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THE GOLDEN YOKE: The Legal Cosmology of Buddhist Tibetby Rebecca Redwood French"To read the Golden Yoke is to walk into the daily life of Tibet last century and centuries before, go with a monk official to consult a tome of land titles kept in a monastic cellar, and then to the fields to find buried boundary markers of white and black stones, in order to settle a dispute among neighbors. It is to marvel at the sophistication of an ancient, literate, humanely organized society, that tries to maintain Buddhist ethical principles in its institutions, laws, and practices. Her scholarship is thorough, critical, overall informed by her own sensitive conversations with the people who were there on the spot, who knew how things worked. Confronting the unique Buddhist culture of Tibet on the ground, she is unflinching about problems and compromises she discovers, while also not afraid to discover some distinctive virtues. It is a work of the highest caliber, a must-read for anyone who is not satisfied with either romanticism or negative propaganda and wants a realistic picture of life in old Tibet."-- Robert A.F. Thurman The "golden yoke" of Buddhist Tibet was the last medieval legal system still in existence in the middle of the twentieth century. This book reconstructs that system as a series of layered narratives from the memories of people who participated in the daily operation of law in the houses and courtyards, the offices and courts of Tibet prior to 1959. The practice of law in this unique legal world, which lacked most of our familiar sign posts, ranged from the fantastic use of oracles in the search for evidence to the more mundane presentation of cases in court. Buddhism and law, two topics rarely intertwined in Western consciousness, are at the center of this work. The Tibetan legal system was based on Buddhist philosophy and reflected Buddhist thought in legal practice and decision making. For Tibetans, law is a cosmology, a kaleidoscopic patterning of relations which is constantly changing, recycling, and re-forming even as it integrates the universe and the individual into a timeless mandalic whole. The Golden Yoke causes us to rethink American legal culture. It argues that in the United States legal matters are segregated into a separate space with rigidly defined categories. The legal cosmology of Buddhist Tibet brings into question both this autonomous framework and most of the presumptions we have about the very nature of law, from precedent and res judicata to rule formation and closure. "Rebecca French has written one of the two best books of the last twenty years on the legal cultures and legal history of Asia...French will surely be the last anthropologist to have studied an undiluted pre-modern literate legal system by talking to its practitioners."--Andrew Huxley, The Yale Law Journal 1559391715 | |
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