Buddhism, Sexuality, and Gender

Buddhism, Sexuality, and Gender PDF Author: Jos? Ignacio Cabez?n
Publisher: SUNY Press
ISBN: 9780791407578
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 268

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Book Description
This book explores historical, textual, and social questions relating to the position and experience of women and gay people in the Buddhist world from India and Tibet to Sri Lanka, China, and Japan. It focuses on four key areas: Buddhist history, contemporary culture, Buddhist symbols, and homosexuality, and it covers Buddhism's entire history, from its origins to the present day. The result of original and innovative research, the author offers new perspectives on the history of the attitudes toward, and of the self-perception of, women in both ancient and modern Buddhist societies. He explores key social issues such as abortion, he examines the use of rhetoric and symbols in Buddhist texts and cultures, and he discusses the neglected subject of Buddhism and homosexuality.

Buddhism, Sexuality, and Gender

Buddhism, Sexuality, and Gender PDF Author: Jos? Ignacio Cabez?n
Publisher: SUNY Press
ISBN: 9780791407578
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 268

Get Book

Book Description
This book explores historical, textual, and social questions relating to the position and experience of women and gay people in the Buddhist world from India and Tibet to Sri Lanka, China, and Japan. It focuses on four key areas: Buddhist history, contemporary culture, Buddhist symbols, and homosexuality, and it covers Buddhism's entire history, from its origins to the present day. The result of original and innovative research, the author offers new perspectives on the history of the attitudes toward, and of the self-perception of, women in both ancient and modern Buddhist societies. He explores key social issues such as abortion, he examines the use of rhetoric and symbols in Buddhist texts and cultures, and he discusses the neglected subject of Buddhism and homosexuality.

Sexuality in Classical South Asian Buddhism

Sexuality in Classical South Asian Buddhism PDF Author: José Ignacio Cabezón
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1614293686
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 632

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Book Description
A prolific scholar surveys classical Buddhism’s approach to sex, gender, and sexual orientation in this landmark volume. More than twenty-five years in the making, this detailed sourcebook on Buddhist understandings of sexuality, desire, ethics, and deviance in classical South Asia is filled with both engaging translations and original and provocative analysis. Jose Cabezon, the XIVth Dalai Lama Professor at the University of California Santa Barbara, marshals an incredible array of scriptures, legal and medical texts, and philosophical treatises, explaining the subtleties of this ancient literature in lucid prose. This work will be of immense interest not only to scholars of Buddhism and gender studies but also to lay readers who want to learn more about traditional Buddhist attitudes toward sex.

Buddhism beyond Gender

Buddhism beyond Gender PDF Author: Rita M. Gross
Publisher: Shambhala Publications
ISBN: 1611802377
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 194

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Book Description
A bold and provocative work from the late preeminent feminist scholar, which challenges men and women alike to free themselves from attachment to gender. At the heart of Buddhism is the notion of egolessness—“forgetting the self”—as the path to awakening. In fact, attachment to views of any kind only leads to more suffering for ourselves and others. And what has a greater hold on people’s imaginations or limits them more, asks Rita Gross, than ideas about biological sex and what she calls “the prison of gender roles”? Yet if clinging to gender identity does, indeed, create obstacles for us, why does the prison of gender roles remain so inescapable? Gross uses the lenses of Buddhist philosophy to deconstruct the powerful concept of gender and its impact on our lives. In revealing the inadequacies involved in clinging to gender identity, she illuminates the suffering that results from clinging to any kind of identity at all.

Sex, Sin, and Zen

Sex, Sin, and Zen PDF Author: Brad Warner
Publisher: New World Library
ISBN: 1577319109
Category : Sex
Languages : en
Pages : 306

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Book Description
With his one-of-a kind blend of autobiography, pop culture, and plainspoken Buddhism, Brad Warner explores an A-to-Z of sexual topics — from masturbation to dating, gender identity to pornography. In addition to approaching sexuality from a Buddhist perspective, he looks at Buddhism — emptiness, compassion, karma — from a sexual vantage. Throughout, he stares down the tough questions: Can prostitution be a right livelihood? Can a good spiritual master also be really, really bad? And ultimately, what's love got to do with any of it? While no puritan when it comes to non-vanilla sexuality, Warner offers a conscious approach to sexual ethics and intimacy — real-world wisdom for our times.

Transcending

Transcending PDF Author: Kevin Manders
Publisher: North Atlantic Books
ISBN: 1623174155
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 297

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Book Description
A compelling collection of the many voices and experiences of trans, genderqueer, and nonbinary Buddhists Transcending brings together more than thirty contributors from both the Mahayana and Theravada traditions to present a vision for a truly inclusive trans Buddhist sangha in the twenty-first century. Shining a light on a new generation of Buddhist role models, this book gives voice to those who have long been marginalized within the Buddhist world and society at large. While trans, genderqueer, and nonbinary practitioners have experienced empowerment and healing through their commitment to the Buddha, dharma, and sangha, they also share their experiences of isolation, transphobia, and aggression. In this diverse collection we hear the firsthand accounts, thoughts, and reflections of trans Buddhists from a variety of different lineages in an open invitation for all Buddhists to bring the issue of gender identity into the sangha, into the discourse, and onto the cushion. Only by doing so can we develop insight into our circumstances and grasp our true, essential nature.

Lust for Enlightenment

Lust for Enlightenment PDF Author: John Stevens
Publisher: Shambhala Publications
ISBN: 0834829347
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 200

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Book Description
Over the centuries, Buddhism has responded to sexuality in a variety of fascinating ways, sometimes suppressing the sexual urge, sometimes sublimating it, sometimes cultivating it, and, on the highest levels, transforming it. This book reveals how Buddhists, beginning with Shakyamuni Buddha himself, relate to the "inner fire" that drives humankind. Included are chapters on the Buddha’s love life before his enlightenment and his later relationships with women; the tantric approach to sex among Buddhists of ancient India, Tibet, China, and Japan; Zen in the art of love; and a positive discussion of women and Buddhism.

Cosmopolitan Dharma

Cosmopolitan Dharma PDF Author: Sharon Smith
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 900423280X
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 306

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Book Description
Cosmopolitan Dharma, through an analysis of the diverse voices of racial, sexual and gender minority Buddhists, explores how cultural politics from the ground up can offer a more inclusive philosophy and lived experience of spirituality for Western Buddhism.

The Way of Tenderness

The Way of Tenderness PDF Author: Zenju Earthlyn Manuel
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1614291497
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 152

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Book Description
“What does liberation mean when I have incarnated in a particular body, with a particular shape, color, and sex?” In The Way of Tenderness, Zen priest Zenju Earthlyn Manuel brings Buddhist philosophies of emptiness and appearance to bear on race, sexuality, and gender, using wisdom forged through personal experience and practice to rethink problems of identity and privilege. Manuel brings her own experiences as a bisexual black woman into conversation with Buddhism to square our ultimately empty nature with superficial perspectives of everyday life. Her hard-won insights reveal that dry wisdom alone is not sufficient to heal the wounds of the marginalized; an effective practice must embrace the tenderness found where conventional reality and emptiness intersect. Only warmth and compassion can cure hatred and heal the damage it wreaks within us. This is a book that will teach us all.

A Bull of a Man

A Bull of a Man PDF Author: John Powers
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674033299
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 335

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Book Description
The androgynous, asexual Buddha of contemporary popular imagination stands in stark contrast to the muscular, virile, and sensual figure presented in Indian Buddhist texts. In early Buddhist literature and art, the Buddha’s perfect physique and sexual prowess are important components of his legend as the world’s “ultimate man.” He is both the scholarly, religiously inclined brahman and the warrior ruler who excels in martial arts, athletic pursuits, and sexual exploits. The Buddha effortlessly performs these dual roles, combining his society’s norms for ideal manhood and creating a powerful image taken up by later followers in promoting their tradition in a hotly contested religious marketplace. In this groundbreaking study of previously unexplored aspects of the early Buddhist tradition, John Powers skillfully adapts methodological approaches from European and North American historiography to the study of early Buddhist literature, art, and iconography, highlighting aspects of the tradition that have been surprisingly invisible in earlier scholarship. The book focuses on the figure of the Buddha and his monastic followers to show how they were constructed as paragons of masculinity, whose powerful bodies and compelling sexuality attracted women, elicited admiration from men, and convinced skeptics of their spiritual attainments.

Gender, Identity, and Tibetan Buddhism

Gender, Identity, and Tibetan Buddhism PDF Author: June Campbell
Publisher: Motilal Banarsidass Publishe
ISBN: 9788120817821
Category : Buddhism
Languages : en
Pages : 260

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Book Description
Gender, Identity and Tibetan Buddhism is a cross-sultural study which creates links between the symbolic representations of gender in the philosophy of Tibetan buddhism and contemporary thinking in relation to identity politics and interubjectivity. it traces some of the important cultural factors in the representations of gender in Tibet`s archic images, its monastic institutions, and in the light of Tibetan Buddhism`s popularity in the west, June Campbell raises important questions concerning the potential uses and abuses of power, authority and secrecy in the sexual practices of Tibetan Tantra, now that its teachings are being disseminated throughout the world.