BOOK REVIEW 1 Buddhist Law 2 Christian D. Lammerts, Buddhist Law in Burma: A History Dhammasattha Texts and Jurisprudence, 3 1250–1850 (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2018) pp 304. Hardcover: $62.08. 4 doi:10.1017/als.2019.14 5 Dhammasattha is a genre of legal literature that was popular in Southeast Asia during much of the 6 second millennium. Somewhat varied in style and contents, most dhammasattha texts appear to 7 have been written as instructional manuals for those who were charged with managing disputes in 8 the pre- and early-modern periods: village heads, magistrates, judges, royal officers, and other 9 “good persons.” These manuals instruct would-be users on a variety of topics related to arbitra- 10 tion. These include procedural matters such as the major types of litigation, the ideal qualities of 11 judges, classifications of people and offences, and lists of rules and remedies. They also include 12 (what we moderns might want to call) religious matters relating to cosmology and Buddhist sote- 13 riology. Thus, alongside discussions of evidence and oaths, one also finds information about law’s 14 cosmic origins as well as explanations of how and why the proper adjudication of disputes helps 15 one attain a better rebirth. Dhammasattha texts have been important in the territories of modern- 16 day Thailand, Cambodia, and Laos. Yet they have played an especially major role in the legal 17 history of Burma. 18 Buddhist Law in Burma is a special book. Although the dhammasattha genre has been studied 19 by several other scholars, 1 Lammerts’s book engages directly, critically, and comprehensively with 20 Burma’s large and important dhammasattha manuscript archive on a new scale. Not only has 21 Lammerts located, translated, and analyzed an incredible amount of to-date unexamined sources; 22 he does so in a manner that is accessible and inviting to scholars from a variety of fields. For 23 scholars of Buddhism, the book offers a fresh and erudite history of the religious worlds and 24 textual practices of pre-modern Burmese monks and lay literati. For historians of Southeast 25 Asia, Lammerts opens up the logics and material culture of Burmese manuscript production 26 in the centuries before the British colonization, while also providing new insights into the 27 pre-modern social imaginaries. For socio-legal scholars, this book offers an unmatched and 28 unprecedented introduction to a type of law and jurisprudence that shows both remarkable par- 29 allels with modern Asian and Western law as well as instructive divergences (a theme explored 30 below). For all scholars, this book provides an exemplum of the very best of socio-legal history, 31 combining scholarly rigor, subtle insight, and strong, clear, compelling prose. 32 At its broadest, Lammerts’s book accomplishes two major tasks. First, it offers the first detailed 33 account of the history and transformations of Burmese dhammasattha literature from the early 34 second millennium to the advent of colonialism—one that is informed by what seems to be an 35 exhaustive consultation of relevant epigraphical and manuscript sources in the original languages 36 (mainly Burmese and Pali, but also Sanskrit and Arakanese) along with scattered Pyu and Mon 37 sources in translation. Second, the book lays out a clear picture of dhammasattha jurisprudence 38 and its transformations between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, which, in Lammerts’s 39 view, “constitutes a tradition of Buddhist law—or, minimally, a tradition of legal discourse © Cambridge University Press and KoGuan Law School, Shanghai Jiao Tong University 2019. 1 Important recent studies include Ishii (1986); Okudaira (1986); Baker and Phongpaichit (2016); and a very important edited volume by Huxley (1996). Asian Journal of Law and Society (2019), page 1 of 5