New Leverhulme Trust-funded research project on Tibetan law: the socio-historic exploration of a unique legal system
Director of the Centre for Socio-Legal Studies, Professor Fernanda Pirie, uses anthropological and comparative methods to compare legal practices and texts from around the world, and has carried out ethnographic fieldwork at both ends of the Tibetan plateau. She has recently been awarded a Leverhulme Trust Research Project Grant to continue her work on Tibetan legal texts. The three-year project, Tibetan law: the socio-historic exploration of a unique legal system, will begin in October 2025.
Tibetan law remains one of the least well understood of the world’s historic legal systems. Tibetans had a concept of law, ‘khrims’ which shifted in meaning over time, from administrative rules, to historic accounts of the Tibetan polity, to bureaucratic decrees, to legal treatises. Aspects of Tibetan law were nominally based on Buddhist principles. However, they formed nothing like the sophisticated legal regimes of other Buddhist regions. Nor do Tibetan texts show much correspondence with the laws of the more legalistic Chinese and Hindu traditions, of which Tibetans would have been aware. Even when the Dalai Lamas centralized their government in Lhasa in the seventeenth century, they hardly systematised practices of justice and created no detailed practical legal texts.
All of this remains a puzzle and indicates that Tibetan laws and legal practices need to be understood very much on their own terms. It also raises broader questions about forms of government and the role of law within them. Can the Tibetan case shed new light on the relationships between law, government, and religion?
At the heart of Professor Pirie’s project are texts produced in the seventeenth century, when the Fifth Dalai Lama established a new polity in Lhasa. Different versions were widely reproduced and distributed over the following centuries and annotations on surviving copies indicate their practical use by government officials. They appear to have created the sense of a legal system, of authoritative rules and practices, of precedent, and of systematic practices of justice. But they were hardly changed or updated in three hundred years and much about their use and readership is still not understood.
Due to entry restrictions from the Chinese Government, which has held power in Tibet since 1951, Professor Pirie will not be able to undertake archival research in Tibet. However, materials and texts that were gathered by earlier scholars in the twentieth century or more recently deposited in other archives around the world represent a rich and, as yet, little-studied resource, which will be analysed by the research team.
The research team will translate and analyse key texts, examine their practical application, and investigate their creation. The three-year scope of the project will give time for the researchers to look at the origins of – and influences on – these texts, to learn about the authorships of the materials, and to understand how they were copied and distributed in Tibetan society. This should shape a wider understanding of the intricacies of Tibetan governance illuminate the nature of a unique theocracy.
On the importance of Tibetan law, Professor Pirie said “It was not highly developed, unlike the Chinese imperial system, with its extensive texts, systems of courts, and scholarly jurisprudence. The Tibetan material consist of texts, practices, and ideas, but it does not seem to form a ‘system’ as such. So, the question is should we even treat it as a law? Or was it even a system? How were they connected? When the subject matter is uncertain, these are challenging, and also interesting, questions”.
Professor Pirie’s interest in Tibetan law includes reflecting on this uncertainty. If it is not certain whether something is really law or not, it invites us to reflect on what law is. And this, in turn, can shed light on fundamental and philosophical questions about the role of law in society. According to Professor Pirie “Social values, and moral ideas and values are always brought to bear on legal texts and practices. The important thing about anthropological and historical studies is that they show us how different societies have formed. It is a far too romantic an ideal to look at this for how we could do things better, but we can look at them for how we might do things differently.”
Dr Daniel Wojahn, who specializes in Tibetan legal and political history, will join the project as a post-doctoral researcher. Professor Pirie said “The language is very specialist. The project involves interpreting and translating texts that have not ever been fully analysed and this requires linguistic expertise, as well as working with other Tibetan texts from that period and exploring the social and political context. Dr Wojahn studied governmental and legal issues in Tibet for his recently-completed doctorate, so he is well prepared for this project.”
Combining this research project with her earlier work on Tibetan law, Professor Pirie plans to write a book tracing the history of Tibetan law from the seventh to the twentieth centuries. This will offer valuable comparative material for scholars considering law on a global scale, as well as advancing our knowledge of a civilization whose remnants are fast disappearing in the contemporary world.
Leverhulme Trust Research Project Grants provide up to £500,000 in funding for research projects taking place at UK universities or higher education institutions. Professor Pirie said “I chose the Leverhulme Trust Research Project Grant because it suited the sort of project I wanted to do. It is both historical and socio-legal – in some senses more of a humanities project, but also not a typical Tibetan-studies project. Leverhulme treats applications and projects on their own terms. They are good at entertaining the unusual.”