Book Reviews: REBECCA REDWOOD FRENCH. The Golden Yoke: The Legal Cosmology of Buddhist Tibet. Ithaca, NY/London: Cornell University Press, 1995, 404pp
| Published date | 01 September 1996 |
| DOI | 10.1177/096466399600500313 |
| Author | Roshan De Silva Wijeyeratne |
| Date | 01 September 1996 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
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sociocultural material to work with is something that has hardly ever been written
about in any serious way.
Chua and Hill and Fee are therefore clearly on to something here. The absence of
the now-predictable tendency towards Singapore-bashing which so often degenerates
into simplistic critiques of caricaturized authoritarian regimes is truly refreshing. For
a start, it forces those Singapore-watchers who are so prone to find oriental despotism
growing anywhere east of Suez to think of a few new clich6s.
Instead, the authors suggest to us another angle from which we may look at develop-
ments in contemporary Singapore today: namely, an analysis of nation-building which
not only utilizes a critique of the methods of policing and control which are features
of the state but also emphasizes the reliance upon the role of creativity and invention
in the creation of the state’s cultural mainstream and its dominant political discourse.
Perhaps in this respect, these books could and should have gone a little further than
they did. Texts written by academics and technocrats tend to have a somewhat dry
’Kantian’ flavour, and these are no exception. But although many social scientists are
wary of treading into these territories, a serious interrogation of the role and dynam-
ics of creativity and invention in the mechanics of nation-building is nonetheless
required. For a start, it may reveal new insights into the underlying motives and
blindspots which mark the contours of the nation that these nation-builders are trying
to construct.
And one should never underestimate the role of play and creativity as something
superfluous and frivolous - it can also have potentially terrible and catastrophic con-
sequences as any (social) scientist will tell you.
FARISH A. NOOR
Department of Government, University of Essex, UK
REBECCA REDWOOD FRENCH. The Golden Yoke: The Legal Cosmology of Buddhist
Tibet. Ithaca, NY/London: Cornell University Press, 1995, 404pp.
This monumental work on Tibetan Buddhist Law is the result of over 10 years of
research that first began in 1981. What has emerged is the first major attempt to rep-
resent the legal world of Buddhist Tibet, a legal world that lives on within the exiled
Tibetan community in Dharamsala, Northern India. Although the central aim of the
book is to establish how
Buddhism is the source of Tibetan jurisprudence, in the course
of this vast study, French also identifies points of difference and similarity between
Tibetan legal concepts and Anglo-American legal doctrine. Therefore, while the text
has a comparative law dimension, the body of knowledge she presents here is a sig-
nificant addition to the growing body of material on Buddhist jurisprudence. Further-
more, by making Tibet its object of study, French sets the standard for future research
into the philosophy, history and practice of Tibetan law.
In over 10 years of research, French spent four of those interviewing Tibetans, not
only in Dharamsala but also in Tibet itself, Nepal, Britain and the United States. The
core of the legal narrative...
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