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55 Buff. L. Rev. 707 (2007-2008)
Separation of Religion and Law: Buddhism, Secularism and the Constitution of Bhutan

handle is hein.journals/buflr55 and id is 715 raw text is: Separation of Religion and Law?: Buddhism, Secularism and the Constitution of Bhutan RICHARD W. WHITECROSSt As a legal anthropologist and a socio-legal researcher, I was particularly interested to hear His Holiness discuss the relationship between Buddhism and law. The study of law and Buddhism is in its infancy, and there are difficult questions to address. For example, we need to critically evaluate what Buddhist law might be and what we are attempting to achieve with the study of law and Buddhism. And a related issue, of course, is what we mean by Buddhism. When I originally began to conceive my doctoral research on law in the Buddhist state of Bhutan in the mid- 1990s, I wanted to examine the role of Buddhism in contemporary Bhutanese law. Bhutan is the last independent Himalayan Buddhist state. Its political history is separate from that of Tibet from the seventeenth century onwards. Zhabdrung Ngawang Namgyal, who unified Bhutan, implemented his personal vision of Bhutan as a religious state, with secular and temporal rule combined much more intimately than in the government of the Dalai Lamas. Although British missions passed through Bhutan to Tibet in the late eighteenth century and British colonial forces defeated the Bhutanese in the 1860s, Bhutan was never colonized and British influence was minimal. In theory, Bhutan was a theocracy until the early twentieth century, and the monarchy, established in 1907, is descended from a major fifteenth century Bhutanese Buddhist saint, Pema Lingpa. During my fieldwork, I was fortunate to meet and interview several major reincarnates in Bhutan; however, they rarely discussed the relationship between law and Buddhism, except perhaps to stress the importance of t Honorary Fellow in Social Anthropology, University of Edinburgh. Associate Member CNRS (Paris) UMR 8047. 707