Asia is home to four of the five great world religions - Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam, and Christianity - along with other classical philosophical and belief systems such as Confucianism and Taoism, as well as countless smaller, localized, and largely unwritten religious traditions.
To understand Asian law in its social and cultural context, it is essential to ask how religious and/ or philosophical practices and beliefs influence legal activities and institutions and shared concepts of justice.
Indeed, it is impossible to consider any aspect of Asian societies without reference to the religious and philosophical substrata that extend back through the millennia and remain extraordinarily important today among the peoples and nations of Asia.This chapter focuses primarily on law and religion in Asia. But to speak of law and religion is somewhat misleading, since it implies that they are distinct from one another and that the task of sociolegal scholars is to examine the ways in which they interact. If religion is positioned outside of law and legal institutions, then it would seem that the task confronting researchers is to determine when and how religion may affect legal practices or values or, conversely, how law may affect religious organizations, beliefs, or activities. As we shall see, however, the notion that law and religion are separable or even distinguishable from one another made little sense within the historical
The prevalence in Asia of the fifth world religion, Judaism, is considerably smaller.
traditions we shall consider. It is only in recent years that the separability of law and religion in Asia has even been thinkable, and one might argue that the imagined separation has never been achieved in practice. In the classical religions themselves, partitioning the legal from the sacred was never a central concern. It would be more accurate to speak of law in religion or even religion as law. As Clifford Geertz (1983) famously observed, both law and religion are ways of “imagining the real,” and for most of the history of Asia, the two imaginings were one and the same.
We begin with an overview of premodern Asian religious traditions in order to gain an understanding of their legal dimensions, particularly in the period before Western law arrived in Asia.
The readings that follow address Hinduism, Buddhism, Confucianism, Taoism, and Islam. Christianity played an important role in some Asian societies much later than the other world religions, and its history is entangled in the story of European imperialism, a topic that will receive attention in the later chapters of this book. For that reason, we do not include a separate reading on Christianity in this chapter. We should also point out that some scholars would disagree with our decision to include Confucianism and Taoism alongside Hinduism, Buddhism, and Islam. They might argue that Confucianism should not be considered a “religion” and that Taoism has little importance for the study of law in society. Other scholars, however, question both of these assumptions, and we leave it to readers to decide this matter for themselves. Our position is that both Confucianism and Taoism played a historical role in establishing fundamental understandings of justice, social order, individual obligation, and political legitimacy in China and other Asian societies. In that sense, they were at least functionally analogous to Hinduism, Buddhism, and Islam.