In Siam, later Thailand, doctrines of Buddhist kingship fluctuated with the needs of the king and the interests of the legal profession. In the period between the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the transition to constitutional monarchy relied on notions of Buddhist kingship to ’smooth’ this process and indigenize the legal transplant of Western constitutional monarchy. The most important element of this hybridisation was the doctrine of ’the king as source of the constitution,’ which established royal sovereignty in Western, positivist, terms. The prestige of the nineteenth-century European models of constitutional and ‘limited’ monarchies, embodied in royally granted charters, provided a reservoir of doctrines to draw from in order to ‘modernise’ the monarchy in accordance with the newly imported tenets of legal positivism, while consolidating royal authority. In particular, the doctrine of ’granted constitutionalism’ established the king as the sovereign source of the constitution, a modern construct that was easily hybridised with traditional theories of Buddhist kingship. As a result, in present-day Thailand, the principle of royal sovereignty prevails both in doctrine and in practice.

The charismatic Tibetan religious hierarch, the Zhabdrung Ngawang Namgyal unified Bhutan in the second quarter of the seventeenth century. The Zhabdrung introduced a “dual system” of secular and religious government that remained in place until the establishment of the current monarchy in 1907. Major institutional reforms implemented by the third king saw the state-sponsored Central Monk Body gain roles in the National Assembly and the Royal Advisory Council that lasted until 2008. In its transition to a democracy in 2008 Buddhism was declared to be separate from politics with monks, nuns, and lay practitioners (gomchen) prohibited from taking part in elections or voting. The chapter outlines the transformation from a theocratic “dual system” to a constitutional monarchy and the unforeseen consequences of the separation of religion and politics now emerging in Bhutan.