The Golden Yoke: The Legal Cosmology of Buddhist Tibet

Reviewed by Andrew Huxley

            
            
             
            By Rebecca Redwood French. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 
            1995. Pp. xv+404, 64 plates, 17 figures. 
            Unfortunately, the subject matter of French's study, the precolonial 
            law of Tibet under the Dalai Lama's government, is now appropriate 
            to this journal. Pre-1959 Tibet has become history, but it remains, 
            for the time being, within living memory. Dharamsala, the seat of 
            the Tibetan government-in-exile where much of French's research took 
            place, will soon be entirely inhabited by second-generation 
            refugees. French won her race to preserve memories of dispute 
            settlement and administration in 1940s and 1950s Tibet, but it was a 
            close-run thing: her principal informant in Tibetan law whose 
            "opinions and prejudices are the backbone of this work" (p. 11) died 
            while the book was still in draft. To produce an anthropology of 
            law, French has had to struggle with the anthropology of memory. 
            Would her informants' nostalgia convert the jagged Himalayan peaks 
            into "blue remembered hills"? The sensible precautions she has taken 
            to avoid this provide a primer on how to do this kind of fieldwork. 
            Tibetan law, like that of other literature cultures, combines texts 
            and human attitudes toward them. The Tibetan tradition of writing 
            law texts goes back at least five (perhaps fifteen) centuries. We 
            urgently need an analysis of this genre to establish the balance 
            between textual continuity and innovation in the various legal 
            recensions, and I know of a German scholar who has the task in hand. 
            On past form, his work will be misunderstood. Reviewers will 
            enthusiastically describe these texts as "law codes" and assume that 
            they function within Buddhist society much as Napoleon's Code Civile 
            or the California Penal Code function in the West. In fact, the way 
            in which legal practice relates to written codes of law is complex 
            and never fully articulated. The relationship differs between France 
            and California and differs radically between those two cultures and 
            premodern Asia. The Tibetan codes will tell us very little unless we 
            know what use Tibetans made of them: we need a Tibetan practitioner 
            to unlock the real meaning of the Tibetan laws. But where, after 
            1959, are we to find one? The Tibetan legal specialists were not, as 
            were the Burmese, organized into a formal profession. There was no 
            degree ceremony or practice certificate awarded by the guru to his 
            successful disciple. Nonetheless, we can be pretty certain that 
            French, an attorney in the United States, has also qualified as a 
            lawyer in the Dalai Lama's Tibet. She studied daily for three years 
            with her guru, a high official of the pre-1959 government whose 
            specialty was the legal literature. What this book contains, teased 
            out from mythology, architecture, and ritual, are the unspoken 
            assumptions that make up the Tibetan relationship between legal 
            practice and written law. French gives us the key that will unlock 
            the law codes and reveal the meaning within. 
            This is good news for legal history, but does it concern historians 
            of religion? I hear a heckle from the back of the lecture hall: "We 
            are interested in Tibet qua Buddhism, not Tibet per se. The pre-1959 
            law will only interest us if it is demonstrably Buddhist." Well, I 
            can assure you that it is. The phrase "legal cosmology" in French's 
            title signals her argument that the Tibetan view of the universe and 
            the Tibetan view of law share the same Buddhist structure. 
            Elsewhere, she refers to it as a "kaleidoscopic cosmology," meaning 
            "realigning sets of patterns and actions that are both constant and 
            ever changing, integrating and disintegrating, coherent and 
            incoherent" (p. 16). They underpin Tibet's jurisprudential concepts 
            "such as the absolute uniqueness of each circumstance, the absence 
            of precedent, the importance of karmic sanctions and the legal 
            structure of the country as a pulsating mandala" (p. 16). The law is 
            not Buddhist in the superficial sense that it borrows a few phrases 
            from the Vinaya or a few stories from the Jataka and Avadana 
            literature. It is deep-down Buddhist in its fundamental hostility to 
            rules and its assumption that nature not only makes ethical 
            judgments but can apply karmic sanctions to those who have 
            misbehaved. I have found the same deep Buddhist legal assumptions in 
            my own work on Southeast Asia, and I know how difficult it is to put 
            them into words. The English language lacks an appropriate 
            vocabulary. By using the nearest English equivalent--a phrase like 
            "natural law," for example--we swamp our comparison with too many 
            unwanted resonances. The only solution is to speak metaphorically, 
            to trust in poetic evocation rather than academic exactitude, 
            trusting in Rorty's dictum that "It is pictures rather than 
            propositions, metaphors rather than statements, which determine most 
            of our philosophical convictions.") French's metaphor of choice is 
            the kaleidoscopic cosmology, "this whirling, interpenetrating 
            multiplicity, this atmosphere of interconnections and gaps, this 
            determined indeterminancy" (p. 16). It would not be mine. 
            Perhaps there is more at stake here than our different choice of 
            metaphors. We may each be led by our research material, in the sense 
            that Tibetan and Theravada Buddhism have chosen different vehicles 
            to express the same truth. Buddhist causation treats all conditions 
            of an event as equally important. But a legal or ethical rule can 
            only work by privileging some conditions and backgrounding others. 
            Our rule about liability for car crashes treats the skill and 
            attention of the drivers as all-important, while backgrounding 
            information about the make of the cars involved or the day of the 
            week on which the crash took place. Pointing out the exception that 
            proves the rule, or, if you prefer, "deconstructing the notion of 
            rule," is a distinct theme in Buddhist literature. In Tibetan 
            Buddhism the theme is expressed in the pulsations of the mandala, 
            while in Theravada Buddhism it emerges through the ever finer, and 
            ever more pointless, distinctions of the Abidhamma. 
            The book is handsomely produced. The text has been enhanced by 
            photographs of Tibet in the 1920s and line drawings of vernacular 
            architecture. It is also a storybook in the grand tradition of the 
            Arabian Nights or the Decameron since, from the myths that 
            illustrate Tibetan cultural presumptions to the firsthand accounts 
            of how trouble cases were handled, French's raw material is 
            narrative. She has provided a wide variety of settings in which 
            these narrative jewels can sparkle to best effect. Since even the 
            most reluctant student will be lured onward by the stories and 
            photographs, the book will be an excellent teaching aid for classes 
            in religion, history, law, and anthropology. 
            (1) Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton, 
            N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1979), p. 12.