The Baldy Center Podcast

The Baldy Center for Law and Social Policy at the University at Buffalo

Episode #39

Podcast recording date: 11/20/2023

Host-producer: Logan

Speakers: Rebecca Redwood French and Mark A. Nathan

Contact information: BaldyCenter@buffalo.edu

Transcription begins.

Logan:

Hello and welcome to The Baldy Center for Law and Social Policy Podcast. I'm your host Logan. On this episode, we are joined by associate professor of history, Dr. Mark Nathan, director of the Asian Studies Program, and Dr. Rebecca Redwood French, professor of law. We discuss the evolution of their research in the field of Buddhism and law, the most recent Third International Conference on Buddhism and Law, and the future of their research and the Buddhism, Law & Society journal. Here is Dr. French and Dr. Nathan.

Well, thank you so much for joining me today. I really appreciate your time. I would first like to start off with having each of you introduce yourselves and to give our audience a bit more background on your respective fields of study.

Mark:

Why don't you begin?

Rebecca:

I'm Rebecca Redwood French. I practiced law for about seven years and then got bored and went to get a PhD in anthropology with a person who does legal anthropology. It is a very specialized field, but during the course of that, I was interested in what the moral norms are, for law, and I thought that going to Tibet would be a good idea. It turned out it was something that took a very long time. I was four or five years in the field in India because Tibetans at that point had been taken over by China and were in a refugee community in India. I came back, wrote a book, got a job as a law professor, and for a long time I was in Tibetan legal studies. And then perhaps 20 or 25 years ago, I switched over into Buddhist legal studies realizing that people didn't seem to know that the Buddha had a whole law code and that there were all kinds of moral and other interesting ideas. So I've been teaching in law for 33 years now, so that is a little while.

Mark:

Let's see. I took a different path, but one that led me here to Buffalo and to studying Buddhism and law, particularly with Rebecca. But I did my undergraduate degree in history, a master's degree in religious studies, and then I went for a PhD in Asian studies with a focus on Buddhism and Korean history. And while I was just starting really my dissertation work and I had a topic I had the opportunity to attend a workshop that Rebecca hosted here at The Baldy Center with David Engel. And it opened my eyes to some things about my own work that I hadn't noticed before and deciding to come at it from a legal perspective and the way that the Buddhist community and Buddhist institutions in Korea in the 20th century interacted with the law and were influenced and shaped by some of the ways that religion was being legally defined. I ended up including an entire, I mean, it was a big part of the work that I ended up producing for my dissertation and then my book. And it was a nice coincidence that I ended up here at Buffalo and then could work together more closely with Rebecca. And we did this edited volume with Cambridge University Press called Buddhism and Law: An Introduction. That was about, that was almost 10 years ago. So yeah, we've continued on working together on this topic and that continued with the most recent conference that we had here at The Baldy Center.

Logan:

And within your respective areas between Tibet, India and Korea, what were the differences? What are the similarities that you see? I guess there could be a lot within the years you've been working together, but kind of a brief overview for our audience, what that intersection looks like.

Rebecca:

Well, I think the most important thing about it is the similarities. The Buddha actually orally transmitted, it is traditionally said, an entire law code for the people who were practicing Buddhists. And I think the real problem is that even though we understand that Christianity has a very large moral background and law code, et cetera, and we understand that Islam does, and Judaism does, and Hinduism does, no one has ever really paid much attention at all to the fact that Buddhist countries have one, which is a really large subdisciplinary law. So in some ways, the fact that everybody thought that all the different Asian countries were completely different and that the Buddhism in all of those different countries was different and never connected up the legal system was the problem that we were really facing throughout all of this. So if there's anything, I guess it's similarities that we're finding. People are always citing the same texts. People are always, every different cultural community has a different resolution to those things and different cultural ideas, which is what the Buddha wanted. But they're all using many of the same ideas, and that has really resulted in a very fruitful and engaging series of conversations, I guess I'd say, books, articles, things like that.

Mark:

Well, I mean specifically to your question about differences between Tibet and Korea, it is true that there's kind of common ground for Buddhist communities throughout Asia, particularly in tied together with the monastic codes that Rebecca was referring to. Although they're modified in various places and certainly not exactly the same. But generally scholars divide up the Buddhist world in Asia between the different canons that are used and that are seen as being the transmission of the Buddhist teachings through time. So there is one that is in Pali, an ancient Indian language. There is a Chinese canon which is used throughout East Asia, and then there is one in Tibetan. So the Tibetans have their own canon in Tibetan. But East Asia is a little, particularly for Korea, I mean, when Rebecca went and studied the Tibetan legal system, I think she found everywhere she looked, Buddhist influence, Buddhist ideas, concepts that were imbued in the way that Tibetans approached legal problems and legal issues throughout their societies. The East Asian countries are a little different because they did not base their legal systems on Buddhism, more so on sort of Confucian influence from Chinese legal codes prior to the time that Buddhism was introduced. So my challenge in talking to my East Asian Buddhist studies colleagues is convincing them that there is something here that we need to take account of, even if it's not the case that Buddhism heavily influenced the way that legal codes were written and instituted in those societies. Still, there's lots of interaction happening between the legal system and Buddhist communities and ideas and things.

Logan:

And Dr. French, you've dedicated your career to making Buddhism and law an accepted research topic. Could you briefly explain to our audience what the research on this topic, if what it looked like in the early stages of your career?

Rebecca:

Well, unfortunately, I would go to conference after conference and people would think it was really interesting, but they didn't really care. I mean, to be frank, people presumed that the Buddha spent all of his time meditating and was always kind and was always thoughtful and had never gotten angry about much of anything. And I'm not saying that is untrue. It is just that he also had these codes which were used by the monastics, but then very much looked at by the lay population as sort of a basis for, in some ways, what they wanted to do. And of course, communism had come in and taken over. I mean all kinds of different religious influences that occurred. So it was very hard, frankly at first to even convince someone that there was such a thing as a religious influence. I found that really astonishing because in America, no one thinks that there isn't a religious, I mean especially now, a religious influence on our legal system. No one would even think to presume that. And that same person, even if they are in Buddhist studies, would still say that Buddhism didn't have any influence on the Asian legal systems or South Asian legal systems or Southeast Asian legal systems. So it continues to be a real quandary and quite difficult at first. And I think it just takes a lot of staying power. I don’t know what else to say about it. I had mentors, which was wonderful, Frank Reynolds and Andrew Huxley and Leslie Gunawardena and others who I got together in the early 2000s. Luckily it was in Rockefeller Center in Lake Como in Italy, which was really nice. I think they went to go to Lake Como, primarily. But it was fascinating even though that they wrote about Buddhism and law, there was still all this problem with seeing it as a, but they gave me a lot of ideas. What they said was, you have to write on it a lot, you have to get people together to do it. And then Frank Reynolds and another one of my mentors at Yale said, start a journal, write the major book. I wasn't actually very interested in doing all those things, but there wasn't any other way to do it except to just start in. So we've been doing each one of the steps that were mentioned by that group.

Logan:

And for Dr. Nathan. I wanted to ask you about your most recent book, I guess in 2018 that was released, From the Mountains to the Cities: A History of Buddhist Propagation Reform in Modern Korea. Could you give us a bit of insight from what your research looked like for that and what surprised you the most when doing that work?

Mark:

Oh, okay. Well, let me weave together sort of the piece of it that law kind of played in that project. As I said before, it was something that I had decided to study and to examine but hadn't considered looking at law for that project. And then once I did, by coming into contact with Rebecca and taking part in that workshop, it sort of opened my eyes and then I began to look for things and oh, look at that, there's all this subject of propagation. Buddhist propagation, which is what I studied, starts appearing in laws that are being passed and being used to define what it is to be a Buddhist and to be recognized under the law as legitimately a Buddhist temple or monastery, they would need to be engaging in this activity, which I translate as propagation. Some people call it proselytizing. But I explained in my book why I don't think that's an appropriate term for it. It's really more just about spreading the Dharma as widely as possible in society for the greatest benefit. So the book is really an examination of how this concept of propagation and the activities associated with it led the Buddhist reforms of the 20th century for the Buddhist community in Korea. And I discovered that the law played a really crucial role in, I guess not just incentivizing that activity, but actually making it, as I said before, a part of the legally defined notion of what it is to be a Buddhist or to be a religion. So that is essentially, I traced from the beginning in the late 19th century all the way down to the early 21st century, just looking at how this concept has shaped the Buddhist community and reform movements in Korea.

Logan:

And now collaboratively you do the Buddhism and Law conference. So we know that that conference was supposed to be scheduled for the 22-23 academic year but was postponed to the fast fall due to the COVID-19 pandemic. And could you explain to our listeners the variety of scholars that come to your conferences and what type of research that is discussed or what kind of variation you see within this type of work?

Rebecca:

Well, I'll start, but then Mark can continue. I guess what I'd like to say is I can't imagine anything more perfect. I mean, it was as if the flowering of this discipline or subdiscipline was just astonishing. I mean, the people who came from all over, oh my gosh, we had speakers from everywhere around the world actually, people came in from the Netherlands and from Japan and from all kinds of places. I think what was amazing was that almost everyone who was there was actually convinced that there was a relationship between Buddhism and law in their country and is dedicated to working on it. So that was very exciting. Burma has opened up, besides Tibet, and the entire Burmese legal system prior to colonization by the British was based on, and states that it was based on, Buddhist Vinaya doctrine, which means the law codes for the monastics and the nuns. So it was just incredibly exciting and it ranges all the way, which Mark can talk about from really old Buddhist texts, very, very original texts that people are translating in all different languages to what happened this fall in Nova Scotia and a local Buddhist sect center. So it was really exciting. People love our conferences because they have such a good time. The food is so good, it's not too big a conference, so they really get to see each other a lot and they all, many of them, dedicated themselves to doing the source book, which we'll talk about later. So anyway, it was exciting.

Mark:

Yeah, I do want to underscore what Rebecca said about the fact that there's no convincing needed for these folks that Buddhism and law is a legitimate subfield of religion and law that is worth our time and effort to study. That's having been associated with these gatherings here going back two decades now, that change has been nice to see, and we can really kind of gather and really get down into subjects and issues that are kind of animating a lot of the folks in this field. I would say that the type of people, there are some differences that I think have begun to appear and see recur over time. There are those folks who are mainly interested in studying the Vinaya, these monastic codes that are really foundational for Buddhism. I mean, one of the things that makes Buddhism really unique in the history of religions is the fact that it began as a monastic religion. You find monasticism in a lot of the other world religions. But that was added on later as a kind of, after the religion had already spread and really become quite institutionalized. In Buddhism, it was really the reverse. So to be a Buddhist in ancient India essentially meant that you had left home and renounced home life and joined the monastic community. And they had codes and rules, precepts to live by, which is what we call the Vinaya. So we have a lot of folks who are intensely interested in understanding what are in those codes. And Rebecca can talk about this a little more, but they really are just sort of like case law. They take the form of monks encounter a problem, they go to the Buddha and say, so-and-so was doing this, and really that's not okay, is it? And then the Buddha essentially lays down a new rule, okay, that no, that monk didn't follow proper decorum behavior, and so from now on, monks will do this. So they really take this sort of form of case law in a way. So we have scholars who are really interested in those ancient recensions and studying differences between them because different communities had their own Vinaya codes. And then we have others who are really interested in, as Rebecca said, particularly for the folks in Southeast Asia, they're very much interested in how these law codes and other sources of legal information from Buddhism influenced the creation of the broader societal norms and legal systems. And then others like me who look a little bit more at how the law has been influencing Buddhism in more sort of contemporary or recent historical times. So we have a broad array I think, of people coming at it from different perspectives.

Logan:

And were there any changes seen before when the conference was scheduled for the year before? Were there any differences or advancements in the research that you saw between this year and the past? Or were those topics, those research studies kind of stayed consistent or did anything else emerge during that gap year?

Rebecca:

I'd say that with the journal, it's just gotten better and better and better.

Mark:

Nothing really changed from the year, not much changed in a year. This is a field that's slow growing and taking a while. So a one year delay didn't really affect the sort of content or approach that people took. Although it, Rebecca was right before when she said, the people that get together for these all say this is their favorite forum for gathering. I think mostly because they're oftentimes at conferences having to justify and explain what it is they do to people that aren't really aware or don't think that law, as Rebecca was saying, with these archeologists, not really recognizing that what they were dealing with was really legal issues in many of the inscriptions that they were studying. But once they're made to see that, I think they come to recognize the importance much like I did at one time.

Logan:

And we spoke briefly about the workshop that you held that Sunday of the conference talking about tackling source and workbook material. Could you talk more about that or what your, that current work looks like?

Mark:

Sure. Well, I mean it's something that we've been discussing for quite a long time. I mean, I think not long after the volume, edited volume Cambridge University Press, that really sort of announced this, I think, as a field that people should pay attention to, we started talking about gathering materials that scholars who work in this field use and trying to make them more available in English because a lot of these, there are real barriers. Many of the languages are less studied and not well known. Some of them might be more well known, but the materials themselves are kind of obscure. So we have for quite some time talked about wanting some sort of anthology, a source book making these primary source materials available in English translation with some contextualization. And that is something we talked about a long time and at previous conferences have brought up, but never really seemed to get the ball rolling. So this time we made a specific Sunday workshop for people that wanted to be involved in this and were going to devote some time and energy to it. And we talked about strategies for how to do that, how to recruit people, and what areas we wanted to work in, what kinds of materials. So that's sort of the genesis of it. You want to say a bit more?

Rebecca:

It's so exciting because they're really asking law questions. I mean, there were actually discussions in which people said, Rebecca, should I go to law school? I had three people say to me. We had one conversation about proof, a fellow said, oh, well this isn't enough proof. And I just went, proof in my legal world means this and this and this. It doesn't mean just any kind of evidence. It doesn't mean this; it doesn't mean that. And they were open to those more detailed conversations. So for example, the average person in Buddhist studies will be writing about something and they'll say, oh, this was a loan. Right? But of course the problem with that is that there are lots of different kinds of loans. There's lots of different ways to have them set up and it makes a huge difference that the debt load, the interest, all kinds of things that we tend to think about. And they just don't ask themselves any of those questions. So this was completely different. I mean, there were a lot of people there. They all want to work as a team, this book they want to represent their area. It was very exciting. But they were asking questions like that, like what book can you give me? And I gave them lots of books from my library because they're interested now in understanding what things are in a more detailed way. So anyway, it was just, the workshop was, I was shocked. Were you shocked?

Mark:

I don't know if I'd say shocked. Pleasantly surprised.

Rebecca:

Yeah, I was so excited. I mean, I can't imagine a better workshop. It was fabulous. I think Mark and I were sort of thinking, well, should we do this or not? And so we decided beforehand that we would just wait to see if people were interested. We were sort of like, well, we've talked about this. This is the third time we talked about this. And people were really gung-ho. It was wonderful. We were very excited.

Mark:

Rebecca points to a persistent problem. I think with moving forward in this, in that people are trained in one area. It really is joining, so Buddhism and law, you tend to get folks who are well-trained in Buddhism or Buddhist studies, but don't really know that much about the law because they didn't go to school and don't know the terms. So they throw certain legal terms around without necessarily understanding what those really are in how they're employed in legal contexts. I had a friend when I was, before I went to get my master's in religious studies, a good friend of my father who was a law professor at the University of Iowa, he said to me, Mark, you should go get a law degree. I said, well I'm planning to go and study religion. I don't really see why I would need a law degree for that. And he was insistent. I mean, he would tell me every time he saw me, you should get a law degree. And once I asked him, I said, well, why do you keep telling me that? Why do you keep telling me I should go and study law? And he said, well, even if you end up in a religious studies department as a professor somewhere, if you have a law degree, they have to pay you more. Okay, well, I'm not really going into this for the money. So I discounted it. But then years later here I am working on Buddhism and law, and I keep thinking back, I should have listened to him. I should have gotten that law degree. It would've really help me as I studied this stuff. But yeah, anyway.

Logan:

And how is this shaping what your future research is looking like? So is the source book material kind of driving the force for your future research?

Rebecca:

The letters are out to the teams. We finished drafting a letter to the teams. The book proposal is done. We wrote letters to help them write letters to other people. We've been contacted back by a couple of them, but not all of them. So I think the pressure is going to go on them in January. We're going to ask for Zoom meetings and stuff with all of them, but they're just really excited. It's really wonderful. Even the ones who are doing heavy duty Sanskrit, Pali and Chinese Vinaya studies are asking me, how does property law work? Is there this? Is there that? Is there is difference between possession and ownership? So it's very fun.

Mark:

I don't know that it's going to shape the future direction of my work. I think there is one way that I think this will help further the field and my own contributions to it. And that is to get people together to work on a project like this. And it might involve recruiting some folks who don't even see themselves as necessarily working in Buddhism and law, but they work on certain kinds of materials that have a lot of relevance for the kind of stuff that we're looking at. So to the extent that we can kind of interest them in this and say, well, we really just need, you're working on these texts anyway. Let's say maybe they're local cases that involve monasteries in property disputes or theft or other kinds of things. It's going to help by making people aware that materials that they may not have seen as having a bearing on the study of Buddhism and law, in fact, do have a lot of relevance. And maybe we can kind of build further momentum toward gaining acceptance for this area.

Logan:

And briefly before we wrap up, I wanted to talk about your journal Buddhism, Law & Society with William S. Hein & Co. Now it's going to be housed at Rutgers University and talk about where the future of the journal is headed.

Rebecca:

Well, that is really exciting. I mean, here, our Asian studies department is quite small, and…

Mark:

program

Rebecca

The program, excuse me, is very small. At Rutgers, it is 25 people from all over Asia and here we do not have a religious studies department at all. And I think it's 15 people at Rutgers. So the wealth there in terms of just brain power to work on something like this, also the two people are getting it, are just fantastic. One is Christian Lammerts, who is the expert in medieval Burmese legislation cases, et cetera, and has become very well-known because of that. And they were very Buddhist inspired. I mean, he's probably one of the ones who just went, of course there's Buddhism and law, which was very exciting to me. And the other one is Petra Kieffer-Pülz, who is in Germany and is an extremely well known, probably one of the top Sanskritists in the world. And she does Sanskrit and Pali and is an expert translator with the Pali society in England. She lives in Germany, but she is very concerned with them, and they have translated almost everything that's really important in terms of sutras and everything else of the Buddha. So it's really exciting. It's been a real lug. We have worked along, plugged along, and I work with Josh Coene mostly doing the editorial work there. He's been very, very good. So it will be really nice, to be truthful, to pass it on to a whole team that is well-situated and has a lot of other scholars and really knows what they're doing. And they have all kinds of plans for more conferences, et cetera. We told them that we'll keep hosting it through Baldy, no matter what. So we're very excited about that.

Mark:

Yeah, it's bittersweet. Losing the journal, not losing, but having it move on is somewhat bittersweet. But I mean, I will say that when I go places and I say that I'm here at University at Buffalo and I work on, if I say I work on Buddhism and law, oh, isn't that the place I've heard? They know they've associated buffalo with Buddhism and law because of all of the, especially with the help of The Baldy Center, all the conferences we've done, the volumes, starting the journal. So we're sort of the incubator of things. And so it is good to see it branch out and other people pick up the baton and start running with it. So we have a lot of hope that this journal will continue to grow and become important. But yeah, very thankful that it's landing at Rutgers, which is actually my alma mater, but it's somewhat bittersweet as well.

Logan:

I really enjoyed our conversation and learning more about the ins and outs of this new, or I guess developed now, area of study. So I really appreciate it.

Rebecca:

Well, thank you. Thank you so much.

Logan:

That was associate professor, Dr. Mark Nathan, and Dr. Rebecca French, professor of law. And this has been The Baldy Center for Law and Social Policy Podcast produced by the University at Buffalo. Let us know what you think by visiting our X, formerly Twitter, @baldycenter, or emailing us at baldycenter@buffalo.edu. To learn more about the Center, visit our website, buffalo.edu/baldycenter. The theme music for the season was composed by Matias Homar. My name is Logan and on behalf of The Baldy Center, thank you for listening.