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The wisest teachings of Buddhism say that, like all oppositions, one must move beyond gender. But as Serinity Young shows in this enlightening work, the rhetoric of Buddhist texts, the symbolism of its iconography, and the performative import of its rituals, tell different, and often contradictory, stories. In Courtesans and Tantric Consorts, Serinity Young takes the reader on a journey through more than 2000 years of biographical writings, iconographic depictions, and ritual practices revealing Buddhism's deep struggles with gender. Juxtaposing empowering images of women with their textual repudiation, beginning with the Buddha himself who abandoned his wife; tantric courtesans who are considered necessary to male enlightenment with fertility rituals designed to ensure male offspring; tales of gender-bending gods and goddesses with all male heavens; Serinity Young draws on a vast range of sources to reveal the colourful, and often troubling, mosaic of beliefs that inform Buddhist views about gender and sexuality.
In Courtesans and Tantric Consorts, Serinity Young takes the reader on a journey through more than 2000 years of Buddhist history, revealing the colourful mosaic of beliefs that inform Buddhist views about gender and sexuality.
This book examines sexuality in the past, and explores how it helps explain sexuality in the present. The subject of sexuality is often a controversial one, and exploring it through a world history perspective emphasizes the extent to which societies, including our own, are still reacting to historical change through contemporary sexual behaviors, values, and debates. The study uses a clear chronological structure to focus on major patterns and changes in sexuality—both sexual culture and sexual behaviors—in the main periods of world history, covering topics including: • The sexual implications of the transition from hunting and gathering economies to agricultural economies; • Sexuality in classical societies; • The postclassical period and the spread of the world religions; • Sex in an age of trade and colonies; • Changes in sexual behaviors and sexual attitudes between 1750 and 1950; • Sex in contemporary world history. This new edition examines these issues on a global scale, with attention to anthropological insights on sexuality and their relationship to history, the dynamics between sexuality and imperialism, sexuality in industrial society, and trends and conflicts surrounding views of sex and sexuality in the contemporary world.
A new history of Buddhism that highlights the insights and experiences of women from diverse communities and traditions around the world Buddhist traditions have developed over a period of twenty-five centuries in Asia, and recent decades have seen an unprecedented spread of Buddhism globally. From India to Japan, Sri Lanka to Russia, Buddhist traditions around the world have their own rich and diverse histories, cultures, religious lives, and roles for women. Wherever Buddhism has taken root, it has interacted with indigenous cultures and existing religious traditions. These traditions have inevitably influenced the ways in which Buddhist ideas and practices have been understood and adapted. Tracing the branches and fruits of these culturally specific transmissions and adaptations is as challenging as it is fascinating. Women in Buddhist Traditions chronicles pivotal moments in the story of Buddhist women, from the beginning of Buddhist history until today. The book highlights the unique contributions of Buddhist women from a variety of backgrounds and the strategies they have developed to challenge patriarchy in the process of creating an enlightened society. Women in Buddhist Traditions offers a groundbreaking and insightful introduction to the lives of Buddhist women worldwide.
Although Indian and Tibetan versions of tantric Buddhism are increasingly recognized, the East Asian variations on this practice remain largely overlooked. The only book to present the entire breadth of tantric Buddhism in East Asia, this collection remedies that situation with 12 key essays drawn from rare sources. Organized into four sections--China and Korea, Japan, Deities and Practices, and Influences on Japanese Religion--the book brings together a "critical mass" of scholarship, with the potential to create a sea change in the understanding of this subject
Volume II focuses on systems of thought and belief in the history of world sexualities, ranging from early humans to contemporary approaches. Comprising eighteen chapters, this volume opens with a chapter on the evolutionary legacy and then delves into the sexualities of ancient Egypt, the Near East, Greece, and Rome, continuing with pre-modern South Asia, China, and Japan, Africa, the Americas, and Oceania. Chapters include an examination of sexuality in the religious traditions of Buddhism, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, and also look at more recent approaches, including scientific sex, sexuality in socialism and Marxism, and the intersections between sexuality, feminism, and post-colonialism.
Reincarnation in Tibetan Buddhism examines how the third Karmapa hierarch, Rangjung Dorjé (1284-1339) transformed reincarnation from a belief into a lasting Tibetan institution. Born the son of an itinerant, low-caste potter, Rangjung Dorjé went on to become a foundational figure in Tibetan Buddhism and a teacher of the last Mongolian emperor. He became renowned for his contributions to Buddhist philosophy, literature, astrology, medicine, architecture, sacred geography and manuscript production. But, as Ruth Gamble demonstrates, his most important legacy was the transformation of the Karmapa reincarnation lineage to ensure that, after his death, subsequent Karmapas were able to assume power in the religious institutions he had led. The inheritance model of reincarnation instituted by Rangjung Dorjé changed the Tibetan Plateau's power relations, which until that time had been based on family associations, and created a precedent for later reincarnate institutions, including that of the Dalai Lamas. Drawing on Rangjung Dorjé's hitherto un-translated autobiographies and autobiographical songs, this book shows that his reinvention of reincarnation was a self-conscious and multi-faceted project, made possible by Rangjung Dorjé's cultural, social, and political standing and specific historical and geographical circumstances. Exploring this combination of agency and historical coincidence, this is the first full-length study of the development of the reincarnation institution.
Scholars have long been divided on the question of whether the Amazons of Greek legend actually existed. Notably, Soviet archaeologists' discoveries of the bodies of women warriors in the 1980s appeared to directly contradict western classicists' denial of the veracity of the Amazon myth, and there have been few concessions between the two schools of thought since. Postcolonial Amazons offers a ground-breaking re-evaluation of the place of martial women in the ancient world, bridging the gap between myth and historical reality and expanding our conception of the Amazon archetype. By shifting the center of debate to the periphery of the region known to the Greeks, the startling conclusion emerges that the ancient Athenian conception of women as weak and fearful was not at all typical of the region of that time, even within Greece. Surrounding the Athenians were numerous peoples who held that women could be courageous, able, clever, and daring, suggesting that although Greek stories of Amazons may be exaggerations, they were based upon a real historical understanding of women who fought. While re-examining the sources of the Amazon myth, this compelling volume also resituates the Amazons in the broader context from which they have been extracted, illustrating that although they were the quintessential example of female masculinity in ancient Greek thought, they were not the only instance of this phenomenon: masculine women were masqueraded on the Greek stage, described in the Hippocratic corpus, took part in the struggle to control Alexander the Great's empire after his death, and served as bodyguards in ancient India. Against the backdrop of the ongoing debates surrounding gender norms and fluidity, Postcolonial Amazons breaks new ground as an ancient history of female masculinity and demonstrates that these ideas have a much longer and more durable heritage than we may have supposed.
Many forms of Buddhism, divergent in philosophy and style, emerged as Buddhism filtered out of India into other parts of Asia. Nonetheless, all of them embodied an ethical core that is remarkably consistent. Articulated by the historical Buddha in his first sermon, this moral core is founded on the concept of karma—that intentions and actions have future consequences for an individual—and is summarized as Right Speech, Right Action, and Right Livelihood, three of the elements of the Eightfold Path. Although they were later elaborated and interpreted in a multitude of ways, none of these core principles were ever abandoned. The Oxford Handbook of Buddhist Ethics provides a comprehensive overview of the field of Buddhist ethics in the twenty-first century. The Handbook discusses the foundations of Buddhist ethics focusing on karma and the precepts looking at abstinence from harming others, stealing, and intoxication. It considers ethics in the different Buddhist traditions and the similarities they share, and compares Buddhist ethics to Western ethics and the psychology of moral judgments. The volume also investigates Buddhism and society analysing economics, environmental ethics, and Just War ethics. The final section focuses on contemporary issues surrounding Buddhist ethics, including gender, sexuality, animal rights, and euthanasia. This groundbreaking collection offers an indispensable reference work for students and scholars of Buddhist ethics and comparative moral philosophy.
Silver Medalist, 2020 Independent Publisher Book Awards in the Religion (Eastern/Western) Category This groundbreaking book explores Buddhist thought and culture, from multiple Buddhist perspectives, as sources for feminist reflection and social action. Too often, when writers apply terms such as "woman," "femininity," and "feminism" to Buddhist texts and contexts, they begin with models of feminist thinking that foreground questions and concerns arising from Western experience. This oversight has led to many facile assumptions, denials, and oversimplifications that ignore women's diverse social and historical contexts. But now, with the tools of feminist analysis that have developed in recent decades, constructs of the feminine in Buddhist texts, imagery, and philosophy can be examined—with the acknowledgment that there are limitations to applying these theoretical paradigms to other cultures. Contributors to this volume offer a feminist analysis, which integrates gender theory and Buddhist perspectives, to Buddhist texts and women's narratives from Asia. How do Buddhist concepts of self and no-self intersect with concepts of gender identity, especially for women? How are the female body, sexuality, and femininity constructed (and contested) in diverse Buddhist contexts? How might power and gender identity be perceived differently through a Buddhist lens? By exploring feminist approaches and representations of "the feminine," including persistent questions about women's identities as householders and renunciants, this book helps us to understand how Buddhist influences on attitudes toward women, and how feminist thinking from other parts of the world, can inform and enlarge contemporary discussions of feminism.