Buddhist Law Against the State? Representing Religion, Law, and Conflict

Abstract

Public disputes over the legal regulation of religion are often portrayed as naturally occurring conflicts between competing normative systems: religious law and state law. What, then, explains why some normative frictions become the focus of major controversies, whereas others do not? This article tries to answer this question, while examining a genre of religious law that has not received much attention by scholars of law and religion, Buddhist law in Sri Lanka. Drawing on monastic disciplinary texts, legal archives, and representations of law taken from online and popular media, this article analyzes how and why a minor, routine friction between Buddhist ecclesiastical rules and Sri Lankan statutory regulations—a dispute over whether a monk may wear his robes in prison—came to be portrayed as a grand contest between two incompatible regimes: “Buddhist law” and “state law.”