Courtesans and Tantric Consorts: Sexualities in Buddhist by Serinity Young

By Serinity Young

The wisest teachings of Buddhism say that, like several oppositions, one needs to movement past gender. yet as Serinity younger indicates during this enlightening paintings, the rhetoric of Buddhist texts, the symbolism of its iconography, and the performative import of its rituals, inform diversified, and infrequently contradictory, tales. In Courtesans and Tantric Consorts, Serinity younger takes the reader on a trip via greater than 2000 years of biographical writings, iconographic depictions, and formality practices revealing Buddhism's deep struggles with gender.Juxtaposing empowering photos of ladies with their textual repudiation, starting with the Buddha himself who deserted his spouse; tantric courtesans who're necessary to male enlightenment with fertility rituals designed to make sure male offspring; stories of gender-bending gods and goddesses with all male heavens; Serinity younger attracts on an unlimited diversity of assets to bare the vibrant, and sometimes troubling, mosaic of ideals that tell Buddhist perspectives approximately gender and sexuality.

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By Serinity Young

The wisest teachings of Buddhism say that, like several oppositions, one needs to movement past gender. yet as Serinity younger indicates during this enlightening paintings, the rhetoric of Buddhist texts, the symbolism of its iconography, and the performative import of its rituals, inform diversified, and infrequently contradictory, tales. In Courtesans and Tantric Consorts, Serinity younger takes the reader on a trip via greater than 2000 years of biographical writings, iconographic depictions, and formality practices revealing Buddhism's deep struggles with gender.Juxtaposing empowering photos of ladies with their textual repudiation, starting with the Buddha himself who deserted his spouse; tantric courtesans who're necessary to male enlightenment with fertility rituals designed to make sure male offspring; stories of gender-bending gods and goddesses with all male heavens; Serinity younger attracts on an unlimited diversity of assets to bare the vibrant, and sometimes troubling, mosaic of ideals that tell Buddhist perspectives approximately gender and sexuality.

Show description

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Extra resources for Courtesans and Tantric Consorts: Sexualities in Buddhist Narrative, Iconography, and Ritual

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Cleveland and New York: The World Publishing Company, 1956, 1968), passim. For a general discussion of the hero see Lord Raglan, The Hero: A Study in Tradition, Myth, and Drama, Part II, reprinted In Quest of the Hero, ed. Robert A. Segal (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990), 87–175, and Theodor H. Gaster, “Heroes,” EOR, vol. 6, 302–05. For the Buddhist hero see Nathan Katz, Buddhist Images of Human Perfection (Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1982). See also Nancy Chodorow, The Reproduction of Mothering: Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Gender (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1978) for a gendered and psychoanalytic analysis of the male need to separate from women, especially 164–70.

For instance: “These childish ones are full of desire like idiots clutching pretty vases full of vomit. . These childish ones jump with excitement like dogs in the midst of bones. ”21 This builds to the Buddha’s speech against the human body: “The body, born from the field of karma, issuing from the water of desire, is characterized by decay. Disfigured by tears and sweat, by saliva, urine, and blood, filled with filth from the belly, with marrow, blood, and liquids from the brain, always letting impurities flow— bodies are the abode of impure teachings and ugly stenches.

See Elizabeth A. Johnson, She Who Is: The Mystery of God in Feminist Theological Discourse (New York, Crossroad, 1992), especially 151–54. The Laws of Manu, trans. Wendy Doniger and Brian K. 2. Some of these stories will be discussed in chapter 6. Even though the Buddha is sometimes credited with extraordinary qualities and powers, the tradition emphasizes his human (read male) nature, especially in the early tradition. See Katz, Buddhist Images. , Sakyadh≠tÅ: Daughters of the Buddha, (Ithaca, NY: Snow Lion Publications, 1988); for Sri Lanka see Tessa Bartholomeusz, Women Under the Bo Tree (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994).

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