The idea that justice and good conscience must prevail over law reflects the notion of superiority of higher moral law over the limitations of man-made law. In India this is rooted in the fundamental Vedic principle that there is connection between the form and the formless, mundane and the divine, the means and the ends. As the Rig Veda says, amidst the undifferentiated source, great warmth of creation was born; and the sages who searched in the far reaches of their mind discovered the umbilical connection of manifest with the unmanifest. This holistic, creative and contextual view of Dharma and Dharmasastra is also evident in the countries which were influenced by the Indian Dharmasastra tradition. In Indonesia, Vietnam and Cambodia, the Dharmasastra tradition was accepted largely in its original form, although as the Kutara Manava Dharmasastra of Java shows, some modifications were made. In Tibet, Burma, Thailand, and Ceylon, the indigenous texts were an attempt to use the Indian tradition as a model in an environment entirely given over to the Buddhist faith. They retained the textual classification of contentious matters into Vyavaharapada or eighteen types; but the content of the texts was very much a matter of local rules. Thus, the Dharmasastra were not transplanted in other countries by the force of arms; rather, these were accepted as a guide to form and sustain indigenous traditions of ethics and law. On the basis of the considerable evidence from ephigraphical, and textual sources, it is possible to suggest that by the time Indian-inspired temples, statues and epigraphy appeared in Southeast Asia, sometime between the third and the fifth century CE, the relationship between Southeast Asian and Indian societies had probably already come a very long way through mutual interaction and awareness of the universal nature of India’s knowledge tradition. We need to go beyond the imagined vision of a sudden imposition of Indian culture, and Indianisation or Colonisation of South and Southeast Asia by warriors and sages. In a way, this paper raises the question as to whether Greater India was culturally Indianised through dissemination of India’s knowledge tradition before social and political ‘Indianisation?’