On the Vinaya Section of the Merv Manuscript

FRIDAY

9:00 A.M. – 10:00 – Breakfast and Opening Remarks

Rebecca R. French and Todd Brown, Dean of UB School of Law

D. Christian Lammerts – Continuing to Build the Field of Buddhism and Law: Remarks of the New Editors of Buddhism, Law, and Society

10:00 A.M. – 12:00 – Tibet

Berthe Jansen – Law in the Tibetan Buddhist Imaginaire: Mediation and Adjudication in this Life and the Next
Abstract: We regularly encounter the law in historical Tibetan narratives, as they are related and imagined by their Tibetan authors and tailored to a specific audience. The strict separation between myth and history – fiction and non-fiction – within Tibetan literature is only a relatively recent phenomenon. Arguably, this makes the study of these narratives all the more pertinent. Sometimes, the legal disputes clearly serve as comic relief, while in other instances their descriptions function as a serious warning for the audience to heed the laws of the land and the Dharma. The Tibetan trickster Akhu Tönpa gets tried and punished for slandering a group of nuns, while in Dèlok stories – narratives of those returning to the land of the living after dying – describe the Lord of Death, Yama, holding court in the underworld and judging those recently passed away on their past actions. In other famous accounts, the law is conspicuous by its absence: the yogi Milarepa, for example, famously caused thirty-five people to die, yet no one has ever mentioned even the suggestion of legal involvement or other secular retribution.

In this presentation I will discuss and analyze several cases presented in Tibetan Buddhist narratives. When and why do these stories ridicule actual legal practices and the adjudicating entities? When are they, by contrast, a reiteration of top-down legal and Buddhist decrees? What does this tell us about notions and ideologies of the function and execution of law among the authors and audiences of these popular narratives? In sum, I will argue that these sorts of narratives are rich sources that help us unearth how Tibetan Buddhists historically viewed and experienced the legal world around them. Furthermore, I would like to open up the discussion on whether the usage of Buddhist legal (fictional) narrative as one of the sources for the socio-legal history of Buddhist cultures throughout Asia is one that is both desirable and feasible.

Miguel Álvarez Ortega – The Separation of Church and State and the Basis of Legislation in Khenpo Tsultrim Lödro
Abstract: Khenpo Tsultrim Lödro (b. 1962, Draggo, Sichuan) is an ecumenical Nyingma Tibetan scholar and second-generation teacher at Larung Gar Buddhist Academy (Kham region), founded by Khenchen Jigme Phuntsok (1933-2004) in 1980. Having acquired a reputation for his interest in ethical issues, both at a theoretical and practical level, Khenpo Tsultrim Lödro stands as an example of the continuation of the Tibetan genres of nītiśāstra (public ethics and governance) and chos srdi (religious-secular relations). In my paper, I will address his two seminal works (2011) on these issues, which present the thrilling novelty of establishing a comparison with Western concepts and paradigms, before which he defends a model based upon the Tibetan Empire.

Martin A. Mills  – The Role of Moral Biography in the Legitimation of Tibetan Law
Abstract: One of the defining points of variation in cultures of law around the world is the role of the moral person as either originator or support for law and jurisprudence. While Christian traditions in the wake of the Reformation asserted the strong distinction between “the perfection of the Law and the imperfection of Man” (Scots Confession 1560), others - such as Islamic traditions of jurisprudence, for example, depended extensively on precise biographical evaluation (ilm al-rijāl) of the moral uprightness (al-ʻadālah) and precision (al-ḍabṭ) of narrators to ensure the validity of ḥadīth as a basis of sharia. In the Tibetan traditions of religious and kingly law, the role of spiritual realisation and 'skilful means' of seminal figures as a dominant legitimating trope both in the creation or interpretation of law places the question of biographical evaluation first and foremost in the history of jurisprudence. While formal written law codes (khrims) may act as a convenient shorthand for representing Tibetan legal history, the dependence of such codes on a rich backcloth of nam thar (biographies of liberation), combined with relations of oath-bound loyalty (dam tshig) to specific individuals, created far more hierarchical, contextual, and less bureaucratised cultures of law than those assumed in European legal traditions. In the modern context, this has presented substantial challenges to the integration of Tibetan approaches to law and lawmaking into the modern international culture of jurisprudence, not least in resolving thorny questions such as the devolution of the constitutional powers of the retiring Fourteenth Dalai Lama. In such situations, the parameters of jurisprudential interpretation by legal historians will have significant geopolitical consequences.
 

12:00 P.M. – 1:00 – LUNCH

1:00 P.M. – 3:00 – Governing the Monastery in the Vinaya

Gerjan Altenburg – Voyeurism in the Monastery: The Case of Jack Hillie III
Abstract: In July 2023, in a provincial court, in Port Hawkesbury, Nova Scotia, Jack Hillie III pleaded guilty to the criminal charge of voyeurism. Hillie allegedly placed a hidden camera in a shower at Gampo Abbey, a Buddhist monastic complex in Pleasant Bay, Nova Scotia. The camera was discovered in 2021 by a candidate for ordination. Police confirmed that the candidate and other residents of the abbey were indeed recorded on the device. At the time, Hillie was “Head Monk” at the abbey. 

Hillie clearly violated the Criminal Code of Canada, pleaded guilty, and is scheduled for sentencing in Port Hawkesbury in November. But what are the possible implications of this case for understanding the relationships between Buddhism, law, and contemporary Canadian society? 

Drawing upon vinaya (Buddhist monastic law), and other primary sources, this article will provide some Buddhological context for this case. 

Annie Heckman – The Limits of Commentarial Authority for Monastic Law in Tibet: How Bu ston Rin chen grub Departed from Guṇaprabha’s Presentation of the Rules for Nuns.
Abstract: Guṇaprabha (5^th–7^th century) is widely regarded as the top source of Indian commentarial authority on the Mūlasarvāstivāda Vinaya in Tibet. As yet, however, no scholarship has comprehensively explored how fully such authority was present, in a granular sense, in the vast body of Tibetan commentarial literature. In what ways, if any, did Tibetan commentators depart from Guṇaprabha’s presentation of this monastic code? The rules for nuns preserved in Tibet are an excellent place to start asking such a question, as they have embodied unique issues for the few commentators who have taken interest in them over the centuries: the recitation text (the Bhikṣuṇī-prātimokṣa-sūtra) does not match the purportedly corresponding explanatory text (the Bhikṣuṇī-vinaya-vibhaṅga). Shayne Clarke has demonstrated the presence of a unique Bhutanese recension of this explanatory text, which seems to have been emended by some interested party to bring it in line with Guṇaprabha’s version of the rules in the 72 pāyantikās common to nuns and monks. It is therefore particularly curious that when Bu ston Rin chen grub (1290–1364) created a digest of the frame narratives for nuns’ rules, he largely followed Guṇaprabha—but not entirely. This paper examines how Bu ston’s handling of the unshared pāyantikās for nuns (numbers 73 through ± 180) departs from the presentation found in Guṇaprabha’s Vinayasūtra and its autocommentary, the Vinayasūtra-vṛtty-abhidhāna-svavyākhyāna. These specific changes demonstrate the limits of Guṇaprabha’s commentarial authority in Tibet for at least one influential exegete.

Anna Phipps-Burton – Protector of the Monastery: The Vihārapāla and Its Role in Buddhist Monastic Security in the Mūlasarvāstivāda-vinaya
Abstract: This paper explores the function of the gtsug lag khang skyong (guardian of the monastery) in the Mūlasarvāstivāda-vinaya—the monastic law code of the Mūlasarvāstivādins. The primary thesis of the paper is that the gtsug lag khang skyong played a vital role in the security of the monastery. This thesis is supported by two secondary points: First, that the gtsug lag khang skyong’s duties include striking the gaṇḍī block in case of emergency; and second, that the role of gtsug lag khang skyong is assigned on a rotating basis. It has been thoroughly demonstrated that monks could and did possess wealth; this paper explores the related and as-yet unanswered question of how they protected that wealth.

3:00 P.M. – 4:20 – Structures and Narrative in the Vinaya

Christopher Handy – Automated Alignment of Vinaya Texts: An Evolutionary Strategy
Abstract: This presentation demonstrates a novel method for automated crosslinguistic alignment of vinaya (monastic law) texts in Sanskrit, Tibetan, Chinese and other languages using a simple but effective genetic algorithm, with an example implementation in Python, and a Django web interface. Text alignment is a process of locating similar passages across different versions of documents. The degree to which two passages are similar is a matter open to debate; what similarity means in literature may be mathematically undefinable, due to the non-logical structure of human language. Vinaya texts occur in multiple versions for various reasons, including translations, document drafts, sectarian disagreements, and other phenomena of text transmission. They serve as a good case study for text alignment problems in general. While some alignments between texts may seem obvious to human readers, there are also instances where alignment boundaries are ambiguous or unresolvable even for trained specialists. It is therefore nontrivial to perform the same task on a computer and achieve quality results without intervention from the user. The system described here is open source and free for anyone to use and modify, without restrictions. It can be run on personal computers, cluster computers, mobile phones, and various other computing devices.

Chris Emms – Organizing the Vinaya: Śākyaprabha’s Arrangement of Novice Precepts and Offenses, and its Influence in Tibet
Abstract: Śākyaprabha (ca. 7^th–8th c. CE), an Indian specialist in Buddhist monastic law, composed two Sanskrit commentaries that both survive in Tibetan translation: the Āryamūlasarvāstivādiśrāmaṇerakārikā, and his own commentary upon this verse text, the Āryamūlasarvāstivādiśrāmaṇerakārikāvṛttiprabhāvatī. Śākyaprabha distills the monastic regulations for novice Buddhist monks from the enormous monastic law code, or Vinaya, of the Mūlasarvāstivādin school, into roughly 240 verses. He organizes these verses around 14, instead of the usual 10, novice precepts. In this talk, I explore the role of the *Vinayavibhāṣa, a Vinaya commentary no longer extant, in Śākyaprabha’s organization of novice precepts and offenses. I will also investigate the relationship between a *Vinayavibhāṣa quotation from Śākyaprabha’s autocommentary, and verses contained in only the Sanskrit versions of Guṇaprabha’s Vinayasūtra, as well as verses in Guṇaprabha’s own Vinayasūtra commentary, preserved in Tibetan and Sanskrit.

4:20 P.M. – 5:40 – Vietnam/Laos

Guilhem Cousin-Thorez – Nation-Building and Religion in Modern Vietnam: The Unified Buddhist Church of Vietnam (1964-1975) Ambiguous Position Toward State Secularism
Abstract: The history of politicized Buddhism in contemporary Vietnam has been addressed several times by scholars in the past decades. These works usually focused on the different aspects of the Unified Buddhist Church of Vietnam (UBCV) struggle in favor of peace, sovereignty, and democracy1 in the context of the Vietnamese civil war, fought in the boundaries of the autocratic Republic of Vietnam (RVN2). This decade-long struggle is now referred to as the Buddhist Struggle movement.

Relying on a large set of poorly used Vietnamese sources (primary sources of the RVN and UBCV’s documents), this paper wishes to focus on a central but widely overlooked aspect of this Buddhist Struggle. While the UBCV undoubtedly aimed at influencing the course of events in favor of peace and regime changes, we advocate an additional interpretation of this long struggle movement, intertwined with the rest of the UBCV’s agenda: the conflictual negotiations between religious leaders and secular power to redefine the State-Church relationship3. Indeed, throughout the 60s and 70s, the leaders of the UBCV adopted an increasingly hostile position toward secularism, often instrumental in their opposition to the government. Monks committed themselves in arduous discussions with various actors of the government in the development of a modern and post-colonial religious legal framework, to ensure its compatibility with their vision of the role of Buddhism in the Vietnamese society and their independence towards the State, breaking with the previous place of the Vietnamese Sangha in the institutions of modern Vietnam (19th-20th century).

We will discuss these complex interactions and analyze how the religious leaders tried to gain an advantageous and exclusive position in the institutional framework of the RVN as the sole representant of the Buddhist community and develop autonomously their own lay-oriented institutions such as private education system, youth organizations and workers unions.

Gregory Kourilsky – Offense, Sentence and Status: A Preliminary Study of the Lao Soy Say Kham Code of Law
Abstract: This paper provides a general overview of a particular code of law, the Soi Sai Kham (lit: “golden garland”), which was written in Luang Prabang, then the royal capital of the Lan Xang Kingdom (present-day Laos), presumably in the 16^th century. Numerous copies found in manuscript collections suggest it was still in use until the eve of the colonial period, that is, at the very end of the 19^th c.

The Soi Sai Kham is entirely written in vernacular but includes a significant number of Pali quotations from the Vinaya and other collections such as the Jātakas, and therefore definitely falls in the category of “Buddhist law”. The text claims itself in several instances that regulations it contains have been taught by the Buddha to Upāli-thera, one of his most eminent disciples, who in turn propagated them. On the other hand, the Soi Sai Kham is marked by a crisscrossing of secular and religious law, which is the case of most legal texts from Laos, but also neighboring Thailand and Burma. Religious issues addressed are, for instance, pieces of cloth that compose the monastic robe, authorized and prohibited belongings for the Saṅgha, destination of a monk’s belongings after his death, required dimension of a monastic cell (kuṭi) according to the rank of its occupant, etc. Among secular matters are different categories of murder, theft and robbery, bondage, adultery, divorce, military defection, and so forth.

Soi Sai Kham’s most distinctive feature is it takes over the terminology of the Pali Vinaya—in particular that of the Pātimokkha—for describing offences committed not only by monks but also laypeople according to their seriousness, viz. pārājika for criminal offense, saṃghādisesa for heavy offense, etc. Moreover, this code does not specifically assign religious sanctions, but instead suggests more ‘common’ penalties like fines, or hard labor. Here penitence is determined not only according to the fault committed, but also to the rank, status, and gender of the culprit.

Yet unstudied—as are most Lao codes of law—, Soi Sai Kham constitutes an invaluable source of information for understanding not only local Buddhist monasticism, but also the social, political, and legal cultures of pre-modern Laos, as well as its social structure, hierarchies, and values.

SATURDAY

9:00 A.M. – 11:00 – China and Korea

Gilbert Chen – The Hybrid Court at Work: The Legal Practice of Buddhist Clerical Officials in Late Imperial China
Abstract: In imperial China, the state established the clerical office at both the central and local levels to adjudicate disputes involving monastics. Recently, scholars have conceptualized the office as a hybrid court. Despite the state’s ambitious agenda, scholars generally believe that the institution had declined to an abysmal status by the late imperial era. This view, however, is empirically flawed. Drawing upon legal case records from the Ba County Archives of the Qing Dynasty, this paper investigates the operation of the court at the local level. More specifically, I begin with a discussion of the relationship between the court and local people, both the laity and the clergy. Instead of being a powerless institution as the current scholarship has assumed, the court routinely involved itself in adjudicating disputes among clerics and laypeople. The paper then analyzes the interaction between the Buddhist official and the magistrate. On the one hand, the magistrate relied on the Buddhist court to carry out several judicial and administrative duties concerning the local monastic population. On the other hand, the Buddhist court asserted its institutional agency by resisting the magistrate’s order. Overall, the paper aims to deepen our understanding of the complicated relationship between law and religion by focusing on the lived history of the Buddhist office in Qing China.

Cuilan Liu – Being a Bad Buddhist: Religion, Law, and Legal Governance in China and Tibet  
Abstract: In the Buddhist text the Ten Wheels Sūtra, we find a discussion on governance between the Buddha and Devagarbha, the Buddha expressed the idea that “the yellow jade orchid may wither, yet it is still better than other flowers; Buddhist monks may misbehave, or break their monastic vows, yet are still better than all the non-Buddhists.” This article discusses how this idea originated in Indian Buddhism was received in China and Tibet, where Buddhists continued to engage in the attempt to secure clerical privileges for ordained Buddhist monks and nuns.  

Mark Nathan – Korean Buddhist Temples and Organizations as Legal Entities: Does a Juridical Person (法人) Have Buddha Nature (佛性)?
Abstract: This paper examines a curious paradox concerning the legal status of Buddhist temples as organizational entities in Korean history. On the one hand, despite the fact that the legal concept of a juridical person (pŏbin, 法人), did not exist in Korea prior to 1894, it can be argued that Buddhist temples exhibited equivalent characteristics as modern incorporated organizations and thus possessed the nature of a juridical person. In fact, prior to the introduction of Buddhism in East Asia, there appear to be no comparable organizations composed of multiple, voluntary members, who invariably change over time and are not necessarily bound by familial blood ties nor constituted by the state, that get treated fictitiously as legal persons endowed with certain rights under the law. On the other hand, Buddhist temples and organizations in Korea were, until quite recently, unable to take full advantage of this apparent natural affinity with a juridical person and were prevented from gaining the full rights that this legal entity status ensures. I will argue that political systems and state actors, in both the colonial and postcolonial contexts, interfered with this process by subjecting Buddhist temples, organizations, and institutions to special laws that restricted their ability to obtain juridical person status. The failure to pass a law concerning religious juridical persons after 1945 further limited the possible avenues for Buddhist temples and organizations to obtain legal entity status and full rights under the law.  

11:00 A.M. – 12:20 – Thailand/ Southeast Asia

Tomas Larsson – Buddhism and Law in Thai Electoral Politics
Abstract: This paper discusses how questions pertaining to Buddhism and law have cropped up in recent election campaigns, with a particular focus on the 2019 and 2023 general elections. It will briefly describe how political parties have positioned themselves in relation to controversial issues at the intersection of Buddhism, politics, and law along a scale ranging from Buddhist nationalists to radically secularist. The main purpose of the paper, however, is to present preliminary findings from a post-election survey of eligible voters which was conducted after the May 2023 general election. The survey included several questions on religion, law, and the Thai state, including but not limited to the following: Should the constitution designate Buddhism as the official state religion? Should monks be allowed to vote? Is it a government responsibility to enforce monastic discipline (i.e., upholding the Vinaya) and to protect against deviant teachings of the Buddhist dhamma? Should the state support monks’ teaching of morality in schools? The survey thus allows us to get a sense of Thai voters’ perceptions of the appropriate relationship between Buddhism, law, and the state, and whether these questions divide the electorate along partisan political lines.

Thomas Borchert – Monastic Views on Buddhism as a National Religion in 2010s Thailand
Abstract: “Thai Secularities and Monastic Views on Buddhism as a National Religion in 2010s Thailand”  In the last two decades, Thailand has enacted two different constitutions and each time has seen a series of protests by Buddhist monks calling for the formal establishment of Buddhism as Thailand’s national religion (ศาสนาประจำชาติ). This would seem to suggest that most monks want Buddhism formally established within the Constitution as a national religion.  While there is certainly support within the Sangha for this establishment, data from a variety of sources (surveys, essays, and interviews) suggests a more complicated picture. Rather than advocating for the necessity of Buddhism as an official religion of the state, many monks already see it as the religion of the Thai nation. To these monks establishment of Buddhism is an unnecessary goal. In this paper, I discuss the landscape of monastic attitudes to Buddhism as the national religion in Thailand, and suggest that the very argument itself is an example of the manifestation of the Thai state as a secularist regime.

12:20 P.M. – 1:00 – LUNCH

1:00 P.M. – 3:30 – Burma and Sri Lanka

Matthew Walton – Dynamics of Participation and Inclusion in a Theravāda Moral Universe
Abstract: The conventional narrative within political science has been that democratic transitions have lagged or stalled in Theravāda Buddhist majority countries in South and Southeast Asia. Recent legal studies have also looked to Buddhist norms and practices that seem to undergird non-democratic political practices or undermine democratic ones. This paper attempts to shift the analytical frame from democratic or autocratic regime types or constitutions, to look instead at broader understandings and practices of political participation and inclusion, as argued for by Buddhists in these countries over the last two centuries. This shift of frame moves beyond imposed liberal presumptions to foreground Buddhist understandings of individuals, communities and polities, revealing distinctive perspectives on the relationship between political participation and inclusion, in light of ideas about human nature and the sāsana.

Tony Scott – The Right Robe at the Wrong Time: Debates about Kaṭhina and the Role of Commentary in the Monastic Courts System of Post-colonial Burma
Abstract: The giving of the kaṭhina, or robes donated at the end of the four-month rains retreat, is the quintessential act of the merit economy in Burma, connecting monastic and lay life and involving the householder in the affairs of the Vinaya. In this paper, I examine the kaṭhina reforms put forth by a mid-twentieth-century Burmese scholar monk and pioneer of mass-lay meditation, the Mingun Jetavana Sayadaw (1868-1955) (hereafter the Mingun Jetavana). In his 1948-Pali commentary on the Milindapañha (Questions of Milinda), the Milindapañhā-aṭṭhakathā (Commentary on the Questions of Milinda), the Mingun Jetavana submits a series of proposals to reform the donation of and rituals around the kaṭhina robes. At the heart of these reforms was a proposal to restrict the conventional Pali formula used by a lay supporter when donating kaṭhina, a formula which if uttered incorrectly, “stains” the robe with identifying signs (animittakata) and marks it off as “an untimely robe” (akālacīvaraṃ). While the Mingun Jetavana is not alone in his critiques of kaṭhina convention, we must understand his reforms and the backlash they generated against the rise of the monastic-court system in Post-colonial Burma. I argue that this court system, along with the creation of the “exclusive” canon in the Sixth Council (1954-1956), was an attempt to control the speech and behaviour of monks through the standardization of commentary. In this way, Pali commentary became the ultimate arbiter between the saṅgha and the secular in Burma, between the body of the monk and the bureaucracy of the state.          

Roshan de Silvia-Wijeyeratne – War, Violence, and Dhamma in Buddhist Thought: On the Triumph of Righteousness
Abstract: In the last couple of years, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) has been working on a project that has co-opted leading Buddhist scholars (mainly Pali textualists) into developing an argument that presents Buddhist texts and history as aligned with the prescriptive logic of International Humanitarian Law (IHL). This paper questions that agenda, as well as the value of a project which prima facie appears to argue by analogy; the argument presented in defence of this project asserts that in order to make the liberal principles of IHL palatable to Buddhist majority governments in Southeast and South Asia all we have to do is account for the historic Buddha’s humanitarian gestures vis-à-vis the war-like conflicts that he was confronted with. We are sceptical that we can analogise between the socio-economic and politico-legal concerns of the Buddha (in a time that was absent the nation-state and prior to the European transformation of much of South and Southeast Asia and to paraphrase Philip Almond, in a time prior to the Anglo-European discovery and transformation of Buddhism) and the essential liberal-legal preoccupation of IHL.

Ben Schonthal – The “Practical Canon” of Buddhist Law in Contemporary Sri Lanka
Abstract: In her (now) classic work ‘Looking for the Vinaya,’ Anne Blackburn proposed a distinction between the ‘formal canon’ of Buddhist law—the Vinaya Pitaka ‘as a concept’ as ‘the ultimate locus of interpretive authority—and its various ‘practical canons,’ which are ‘the units of text actually employed’ in the everyday practice of Buddhist law by persons living in particular places and times. In this talk, which draws from my current book project (which I will sketch out), I hope to document some different features of this practical canon as it relates to the legal practices of Buddhist monks in contemporary Sri Lanka. Although everyday monks and monastic jurists in Sri Lanka privilege the Vinaya as the ultimate source of legal authority, they tend to encounter Vinaya passages and vinayic principles indirectly, by way of a variety of other sources: Pātimokkhas and kammavācā texts, modern commentaries and juristic manuals, handbooks and training worksheets, katikāvata and various state-legal structures (such as case law and specialised ordinances). In this talk, I will introduce some of these materials to a group of scholars—you(pl.)—who may (for a change) actually care about them as much as much as I do.

3:30 P.M. – 5:00 – Legal Questions and Legal Reasoning in the Vinaya

Jens Borgland – The Naiḥsargika Section of Guṇaprabha’s Vinayasūtra and Auto-Commentary
Abstract: The 30 naiḥsargika (“forfeiture”) rules make up the fourth category of offenses in the Prātimokṣa for monks and in various ways regulate a monk’s possessions. This paper examines the Naiḥsargika section in Guṇaprabha’s Vinayasūtra, focusing on a sub-section that according to the commentaries contains sūtras on the ‘shared characteristics’ of this kind of offense. 

Shayne Clarke – On the Vinaya Section of the Merv Manuscript
Abstract: On the basis of what was taken to be part of the colophon, the Merv Vinaya manuscript has long been (mis-)identified with the section on the First Buddhist Council at Rājagṛha in other Vinayas. Recently, Professor Oskar von Hinüber has provided new light on the chapter colophon, redrawing the boundaries of exactly where it starts and ends. Nevertheless, various problems remain. In this paper, I will demonstrate that the association with the First Buddhist Council is based on a series of misunderstandings. In comparison with various parallels preserved in Tibetan and Chinese, I will suggest a solution to a number of problematic readings of parts of the manuscript.

Gerjan Altenburg is an Assistant Professor of Religious Studies on a Limited Term Appointment at St. Francis Xavier University in Antigonish, Nova Scotia. He studies Buddhist monastic law. 

Miguel Álvarez Ortega has an academic background in law, linguistics, and translation studies. After completing his Ph.D. in Philosophy of Law with a dissertation on Argentinean thinker Ernesto Garzón Valdés, his research focused on language rights and policies and the use of religious arguments in the public sphere. He later studied Buddhist Philosophy and Tibetan language at the Rangjung Yeshe Institute in Kathmandu, and Sanskrit at Kyoto University. Currently, his main research line deals with Buddhist approaches to law, politics, and public ethics with a focus on the Himalayas. He is an Associate Professor at the Kyoto University Graduate School of Law, where he teaches Legal Anthropology in East Asia, Legal Philosophy, and Religion and Law.

Thomas Borchert is Professor of Religion at the University of Vermont. He is the author Educating Monks: Minority Buddhism on China’s Southwest Border (University of Hawai’i Press, 2017) and the editor of Theravada Buddhism in Colonial Contexts (Routledge 2018). When not in meetings, he is working on a book tentatively titled, Monastic Citizens: Monks and Politics in Contemporary Thailand.

Jens W. Borgland is Associate Professor of History of Religions at Uppsala University. His main research interests are Indian Buddhist monastic law and the Buddhist monastic law codes, especially the Mūlasarvāstivāda vinaya tradition. He is currently working on two projects: preparing an edition and study of the Sanskrit text of the Naiḥsargika (“Forfeiture”) section of Guṇaprabha’s auto-commentary on the Vinayasūtra, and editing and studying Sanskrit manuscript fragments of the MSV Uttaragrantha in the Schøyen Collection.

Gilbert Z. Chen is currently an Assistant Professor at the Department of History, Towson University. He earned his PhD in History from the Washington University in St. Louis in 2019. Dr. Chen mainly works on the social and legal history of Chinese Buddhism during the late imperial era.

Shayne Clarke is an Associate Professor in McMaster University's Department of Religious Studies. He specializes in the study of Indian Vinaya material preserved primarily in Sanskrit, Tibetan, and Chinese. He is the author of Family Matters in Indian Buddhist Monasticisms (University of Hawai‘i Press, 2014) and currently conducting a survey of Tibetan Dunhuang manuscripts preserved in the Stein and Pelliot collections.

Guilhem Cousin-Thorez is a third year Ph.D. student in History at Aix-Marseille University, France. He’s researching contemporary history of Buddhism in Vietnam, focusing on the 20^th century. His dissertation addresses one of the main Buddhist organizations, the Unified Buddhist Church of Vietnam (UBCV, Giáo Hội Phật Giáo Việt-Nam Thống Nhất), active between 1964 and 1975 and famous for its connections with the Buddhist Struggle Movement, favoring Vietnamese sovereignty, democracy, social justice, and later on, peace. His main points of interests are the process of religious institutionalization initiated by the leaders of the UBCV, the political involvement of Buddhist Monks and Lay people during the Vietnamese Civil War, and lastly, the State-UBCV relationship. His research relies on Vietnamese sources (archives of different independent Vietnamese states, UBCV publications and “grey literature” collected in Vietnam) as well as on diplomatic sources of countries influential in Vietnam, mainly France and the United-States.

Christopher Emms is a Sanskrit Lecturer at the Rangjung Yeshe Institute and a Sessional Instructor at McMaster University. His research focuses on the Mūlasarvāstivāda Vinaya and Mūlasarvāstivādin Vinaya commentarial literature, particularly Śākyaprabha’s Āryamūlasarvāstivādiśrāmaṇerakārikā and Āryamūlasarvāstivādiśrāmaṇerakārikāvṛttiprabhāvatī.

Christopher Handy received his PhD in Religious Studies from McMaster University in 2016. His specializations include Indian Buddhist monastic law, linguistic politeness and computational linguistics. He is currently working as a software engineer at the Information and Facility Management department at Leiden University, writing and maintaining custom software applications for humanities research projects.

Annie Heckman is an Associate Translator for 84000 whose research focuses on stories about nuns in the Mūlasarvāstivāda Vinaya, with an emphasis on fourteenth-century Tibetan editorial and digesting practices. She holds MA and PhD degrees from the University of Toronto’s Department for the Study of Religion and Book History and Print Culture collaborative program, as well as a BFA from the University of Illinois at Chicago and an MFA from New York University in Studio Arts. She studied Tibetan language and literature at the University of Chicago Graham School prior to pursuing graduate work in Buddhist studies. She has taught at DePaul University, contributed to Bird of Paradise Press in Virginia, and worked as a reviewer of Dunhuang manuscripts at McMaster University, where she was an Ontario Visiting Graduate Student from 2017 to 2019. She was among the first three recipients of the annual Tsadra Foundation Dissertation Fellowship for Tibetan Buddhist Studies, with a thesis on Bu ston Rin chen grub’s digest of vinaya narratives involving nuns.

Berthe Jansen is Assistant Professor of Tibetan Studies at Leiden University. She has a PhD in Buddhist Studies from the same university. Jansen has wide academic interests but most have to do with the confluence of religion and society. Her monograph The Monastery Rules: Tibetan Monastic Organization in Pre-modern Tibet came out in 2018 with University of California Press. Jansen had a Dutch government grant (NWO) to research the relationship between Buddhism and law in pre-modern Tibet (2016-2022). She is now the PI of the ERC Starting Grant Project Locating Literature, Lived Religion, and Lives in the Himalayas: The Van Manen Collection (2023-2028). Jansen is also a translator and interpreter of (Buddhist) Tibetan.

Gregory Kourilsky is Associate Professor at the École française d’Extrême-Orient (EFEO, France), currently in charge of the EFEO centres in Bangkok (Thailand) and Yangon (Myanmar). He received his PhD at the École Pratique des Hautes Études (EPHE) and previously taught at the National Institute of Foreign Languages and Civilizations (INALCO) in Paris. He specializes in Thai–Lao Buddhism. His recent publications concern Pali literature and scholarship in 16th-century Lanna (northern Thailand), Buddhist legal texts of 16th-century Laos, and filial piety in Theravada Buddhism of mainland Southeast Asia.

Tomas Larsson is an Associate Professor in the Department of Politics and International Studies at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of St John’s College. He is the author of Land and loyalty: Security and the development of property rights in Thailand (Cornell University Press, 2012). He received a PhD in Government from Cornell University in 2007 and worked as a freelance journalist based in Southeast Asia from 1990 to 2000. As an undergraduate, he studied East and Southeast Asian Studies and Thai at Lund University, Sweden.

Cuilan Liu is Assistant Professor in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Pittsburgh. Her research focuses on the intersection of Buddhism and the Law in China, Tibet, and India. Her book Buddhism in Court: Religion, Law, and Jurisdiction in China is forthcoming with Oxford University Press in February 2024.  

Martin A. Mills is Senior Lecturer in Anthropology at the University of Aberdeen and Director of the Scottish Centre for Himalayan Research. Author of Identity, Ritual and State in Tibetan Buddhism (Routledge, 2003), his work combines ethnographic and textual research in the study of Tibetan religious institutions and constitutional history.

Mark A. Nathan is an Associate Professor in the Department of History and the Director of the Asian Studies Program at the University at Buffalo, the State University of New York. He is the author of From the Mountains to the Cities: A History of Buddhist Propagation in Modern Korea (University of Hawai`i Press, 2018) and the co-editor of Buddhism and Law: An Introduction (Cambridge University Press, 2014). His work focuses on the history of Buddhism in twentieth-century Korea, religious pluralism and Buddhist propagation, and the intersection of law and religion.  

Anna Phipps-Burton is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Religious Studies at McMaster University. She completed her MA in Religious Studies at McMaster University and her BA in Religious Studies and Classics at Dalhousie University. Her research currently focuses on theft and security in the Mūlasarvāstivāda-vinaya in Sanskrit and Tibetan, with past research focusing on the Divyāvadāna and other Buddhist past-life narratives.

Benjamin Schonthal is Professor of Buddhist Studies and Head of the Religion Programme at the University of Otago in Aotearoa/New Zealand, where he also co-directs the Otago Centre for Law and Society. He is the author of Buddhism, Politics and the Limits of Law (Cambridge University Press, 2016) and co-editor of Buddhism and Comparative Constitutional Law (Cambridge University Press, 2022). Ben's research examines the intersections of religion, law and politics in South and Southeast Asia.

Tony Scott is a social and cultural historian with a grounding in philology and an interest in postcolonial politics. He is currently a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Department of Political Science, University of Toronto. Along with projects on Buddhism and the Cold War in Asia and Buddhist visual culture in Southeast Asia, his work uncovers the role of modern Pali commentary in twentieth-century meditation movements and Buddhist statecraft in Burma before and after independence.

Matthew J. Walton is an Assistant Professor in Comparative Political Theory in the Department of Political Science at the University of Toronto. Previously, he was the inaugural Aung San Suu Kyi Senior Research Fellow in Modern Burmese Studies at St Antony’s College, University of Oxford. His research focuses on religion and politics in Southeast Asia, with a special emphasis on Buddhism in Myanmar. Matt’s first book, Buddhism, Politics, and Political Thought in Myanmar, was published in 2016 by Cambridge University Press. His articles on Buddhism, ethnicity, politics and political thought in Myanmar have appeared in Politics & Religion, Journal of Burma Studies, Journal of Contemporary Asia, Journal of Contemporary Buddhism, Buddhism, Law & Society, and Asian Survey. Matt was P-I for an ESRC-funded 2-year research project entitled “Understanding ‘Buddhist nationalism’ in Myanmar”, is a co-founder of the Myanmar Media and Society project and of the Burma/Myanmar blog Tea Circle, and is currently co-directing a curriculum project at the University of Toronto on “Deparochializing” Political Theory.

Roshan de Silva-Wijayaratne graduated from the School of Oriental and African Studies (University of London) in 1990 and completed his PhD at the University of Kent on Constitutionalism, Buddhism and Ritual in Sri Lanka in 1998. He has taught in Law Schools in both the UK and Australia and currently teach Comparative Constitutional Law and Property Law in the School of Humanities, Social Sciences and Law at the University of Dundee. He has published widely on the relation between Buddhist historiography, Sinhalese (Buddhist) nationalism, the history of state formation and constitutionalism in Sri Lanka. In 2014 he published Nation, Constitutionalism and Buddhism in Sri Lanka. Currently he is working on an extended review essay of Buddhism and Comparative Constitutional Law published by Cambridge University Press and co-editing a collection of essays (Sovereignty Contested: Cultural Intimacies, the Politics of Space and State-Legal Forms in the Borderlands of the Asia-Pacific) for Sean Kingston Publishing.