This chapter offers a survey of the three principal environments of Buddhist law in precolonial mainland Southeast Asia: vinaya (monastic law), dhammasattha (juristic law), and rājasattha (royal legislation). It assesses, on the basis of manuscript and epigraphic evidence from Burma and Thailand dated between the thirteenth and eighteenth centuries, the scope and significance of constitutional norms and jurisprudence within each sphere. The chapter seeks to dethrone prior scholarship on constitutionalism in Theravāda Buddhism that has narrowly fixated on idioms of kingship and dharma, arguing that such work misconstrues and diminishes regional legal history. It explains, moreover, that the comparative study of Buddhist constitutionalism in precolonial Southeast Asia must necessarily expand the horizon of inquiry to consider those fields of law (such as family law) concerned with matters other than higher-order institutional governance.

This chapter surveys the corpus of early Buddhist texts that have survived the passage of time and can be consulted by scholars. These comprise the complete canon of the Theravāda school written in Pali, a significant amount of the canon in Sanskrit belonging to the Sarvāstivāda school, plus more in Chinese translation, and substantial portions of the canons of other schools, also preserved in Chinese. Determining whether particular texts were early or later, along with analysis of their mode of transmission, enables them to be evaluated as sources for comparative analysis. This rather technical chapter concludes with a discussion of difficulties encountered in drawing parallels between texts from different schools in different languages.