Law and Legalism in Historic Tibet: Workshop Report

The legal system of Tibet, one of the world’s most important theocratic states, has long remained elusive to western scholars. Archives of legalistic documents concerning property and commercial transactions and ideological tracts on the Buddhist foundations of the Tibetan state and its laws have seemed practically irreconcilable. Behind this workshop hovers the basic question, ‘What was Tibetan law’?

In fact, Tibetans have made laws since the sixth century, when they developed a script for their language. The early kings looked to China’s imperial tradition for inspiration, combining its legalistic forms with the traditions of feuding and mediation maintained by their own clans. But after the early empire collapsed, Tibet had no centralized political system until the rise of the Dalai Lamas in the seventeenth century. Paradoxically, it was during this period of political fragmentation that Buddhism was firmly established on the plateau, monasteries grew in political influence, and writers developed theories about Buddhist law. These theories were adopted by the Dalai Lamas and underpinned their new administration, which expanded to control a large part of central Tibet. Government officials developed legalistic techniques to create rules for the new bureaucracy, manage their feudal estates, and unify systems of taxation, and they created documents to record property transactions, trade, and control of the peasantry. But Buddhist principles of non-violence hardly provided a good basis for these developments, leaving judges and mediators to wrestle with the problems of punishment, truth-finding, oaths and ordeals, and relationships between law and ritual, into the twentieth century.

This workshop brought together twelve scholars working on different aspects of Tibet and its legal practices, texts, and ideas. In their presentations and discussions many interesting aspects of this complex story were raised and clarified, while questions and issues for further exploration were identified. The papers will form a much-needed over-view of Tibetan legal history.

The workshop was organised by Fernanda Pirie, together with Berthe Jansen of Leiden University, as part of the AHRC-funded project, Legal Ideology in Tibet on which she is been working since 2015 with Charles Manson. The organisers gratefully acknowledge the support of the CSLS and the Cluster of Tibetan and Himalayan Studies at Wolfson College, where the event was held.

The project will lead to further publications, while sources on Tibetan law can be found on the project web-site: www.tibetanlaw.org.