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‘The Traditions of Mahosadha’: legal reasoning from Northern Thailand
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 February 2009
Extract
Twenty years ago hardly any legal texts from the Middle Mekong region were known. Now more than a 150 legal manuscripts have been borrowed from monastery book-chests, cleaned and microfilmed. Only one of these discoveries has been translated into a non-Thai language, but that is a substantial and important text. Aroonrut Wichienkeeo's and Gehan Wijeyewardene's Laws of King Mangrai translates a manuscript from ‘The Elephant Supported Temple’ in Nan which Richard Davis arranged to be copied. Reviewing it in these pages I suggested that the MS has jumbled together four distinct works in two broad categories. The bulk of the text consists of rules about family, theft and compensation drawn from works called Worldly law and the law of Dhamma (§1–49) and Mangrai's Dhammathat (§50–76). The rest of the MS deals with legal precedents rather than rules and can be divided into a collection of judgement tales (title unknown) (§77–87) and The traditions of King Mahosot (§88–106). There are corruptions, lacunae and interpolations throughout, but the earlier sections can at least be checked against other recensions of Northern Thai law. That is not possible for the last 20 sections: there is nothing in the surviving literature remotely similar to The traditions of King Mahosot. In this paper I attempt to reconstruct the original intentions of its author on contextual grounds: knowing what we do about Middle Mekong legal culture, what is the most plausible reconstruction of this damaged, but fascinating, work? My main aim will have been met if I can make the text more accessible to legal and political historians.
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- Information
- Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies , Volume 60 , Issue 2 , June 1997 , pp. 315 - 326
- Copyright
- Copyright © School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London 1997
References
1 The Laws of King Mangrai, (ed. and tr.) Wichienkeeo, Aroonrut and Wijeyewardende, Gehan (Canberra: Department of Anthropology, Research School of Pacific Studies, Australian National University, 1986). Unadorned section numbers (§ 89), refer to this edition.Google Scholar
I use the following abbreviations in this paper: ROB, day-month-year = Than Tun, The Royal Orders of Burma A.D. 1598–1885, vols. 1–10 (Kyoto: CSEAS, 1984–90); BSOAS= this journal; JAAS= the [Japanese] Journal of Asian and African Studies; citations in the form V, II, 49 = the Pali Tipitaka following the conventions established by the Critical Pali dictionary;, citations in the form Smp., 177 = VI.61 refer to Vin.a, Buddhagosa's commentary on the Vinaya known as Samantapāsādikā. Since I am using Bapat's, P. and Hirakawa's, A. translation of the Chinese version (Shan-Chien-p'i-p'o-Sha, Bhandarkar Oriental Series, 10, Poona, 1970)Google Scholar the page number of their translation is followed by the equivalent chapter and paragraph of the Pali original. Cowell, , followed by volume number and date = Thee Jataka stories of the Buddha's former births translated from the Pali by various hands under the editorship of E. B. Cowell (Cambridge, 1895–1913, 6 vols.).Google Scholar
2 Huxley, A., BSOAS, 51/3, 1988, 609–610.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
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4 Mahā-ummagga Jātaka (no. 546). Cowell, VI, 1907, 156–246.
5 Huxley, A., ‘The Kurudhamma: from ethics to statecraft’, Journal of Buddhist Ethics, 2, 1995, 191–203; 200.Google Scholar
6 Hallisey would prefer to describe such Pali stories as ‘allegedly non-canonical’ rather than ‘apocryphal’ or ’counterfeit’: Hallisey, C., ‘Nibbānasutta’, Journal of the Pali Text Society, 18, 1993, 97–130Google Scholar; 97, n. 2. I sympathize with his intention, but to English legal ears his alternative formulation sounds odd. Within the Mahāvihāra tradition a Jātaka is denned widely to mean any story of any prior birth of the Buddha. (See Sāriputta's Sāratthadīpanī as quoted in Mirando, A., Buddhism in Sri Lanka in the 17th and 18th Centuries, Dehiwalala: Tisara Prakasakayo, 1985, 98)Google Scholar. The 547 former births in the canonical verses and the 50 births in the various Pannāsā Jātaka recensions barely scratch the surface: on the night of his enlightenment, the Buddha remembered more than 100,000 of his births (M, I, 22)!
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8 His allusions-to borrowing eyeballs and small white pigs, to killing cranes and filling wells two metres deep with crystal—have not enabled me to identify the source of the story.
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11 Section 97 gives its own provenance for this story: ‘Where can this precedent be found? In the Atthathamma in the section Pariyathappa [Yoithi?]’. This does not sound like a citation to the Jātaka. The story can be found in the Laotian dhammathat known as the Code de Vientiane (Raquez, A., Pages Iaotiennes, Hanoi: Schneider, 1902, 414Google Scholar). This could be a hint that its Middle Mekong readership knew the Code de Vientiane under the title Atthathamma (‘The meaning of dhamma’).
12 The story is also found in a Burmese rajathat: ROB, 28–1–1795, section 60, giving Kosambi and Benares as the cities rather than the Nan text's Kosamiyia and Anurath. The Burmese tale is told to illustrate the moral ‘Decisions depend on motives and circumstances’. Than Tun has traced the canonical sources for most of the rajathat, but failed here. See further Tun, Than 1983 ‘The Royal Order (Wednesday 28 January 1795) of King Badon’, JAAS, 26, 1983, 153–201Google Scholar. The Nan text describes the source of the story as ‘the Tikanibat’. Steven Collins suggests (personal communication) that this means the third Nipata of the Canonical Jātaka.
13 Homer, I. B., Ten jataka stories each illustrating one of the ten pāramitā with Pali text (London: Luzac, 1956, xix)Google Scholar. This playground rhetoric is a standard folklore motif: Thompson, StithA motif index of folk literature (6 vols. Copenhagen: Rosenkilde & Bagger, 1955–1958), 4Google Scholar: J1161, ‘Literal pleading: the letter of the law has been met’.
14 When we use expletives such as ‘ Slap me!’ the context makes it plain that we do not wish to be interpreted literally.
15 This rather odd conversation follows a model in the Kuṇala Jdtaka (Cowell, 1907), v, 239.
16 A slightly different version of this tale, in which the woman who wins the baby must pay the price of an extra jar to her companion, appears in a collection of 12 Laotian judgement tales attributed to Grandfather King, the Ven. Chenla Bodhisatta: Brengues, J., ‘Contes judiciaires laotiens’, La Revue Indochine, 2, 1904, 124–128.Google Scholar
17 e.g. Law, B. C., The history of the Buddha's religion (Sāsanavamsa), (London: Luzac, 1952), 118–120Google Scholar. The monk who was later to win the title ‘Tilokalankara’ decided in the early seventeenth century to leave the order when aged about 25. An encounter with a mysterious, possibly supernatural, young woman changed his mind.
18 A different version of the story says that they had: ‘This is a just decision because the man and woman have already slept together …’; Leclère, A., Contes laotiens et contes cambodgiens (Paris: Leroux, 1903), 104–105.Google Scholar
19 V, III, 28; Smp., 195 = VII.31.
20 Cowell, 1907, vi:160–l and vi:163.
21 Leclère (Contes laotiens et contes cambodgiens, 9–12) compares four other versions of this tale, two each from Laos and Cambodia. He comments on the fact that these different versions divide up responsibility in different ratios: 1/6:2/6:3/6 or 1/5:1/5:3/5 or 4/9:3/9:2/9: ‘Les variantes sur ce point sont plus importantes parce qu'elles apprécient différement les responsabilités et constituent trois motions d'appréciation.’ Now that we can add the Nan text's ratio of 2/10:3/10:5/10 as a fourth mode of division it becomes clear that the precise numerical quantification is not the point. What makes all these decisions just is that some attempt has been made to split responsibility.
22 Smp., 324–5 = XI.47. Buddhaghosa mentions that this point was discussed by three of the commentaries on which he based his work.
23 Smp., 271 =X.2.
24 The same story may be found in Leclère, Contes laotiens et contes cambodgiens, 47–51: ‘Le diamant volé’.
25 cf. Doyle, A. Conan ‘The adventure of Black Peter’, in The complete Sherlock Holmes (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1981), 558–572.Google Scholar
26 My versification of: Smp., 234 = VIII.64.
27 Manu, VIII, 126.
28 Ishizawa, Y., ‘Remarks on the epigraphy of Angkorian Cambodia’ in (ed.) Hooker, M.The classical laws of S. E. Asia (Singapore: Butterworths, 1986), 1:205 40; 221–222.Google Scholar
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30 Sections 19 and 73 of the Nan manuscript translated in Aroonrut The Laws of King Mangrai. The first is from the part of the text called ‘Worldly law a nd t he Law of Dharnma’, which is a title shared with many texts from Chiang Mai. (See further n. 33.) The second is from three legal lists which bring the ‘Laws of King Mangrai’ section to a close. Mangrai is the founder and culture hero of Chiang Mai.
31 Could the story of the monk who stole phraphloengphlaw from Chompu and took it to Lanka refer to this Vinaya precedent? Phraphloengphlaw cannot, I understand, be easily translated. Might it be a copyist's error for a phrase meaning ‘coconut shell goblet’?
32 My paraphrase of a passage in section 103.
33 Wichienkeeo, Aroonrut, ‘Lanna customary law’, in Huxley, A. (ed.), Thai law: Buddhist law: essays on the history of Thailand, Laos and Burma (Bangkok: White Orchid Press, 1996), 31–42Google Scholar; see 32, 41.
34 Many such stories are known in the South-East Asian legal literature. For instance a tale of four (or five) brahmins whose fabrications are exposed when cross-examined out of each others' hearing appears in the earliest datable Burmese dhammathat (Dhammavilasa c. A.D. 1200), in Kaingza's Maharajathat (c. 1637) and Bhummajeya's Manugye (c. 1752).
35 Okudaira, R., ‘The role of Kaingza Manuraja’, JAAS, 27, 1984, 180–186.Google Scholar