gharaja maintained his office until he died in
1895. An interregnum then occurred for the appointment had always been
made by the king, not by the Sangha. But when Lord Curzon visited
Burma in 1901 he made arrangements for the election by the monks
themselves of a superior of the whole order and Taunggwin Sayadaw was
solemnly installed in this office by the British authorities in 1903
with the title of Thathanabaing.[167]

3

We may now examine briefly some sides of popular religion and
institutions which are not Buddhist. It is an interesting fact that
the Burmese law books or Dhammathats,[168] which are still accepted as
regulating inheritance and other domestic matters, are Indian in
origin and show no traces of Sinhalese influence although since 1750
there has been a decided tendency to bring them into connection with
authorities accepted by Buddhism. The earliest of these codes are
those of Dhammavilasa (1174 A.D.) and of Waguru, king of Martaban in
1280. They professedly base themselves on the authority of Manu and,
so far as purely legal topics are concerned, correspond pretty closely
with the rules of the Manava-dharmasastra. But they omit all
prescriptions which involve Brahmanic religious observances such as
penance and sacrifice. Also the theory of punishment is different and
inspired by the doctrine of Karma, namely, that every evil deed will
bring its own retribution. Hence the Burmese codes ordain for every
crime not penalties to be suffered by the criminal but merely the
payment of compensation to the party aggrieved, proportionate to the
damage suffered.[169] It is probable that the law-books on which these
codes were based were brought from the east coast of India and
were of the same type as the code of Narada, which, though of
unquestioned Brahmanic orthodoxy, is almost purely legal and has
little to say about religion. A subsidiary literature embodying local
decisions naturally grew up, and about 1640 was summarized by a
Burmese nobleman called Kaing-za in the Maharaja-dhammathat. He
received from the king the title of Manuraja and the name of Manu
became connected with his code, though it is really based on local
custom. It appears to have superseded older law-books until the reign
of Alompra who remodelled the administration and caused several codes
to be compiled.[170] These also preserve the name of Manu, but he and
Kaing-za are treated as the same personage. The rules of the older
law-books