This article, which introduces a special issue of Buddhism, Law & Society, identifies several foci of inquiry that may orient current and future scholarship on the legal pluralism of Buddhist monastic life in contemporary Southern Asia.
They act as agents and subjects in multiple regulatory regimes: from monastic tribunals, to constitutional law, to transnational legal bodies. Buddhist monks (like most people) live in a complex situation of legal pluralism. Through a consideration of these legal environments and the way they affected the case, this article illuminates ongoing questions about the legal and political status of Muslims on the island and provides a snapshot of the legal debates and discourses that have flowed into and fortified recent anti-Muslim sentiments on the island.Ĭontrary to popular stereotypes, Buddhist monks do not live in separate, cloistered worlds sealed off from domestic and international lawmaking, courts and politics. These environments offer differing opportunities and imperatives for expressing Muslim identity, religious equality, diversity, rights, and freedoms in contemporary Sri Lanka. It argues that Sri Lankan Muslims find themselves in three interlacing legal “environments” at the present moment: in an environment of general laws governing religion, in an environment of special laws and administrative bodies for Muslims, and in a broader constitutional environment that grants special recognition to Buddhism. This article uses an important Sri Lankan Supreme Court case concerning religious sound as a starting point for thinking about the intersections of Islam, law, politics, and Buddhism in Sri Lanka. By looking at the premodern roots of Buddhist constitutionalism and examining its distinctive formations in Sri Lanka and Thailand, this article explains how and why this particular form of religious constitutionalism has come to influence politics and law in contemporary South and Southeast Asia. This neglect presents a significant problem for scholars of comparative constitutional law because, as this article contends, some of the most important legal projects in South and Southeast Asia have been projects of Buddhist constitutionalism: attempts to use written constitutions and other basic laws to organize power in ways that protect and preserve Buddhist teachings and institutions, especially the institution of Buddhist monasticism, the saṅgha. While this shift has produced a rich literature on Islam and constitutional law, it has almost entirely neglected Buddhism. From a subfield focused mainly on secular constitutions in Anglophone and/or European settings, the study of religion and constitutional law has gradually shifted its attention to religiously preferential constitutions in North Africa, the Middle East and parts of Asia.
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