While early Buddhists hailed their religion’s founder for opening a path to enlightenment, they also exalted him as the paragon of masculinity. According to Buddhist scriptures, the Buddha’s body boasts thirty-two physical features, including lionlike jaws, thighs like a royal stag, broad shoulders, and a deep, resonant voice, that distinguish him from ordinary men. As Buddhism spread throughout Asia and around the world, the Buddha remained an exemplary man, but Buddhists in other times and places developed their own understandings of what it meant to be masculine.
This transdisciplinary book brings together essays that explore the variety and diversity of Buddhist masculinities, from early India to the contemporary United States and from bodhisattva-kings to martial monks. Buddhist Masculinities adopts the methods of religious studies, anthropology, art history, textual-historical studies, and cultural studies to explore texts, images, films, media, and embodiments of masculinity across the Buddhist world, past and present. It turns scholarly attention to normative forms of masculinity that usually go unmarked and unstudied precisely because they are “normal, ” illuminating the religious and cultural processes that construct Buddhist masculinities. Engaging with contemporary issues of gender identity, intersectionality, and sexual ethics, Buddhist Masculinities ushers in a new era for the study of Buddhism and gender.
विषयसूची
Acknowledgments
Abbreviations
Introduction: Masculinities Beyond the Buddha, by Megan Bryson
Part 1: Masculine Models
1. Middle Way Masculinity: The Bodhisattva Siddhārtha as a Renunciant in Early Buddhist Texts and Art, by Dessislava Vendova
2. How Chan Masters Became “Great Men”: Masculinity in Chinese Chan Buddhism, by Kevin Buckelew
3. Men of Virtue: Reexamining the Bodhisattva King in Sri Lanka, by Stephen C. Berkwitz
Part 2: Mighty Masters
4. The Siddha Who Tamed Tibet: Padmasambhava’s Tantric Masculinity, by Joshua Brallier Shelton
5. Building a Nation on the Dharma Battlefield: Lay Zen Masculinities in Modern Japan, by Rebecca Mendelson
6. Macho Buddhism (Redux): Gender and Sexualities in the Diamond Way, by Bee Scherer
Part 3: Making Men
7. Being a Man vs. Being a Monk: Alternative Versions of Burmese Buddhist Masculinity, by Ward Keeler
8. Hanuman, Heroes, and Buddhist Masculinity in Contemporary Thailand, by Natawan Wongchalard
9. Buddhism and Afro-Asian Masculinities in The Man with the Iron Fists, by Marcus Evans
Part 4: Breaking Boundaries
10. The Afterlife of the Tang Monk: Buddhist Masculinity and the Image of Xuanzang in East Asia, by Geng Song
11. Real Monks Don’t Have Gṛhastha Sex: Revisiting Male Celibacy in Classical South Asian Buddhism, by Amy Paris Langenberg
Appendix: Character Glossary
Contributors
Index
लेखक के बारे में
Megan Bryson is associate professor of religious studies at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.Kevin Buckelew is assistant professor of religious studies at Northwestern University.