I have found the same deep Buddhist legal assumptions in my own work on Southeast Asia, and I know how difficult it is to put them into words. The English language lacks an appropriate vocabulary. It would not be mine. Perhaps there is more at stake here than our different choice of metaphors. We may each be led by our research material, in the sense that Tibetan and Theravada Buddhism have chosen different vehicles to express the same truth.
Buddhist causation treats all conditions of an event as equally important.
But a legal or ethical rule can only work by privileging some conditions and backgrounding others. Our rule about liability for car crashes treats the skill and attention of the drivers as all-important, while backgrounding information about the make of the cars involved or the day of the week on which the crash took place. In Tibetan Buddhism the theme is expressed in the pulsations of the mandala, while in Theravada Buddhism it emerges through the ever finer, and ever more pointless, distinctions of the Abidhamma. The book is handsomely produced. The text has been enhanced by photographs of Tibet in the 1920s and line drawings of vernacular architecture.