Benjamin Schonthal
Datos Biográficos
| ID | 1257802 |
|---|---|
| NOMBRE | Benjamin Schonthal |
| NOMBRES | Benjamin |
| APELLIDO | Schonthal |
| FIRMA | SCHONTHAL B |
| AFILIACIONES | University of Otago |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-3091-6576 |
| VERIFICADO | Sí |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 23 |
| TOTAL DE CITAS | 69 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 23 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 0 |
| PRIMER AÑO DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2011 |
| AÑO MÁS RECIENTE DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2025 |
| ÍNDICE H | 4 |
Conformations of Law and the Cunning of Legal Pluralism
Buddhism, Law, Buddhist Law
Buddhism and its legal traditions have shaped Asian law and politics for more than two millennia. Today, nearly half of the world's population lives in areas where Buddhist law has flourished in the past and/or flourishes in the present. Seven countries have citizens who mostly identify as Buddhists: Myanmar, Sri Lanka, Thailand, Cambodia, Laos, Mongolia, and Bhutan. Elsewhere, Buddhism has deep historical, cultural, and political influence, espe…
The Category Formerly Known as Religion
In 1993, one of the world's greatest musicians abandoned the stage name that, for decades, had emblazoned the cover of albums and concert posters. In the place of a name, the musician began to use something else entirely: a visual emblem, a glyph, which combined the astrological symbols for Mars and Venus commonly used to signify male and female. Although evocative, the new ideograph gave no clues as to how it should be pronounced, making it diff…
Breaking the Saffron Wave
In recent years, thousands of Buddhist monastics have marched in antiregime protests across South and Southeast Asia. Among the largest and most influential nonstate organizations in the region, monastic communities appear to be powerful agents for political change. Yet, like similar movements over the last half-century, recent monastic protests did not produce broader political resistance among the monkhood, nor did they lead to substantive poli…
India’s Quotidian Constitution
An abstract is not available for this content. As you have access to this content, full HTML content is provided on this page. A PDF of this content is also available in through the ‘Save PDF’ action button
Legal pluralism and globalization from the Himalayas to Southeast Asia
The cunning of legal pluralism
Arguments about normative unity and multiplicity dominate a great deal of scholarship on legal pluralism. Yet such arguments are not only advanced by academics, nor are they value-free descriptions of law. Notions of legal unity and multiplicity may also be deployed strategically by the legal actors that scholars study in order to advance their own interests, or criticize others. This article considers this fact, along with its methodological con…
The Case for Religious Constitutions
This article argues that there is body of governing laws appearing widely throughout the global history of religions that warrants classification as constitutions. Like national constitutions, these religious constitutions present themselves as a form of “higher law” that declare the identity of a given a community, organize its structures of governing power, define its foundational norms, and authorize further acts of rulemaking. In this article…
Buddhists, Politics and International Law
To date, international law has not featured prominently in academic analyses of Buddhism. Especially absent from this small body of literature are real-life examples of Buddhist monks and laity turning to international law to resolve grievances or protect Buddhism against perceived threats to it. This article seeks to fill this void. Drawing on interview and archival sources from Sri Lanka and the United Nations, it analyzes how one particular mo…
Buddhist Law beyond the Vinaya
This article urges scholars to look beyond the Vinaya Piṭaka when thinking about the regulation of Buddhist monastic life. It makes this case by examining an understudied genre of vernacular legal texts that has influenced the regulation of monks in Sri Lanka for more than a millennium. Monastic constitutions, or katikāvatas, affirm the Vinaya’s authority in principle, while functioning in practice as stand-alone administrative codes. Promulgated…
Judging in the Buddha's Court
Drawing on textual and ethnographic research conducted over the last five years, this article analyses an important genre of judicial practice in South and Southeast Asia that has been almost entirely ignored by socio-legal scholars: Buddhist systems of judging. Using the judicial system of one monastic group in contemporary Sri Lanka as a case-study, it argues that Buddhist judging requires more than just the internalization of moral principles,…
Buddhist Rules About Rules
This Article examines rules of procedure and process that structure the Buddhist legal system in the Theravāda tradition, the dominant tradition of Buddhism in South and Southeast Asia. Drawing on important Buddhist texts written in Pāli as well as evidence from monastic legal practices in contemporary Sri Lanka, it argues that one can find within the Theravāda tradition a robust body of what H.L.A. Hart would call "secondary rules," which determ…
Buddhist Law Against the State? Representing Religion, Law, and Conflict
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…
Economies of expert religion in Sri Lanka
In recent years, international campaigns to promote religious freedom have come under sustained scholarly scrutiny. At the core of much of this scrutiny are concerns about a pernicious misfit between legal categories and local realities. Recent scholarship suggests that international advocacy campaigns often rely on narrow and partisan understandings of religion and religious freedom and, in turn, marginalize or ignore local practices of worship,…
The (New) Buddhist Nationalisms? Symmetries and Specificities in Sri Lanka and Myanmar
A large proportion of mainstream media coverage of Sri Lanka and Myanmar has grouped Bodu Bala Sēnā (BBS), the 969 Movement and the Organization for the Protection of Race and Religion (MaBaTha in its Burmese acronym) as a single phenomenon. Referred to variously as Buddhist terrorism, Buddhist militarism or Buddhist nationalism, these groups appear in popular media as separate iterations of a shared type. However, beneath the many ostensible sym…
The Impossibility of a Buddhist State
This article considers the effects of special constitutional prerogatives for Buddhism in Sri Lanka. It argues that, contrary to the expectations of both supporters and opponents, these clauses have not done what they claim to do: they have not enhanced the dominance of Buddhism on the island. Through a detailed analysis of recent legal action, this article demonstrates how special constitutional protections for Buddhism, in fact, aggravate and a…
Setting an Agenda for the Socio-Legal Study of Contemporary Buddhism
This introduction to the special issue on Buddhism and law lays out an agenda for the socio-legal study of contemporary Buddhism. We identify lacunae in the current literature and call for further work on four themes: the relations between monastic legal practice and state law; the formations of Buddhist constitutionalism; Buddhist legal activism and Buddhist-interest litigation; and Buddhist moral critiques of law. We argue that this agenda is i…
Is the Rule of Law an Antidote for Religious Tension? The Promise and Peril of Judicializing Religious Freedom
Although "rule of law" is often regarded as a solution for religious conflict, this article analyzes the role of legal processes and institutions in hardening boundaries and sharpening antagonisms among religious communities. Using case studies from Sri Lanka, India, Malaysia, and Pakistan, we highlight four specific mechanisms through which legal procedures, structures, and instruments can further polarize already existing religious conflicts. T…
Environments of Law
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. 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 br…
Securing the Sasana through Law
This article examines the history and effects of Buddhist constitutionalism in Sri Lanka, by which is meant the inclusion of special protections and status for Buddhism in the island's 1972 and 1978 constitutions, alongside guarantees of general religious rights and other features of liberal constitutionalism. By analysing Sri Lankan constitutional disputes that have occurred since the 1970s, this article demonstrates how the 'Buddhism Chapter' o…
Constitutionalizing Religion
This article argues for a different reading of the history of law and religion in independent Sri Lanka, one that does not associate the persistence of religious tension with the failure of law, but, somewhat counterintuitively, with the legalization of religion in the first instance. I argue that it is not law's failure that adds to the intensity of religious tensions on the island, but its pyrrhic success. Sri Lanka's success in drafting, ratif…
Trajectories of Religion and Law
The Making of Indian Secularism
The (New) Buddhist Nationalisms? Symmetries and Specificities in Sri Lanka and Myanmar
A large proportion of mainstream media coverage of Sri Lanka and Myanmar has grouped Bodu Bala Sēnā (BBS), the 969 Movement and the Organization for the Protection of Race and Religion (MaBaTha in its Burmese acronym) as a single phenomenon. Referred to variously as Buddhist terrorism, Buddhist militarism or Buddhist nationalism, these groups appear in popular media as separate iterations of a shared type. However, beneath the many ostensible sym…
Environments of Law
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. 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 br…
Securing the Sasana through Law
This article examines the history and effects of Buddhist constitutionalism in Sri Lanka, by which is meant the inclusion of special protections and status for Buddhism in the island's 1972 and 1978 constitutions, alongside guarantees of general religious rights and other features of liberal constitutionalism. By analysing Sri Lankan constitutional disputes that have occurred since the 1970s, this article demonstrates how the 'Buddhism Chapter' o…
Constitutionalizing Religion
This article argues for a different reading of the history of law and religion in independent Sri Lanka, one that does not associate the persistence of religious tension with the failure of law, but, somewhat counterintuitively, with the legalization of religion in the first instance. I argue that it is not law's failure that adds to the intensity of religious tensions on the island, but its pyrrhic success. Sri Lanka's success in drafting, ratif…
Judging in the Buddha's Court
Drawing on textual and ethnographic research conducted over the last five years, this article analyses an important genre of judicial practice in South and Southeast Asia that has been almost entirely ignored by socio-legal scholars: Buddhist systems of judging. Using the judicial system of one monastic group in contemporary Sri Lanka as a case-study, it argues that Buddhist judging requires more than just the internalization of moral principles,…
Is the Rule of Law an Antidote for Religious Tension? The Promise and Peril of Judicializing Religious Freedom
Although "rule of law" is often regarded as a solution for religious conflict, this article analyzes the role of legal processes and institutions in hardening boundaries and sharpening antagonisms among religious communities. Using case studies from Sri Lanka, India, Malaysia, and Pakistan, we highlight four specific mechanisms through which legal procedures, structures, and instruments can further polarize already existing religious conflicts. T…
The cunning of legal pluralism
Arguments about normative unity and multiplicity dominate a great deal of scholarship on legal pluralism. Yet such arguments are not only advanced by academics, nor are they value-free descriptions of law. Notions of legal unity and multiplicity may also be deployed strategically by the legal actors that scholars study in order to advance their own interests, or criticize others. This article considers this fact, along with its methodological con…
Buddhist Rules About Rules
This Article examines rules of procedure and process that structure the Buddhist legal system in the Theravāda tradition, the dominant tradition of Buddhism in South and Southeast Asia. Drawing on important Buddhist texts written in Pāli as well as evidence from monastic legal practices in contemporary Sri Lanka, it argues that one can find within the Theravāda tradition a robust body of what H.L.A. Hart would call "secondary rules," which determ…
Buddhist Law Against the State? Representing Religion, Law, and Conflict
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…
Setting an Agenda for the Socio-Legal Study of Contemporary Buddhism
This introduction to the special issue on Buddhism and law lays out an agenda for the socio-legal study of contemporary Buddhism. We identify lacunae in the current literature and call for further work on four themes: the relations between monastic legal practice and state law; the formations of Buddhist constitutionalism; Buddhist legal activism and Buddhist-interest litigation; and Buddhist moral critiques of law. We argue that this agenda is i…
The Case for Religious Constitutions
This article argues that there is body of governing laws appearing widely throughout the global history of religions that warrants classification as constitutions. Like national constitutions, these religious constitutions present themselves as a form of “higher law” that declare the identity of a given a community, organize its structures of governing power, define its foundational norms, and authorize further acts of rulemaking. In this article…
Buddhist Law beyond the Vinaya
This article urges scholars to look beyond the Vinaya Piṭaka when thinking about the regulation of Buddhist monastic life. It makes this case by examining an understudied genre of vernacular legal texts that has influenced the regulation of monks in Sri Lanka for more than a millennium. Monastic constitutions, or katikāvatas, affirm the Vinaya’s authority in principle, while functioning in practice as stand-alone administrative codes. Promulgated…
Economies of expert religion in Sri Lanka
In recent years, international campaigns to promote religious freedom have come under sustained scholarly scrutiny. At the core of much of this scrutiny are concerns about a pernicious misfit between legal categories and local realities. Recent scholarship suggests that international advocacy campaigns often rely on narrow and partisan understandings of religion and religious freedom and, in turn, marginalize or ignore local practices of worship,…
The Impossibility of a Buddhist State
This article considers the effects of special constitutional prerogatives for Buddhism in Sri Lanka. It argues that, contrary to the expectations of both supporters and opponents, these clauses have not done what they claim to do: they have not enhanced the dominance of Buddhism on the island. Through a detailed analysis of recent legal action, this article demonstrates how special constitutional protections for Buddhism, in fact, aggravate and a…
The Making of Indian Secularism
Constitutionalizing Religion
This article argues for a different reading of the history of law and religion in independent Sri Lanka, one that does not associate the persistence of religious tension with the failure of law, but, somewhat counterintuitively, with the legalization of religion in the first instance. I argue that it is not law's failure that adds to the intensity of religious tensions on the island, but its pyrrhic success. Sri Lanka's success in drafting, ratif…
Trajectories of Religion and Law
The (New) Buddhist Nationalisms? Symmetries and Specificities in Sri Lanka and Myanmar
A large proportion of mainstream media coverage of Sri Lanka and Myanmar has grouped Bodu Bala Sēnā (BBS), the 969 Movement and the Organization for the Protection of Race and Religion (MaBaTha in its Burmese acronym) as a single phenomenon. Referred to variously as Buddhist terrorism, Buddhist militarism or Buddhist nationalism, these groups appear in popular media as separate iterations of a shared type. However, beneath the many ostensible sym…
The Impossibility of a Buddhist State
This article considers the effects of special constitutional prerogatives for Buddhism in Sri Lanka. It argues that, contrary to the expectations of both supporters and opponents, these clauses have not done what they claim to do: they have not enhanced the dominance of Buddhism on the island. Through a detailed analysis of recent legal action, this article demonstrates how special constitutional protections for Buddhism, in fact, aggravate and a…
Setting an Agenda for the Socio-Legal Study of Contemporary Buddhism
This introduction to the special issue on Buddhism and law lays out an agenda for the socio-legal study of contemporary Buddhism. We identify lacunae in the current literature and call for further work on four themes: the relations between monastic legal practice and state law; the formations of Buddhist constitutionalism; Buddhist legal activism and Buddhist-interest litigation; and Buddhist moral critiques of law. We argue that this agenda is i…
Is the Rule of Law an Antidote for Religious Tension? The Promise and Peril of Judicializing Religious Freedom
Although "rule of law" is often regarded as a solution for religious conflict, this article analyzes the role of legal processes and institutions in hardening boundaries and sharpening antagonisms among religious communities. Using case studies from Sri Lanka, India, Malaysia, and Pakistan, we highlight four specific mechanisms through which legal procedures, structures, and instruments can further polarize already existing religious conflicts. T…
Environments of Law
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. 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 br…
Securing the Sasana through Law
This article examines the history and effects of Buddhist constitutionalism in Sri Lanka, by which is meant the inclusion of special protections and status for Buddhism in the island's 1972 and 1978 constitutions, alongside guarantees of general religious rights and other features of liberal constitutionalism. By analysing Sri Lankan constitutional disputes that have occurred since the 1970s, this article demonstrates how the 'Buddhism Chapter' o…
Economies of expert religion in Sri Lanka
In recent years, international campaigns to promote religious freedom have come under sustained scholarly scrutiny. At the core of much of this scrutiny are concerns about a pernicious misfit between legal categories and local realities. Recent scholarship suggests that international advocacy campaigns often rely on narrow and partisan understandings of religion and religious freedom and, in turn, marginalize or ignore local practices of worship,…
Buddhist Law Against the State? Representing Religion, Law, and Conflict
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…
The Case for Religious Constitutions
This article argues that there is body of governing laws appearing widely throughout the global history of religions that warrants classification as constitutions. Like national constitutions, these religious constitutions present themselves as a form of “higher law” that declare the identity of a given a community, organize its structures of governing power, define its foundational norms, and authorize further acts of rulemaking. In this article…
Buddhists, Politics and International Law
To date, international law has not featured prominently in academic analyses of Buddhism. Especially absent from this small body of literature are real-life examples of Buddhist monks and laity turning to international law to resolve grievances or protect Buddhism against perceived threats to it. This article seeks to fill this void. Drawing on interview and archival sources from Sri Lanka and the United Nations, it analyzes how one particular mo…
Buddhist Law beyond the Vinaya
This article urges scholars to look beyond the Vinaya Piṭaka when thinking about the regulation of Buddhist monastic life. It makes this case by examining an understudied genre of vernacular legal texts that has influenced the regulation of monks in Sri Lanka for more than a millennium. Monastic constitutions, or katikāvatas, affirm the Vinaya’s authority in principle, while functioning in practice as stand-alone administrative codes. Promulgated…
Judging in the Buddha's Court
Drawing on textual and ethnographic research conducted over the last five years, this article analyses an important genre of judicial practice in South and Southeast Asia that has been almost entirely ignored by socio-legal scholars: Buddhist systems of judging. Using the judicial system of one monastic group in contemporary Sri Lanka as a case-study, it argues that Buddhist judging requires more than just the internalization of moral principles,…
Buddhist Rules About Rules
This Article examines rules of procedure and process that structure the Buddhist legal system in the Theravāda tradition, the dominant tradition of Buddhism in South and Southeast Asia. Drawing on important Buddhist texts written in Pāli as well as evidence from monastic legal practices in contemporary Sri Lanka, it argues that one can find within the Theravāda tradition a robust body of what H.L.A. Hart would call "secondary rules," which determ…
Legal pluralism and globalization from the Himalayas to Southeast Asia
The cunning of legal pluralism
Arguments about normative unity and multiplicity dominate a great deal of scholarship on legal pluralism. Yet such arguments are not only advanced by academics, nor are they value-free descriptions of law. Notions of legal unity and multiplicity may also be deployed strategically by the legal actors that scholars study in order to advance their own interests, or criticize others. This article considers this fact, along with its methodological con…
India’s Quotidian Constitution
An abstract is not available for this content. As you have access to this content, full HTML content is provided on this page. A PDF of this content is also available in through the ‘Save PDF’ action button
The Category Formerly Known as Religion
In 1993, one of the world's greatest musicians abandoned the stage name that, for decades, had emblazoned the cover of albums and concert posters. In the place of a name, the musician began to use something else entirely: a visual emblem, a glyph, which combined the astrological symbols for Mars and Venus commonly used to signify male and female. Although evocative, the new ideograph gave no clues as to how it should be pronounced, making it diff…
Breaking the Saffron Wave
In recent years, thousands of Buddhist monastics have marched in antiregime protests across South and Southeast Asia. Among the largest and most influential nonstate organizations in the region, monastic communities appear to be powerful agents for political change. Yet, like similar movements over the last half-century, recent monastic protests did not produce broader political resistance among the monkhood, nor did they lead to substantive poli…
Conformations of Law and the Cunning of Legal Pluralism
Buddhism, Law, Buddhist Law
Buddhism and its legal traditions have shaped Asian law and politics for more than two millennia. Today, nearly half of the world's population lives in areas where Buddhist law has flourished in the past and/or flourishes in the present. Seven countries have citizens who mostly identify as Buddhists: Myanmar, Sri Lanka, Thailand, Cambodia, Laos, Mongolia, and Bhutan. Elsewhere, Buddhism has deep historical, cultural, and political influence, espe…
Political science (20 obras) · Sociology (17 obras) · Law (15 obras) · Asian Geopolitics and Ethnography (13 obras) · Buddhism (13 obras) · Asian Studies and History (10 obras) · Law (10 obras) · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies (10 obras) · Philosophy (9 obras) · Politics (8 obras)