Judging in the Buddha's Court: A Buddhist Judicial System in Contemporary Asia, Benjamin Schonthal

The influence of religion on Asian courts is far greater and deeper than locations or buildings (see Chapter ι). In many countries, religious courts coexist with state courts, and even official courts often extend deference to religious laws and norms in judicial decision-making.

Like other systems of religious law in the contemporary world, the judicial systems of Buddhist monks in Asia interact with state law in varying ways. In some contexts - Myanmar, Thailand, and Bhutan, in particular - Buddhist monks have access to monastic judicial systems that are officially recognized and/or administered by the state. While these official Buddhist courts do not displace completely more traditional procedures of dispute resolution that take place within monasteries, they do provide a decisive venue for addressing significant disputes among monks that cannot be resolved by their immediate community of peers. These tend to include: disputes over the use and distribution of sangha properties (such as paddy land and temples); quarrels over which monks ought to be given prestigious and powerful positions; controversies over the proper interpretation of Buddhist doctrine; and argu­ments about whether a monk has or has not violated the sanghas stringent behavioural code. For example, when serious disputes arise over Buddhist doctrine in Myanmar that cannot be resolved within the monastery, those disputes can be referred to a government-appointed monastic tribunal, at either the regional or the national level.

These systems of officially sanctioned monastic courts represent the excep­tion rather than the rule. In most Asian countries, as well as most countries outside the region, governments do not officially recognize or sponsor Buddhist monastic judicial systems, meaning that the determinations made by monastic judges cannot be enforced by the police or other state authorities. Although Sri Lanka is a Buddhist-majority country with a national Constitution that obligates the government to “protect and foster” Buddhism, Sri Lanka's legal environment follows this second system. While Sri Lanka's state-court judges acknowledge the existence of a monastic judicial system as a factual reality, they do not treat the decisions given by Buddhist monastic judges as authoritative sources of law nor as legally binding prece­dents that state courts are obliged to follow. At the same time, long-standing doctrines in Sri Lankan case-law prohibit state-court judges from intervening in disputes over specifically “ecclesiastical” matters such as Buddhist teachings or monastic discipline, which are deemed to be entirely “spiritual” in nature and therefore beyond the competence of state judges.

This is not to say that state and monastic courts are completely isolated from each other. Some state-court judges treat monastic-court decisions as import­ant evidence or advisory opinions when ruling on a dispute. Moreover, state courts admit routinely cases where “spiritual matters” mingle with “temporal” ones, as in the frequent cases of disputes concerning the guardianship, use, and transfer of property that has been entrusted to monastic groups.

This means that, in Sri Lanka, as in other places, Buddhist monastic fraternities must design and oversee their own in-house rules of conduct, procedures of adjudication, and conventions of punishment through which they can effectively manage disputes concerning not just property, but also Buddhist teachings, discipline, monastic comportment, membership, and a variety of other matters. Moreover, because the state courts do not recognize most of these issues as falling within the jurisdiction of lay judges (being purely “spiritual” in nature), this legal system must also be able to deliver judgments that appear acceptable and legitimate to the monastic litigants in the absence of any threat of enforcement by police. Therefore, the design of contemporary monastic judicial systems in Sri Lanka (and in other countries where there is no state-backed monastic system) should not only align with principles of fairness and truthfulness taken from Buddhist texts, but also be structured so as to discourage monastic parties who receive unfavourable decisions from ignoring those decisions or, more disruptively, relitigating the “temporal” aspects of the issue in state courts whose judgments are backed by coercion.

These concerns are not hypothetical. Monastic disputes migrate frequently from monastic tribunals to state courts in Sri Lanka, with disputants translating Buddhist legal arguments into the language of public and private law in order to make their case justiciable by state courts.

As can be seen above, Buddhist judging connotes more than a set of pious principles or mindsets that decision-makers ought to adopt in interpreting law and resolving disputes, more than the cultivation of Buddhist moral values (equanimity, compassion, patience, etc.) in the minds of judges. Viewed through the lens of legal texts written by and for Buddhist monks - particularly those produced by the Ramanna Nikriya - Buddhist judging also implies a set of procedural elements: fair, consistent, and systematic methods for managing disputants, running trials, airing grievances, considering evidence, ordering authority, and processing appeals. Buddhist judging, in this view, connotes not simply a form of virtue jurisprudence, but a broader set of institutional arrangements as well.

Those who are interested in judging and judgment in Asia ought to pay attention to these Buddhist conceptions of judging (in this broader sense of combined jurisprudential and procedural features) and take seriously the contemporary examples of Buddhist judicial systems that appear in the region.

These alignments between Buddhist and state legal cultures are not simply the result of political interference in religious law or the deliberate imitation of state law by Buddhist monastic law-makers. Even when monastic judicial systems come into being as a result of state-led legislation or administrative reform, as in the cases of Thailand or Myanmar, the legal and institutional imaginaries that form the basis of those reforms circulate widely among cultural elites, both political and religious. Rather than simply exporting legal prototypes from one domain (politics) to another (Buddhism), the institutions of monastic judging and those state judiciaries - or at least the idealized presentation of those systems in normative texts - draw concurrently from a shared reservoir of cultural assumptions about who should interpret rules and resolve disputes and how they should do so. Official Buddhist judicial insti­tutions, such as those in Myanmar and Thailand, are the product of explicit and implicit co-ordination between the legal imaginaries of high-ranking monks and those of high-ranking legislators, not the displacing of one imagin­ary by the other. A similar argument may be made about the Buddhist judicial systems created by monastic groups in Sri Lanka. As one can see in the long quote from the monastic judge in the section above, as well as in the many parables of wise judges taken from the Buddhist-story literature mentioned in the introduction, the same qualities and procedures that contribute to a perfect act of judgment by the Buddha also make for a perfect act of judgment by the magistrate. Utopias of judicial action circulate freely among popula­tions, ignoring the imagined boundary between religious and secular law.

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