Dhammasattha is the Pali name of a genre of legal literature common to Western Mainland Southeast Asia (modern Laos, Myanmar (Burma), and Thailand) principally written in Pali, Myanmar (Burmese), Mon, or Tai languages, or in a bi-lingual Pali nissaya style. . Pāli (ISO 639-1: pi; ISO 639-2: pli) is a Middle Indo-Aryan dialect or prakrit. ... Location of Southeast Asia Southeast Asia is a subregion of Asia. ... Mon can be: An abbreviation for Monday, the day of the week between Sunday and Tuesday. ... The Tai languages are a subgroup of the Tai Kadai language family. ...

"Sattha" is the Pali cognate of the Sanskrit term for knowledge or science, "sastra". We may translate dhamma-sattha as the "science of the law or dhamma". The vernacular Myanmar (Burmese) term "dhammathat" (also "dhammasat") is derived from Pali (earlier forms derived from Sanskrit), whereas typically the Tai and Mon terms, often transcribed as "thammasat" or "dhammasat", respectively, derive from Sanskrit. Sanskrit ( संस्कृतम्) is a classical language of India and a liturgical language of Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism. ... Shastra is a Sanskrit word used to denote education/knowledge in a general sense. ... The word dharma (Sanskrit; धर्म in the Devanagari script) or dhamma (Pali) is used in most or all philosophies and religions of Indian origin, Dharmic faiths, namely Hinduism (Sanatana Dharma), Buddhism, Jainism and Sikhism. ...

Dhammasattha are heavily influenced by the Brahmanical dharmasastra literature, although they owe even more to the the Pali Buddhist traditions and literature of Theravada Southeast Asia. The Dharmashastra is a volume of Hindu legal texts, covering moral, ethical and social laws. ... A replica of an ancient statue found among the ruins of a temple at Sarnath Buddhism is a philosophy based on the teachings of the Buddha, Siddhārtha Gautama, a prince of the Shakyas, whose lifetime is traditionally given as 566 to 486 BCE. It had subsequently been accepted by... Theravada (Pali; Sanskrit: Sthaviravada) is one of the eighteen (or twenty) Nikāya schools that formed early in the history of Buddhism. ...

While some dhammasatthas contain laws that pertain to the Buddhist sangha, the main focus of dhammasattha law is the community of lay householders. Insofar as dhammasattha represents a system of Buddhist law developed out of the Pali tipitaka and para-canonical literature for the sake of non-monastics the genre may be interpreted as a counterpart to the monastic vinaya. Sangha is a word in Indian languages that can be translated roughly as association or assembly. It is commonly used in several senses to refer to Buddhist or Jain groups. ... The Tripitaka (Sanskrit, lit. ... The Vinaya (a word in Pali as well as in Sanskrit, with literal meaning discipline) is the textual framework for the Buddhist monastic community, or sangha. ...

Dhammasattha is first mentioned in an inscription from 13th century C.E. Pagan, Myanmar (Burma), yet it is likely that dhammasattha texts were transmitted throughout parts of Southeast Asia much earlier. Certain dhammasatthas claim to have been written during the first millenium C.E. Within a Christian context, paganism (from Latin paganus) and heathenry are catch-all terms which have come to connote a broad set of spiritual/religious beliefs and practices of a natural religion, as opposed to the Abrahamic religions based on scriptures. ...

There is a long tradition of dhammasattha exegesis, particularly in Myanmar (Burma). Hundreds of dhammasattha, commentaries, and related legal texts are extant in palm-leaf and paper manuscript form. A manuscript (Latin manu scriptus, written by hand), strictly speaking, is any written document that is put down by hand, in contrast to being printed or reproduced some other way. ...