Religion and Religious Type Concepts Thread

[RisingSon]

I need to read this book.

In contemporary Western popular culture, the Buddha is commonly portrayed as an androgynous, asexual character, often in a seated meditation posture and wearing a beatific smile. Many (incorrectly) associate the Buddha with Hotei, a corpulent, jolly figure of Chinese Buddhism traditionally viewed as a manifestation of the future buddha Maitreya. Buddhist monks, such as the Dalai Lama, have also become images of normative Buddhism, which is assumed to valorize celibacy and is often portrayed as rejecting gender categories (at least in theory).

In Indian Buddhist literature, however, a very different version of the Buddha and his monastic followers appears: the Buddha is described as the paragon of masculinity, the “ultimate man” (purusottama), and is referred to by a range of epithets that extol his manly qualities, his extraordinarily beautiful body, his superhuman virility and physical strength, his skill in martial arts, and the effect he has on women who see him.

Some of these qualities are present in monks as well:

Many Buddhist monks are depicted as young, handsome, and virile, and the greatest challenge to their religious devotion is lustful women propositioning them for sex. This is even true of elderly monks, who also fend off unwanted advances.

But we’ll talk about monks later on. For now, let us focus on the Buddha:

Since undertaking this project, I have been struck by the pervasiveness of ultramasculine images in Indian Buddhist texts—texts that in some cases I had read many times without even noticing these tropes. Once I began looking, however, they seemed to leap from the pages and confront me with a completely new version of the Buddha, one who personified the ideals of the Indian warrior class (ksatriya), who caused women to faint because of his physical beauty, and who converted people to his teachings through the perceptual impact of his extraordinary physique. In the “Discourse to Canki,” for example, the Buddha is described as “handsome, good looking, graceful, possessing supreme beauty of complexion, with sublime beauty and sublime presence, remarkable to behold.”

In the “Discourse to Sonadanda,” a group of brahmans comes to visit him. One of them, a young man named Angaka, is described as “handsome, good-looking, pleasant to look at, of supremely fair complexion, in form and complexion like the god Brahma, of excellent appearance,” but the brahman who gives this description hastens to add that the Buddha is even more handsome. Similar passages abound in Indian Buddhist literature. The transcendent physical beauty of the Buddha is a core trope of every text I have seen that discusses his life and teaching career.