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| The Red Thread: Buddhist Approaches to Sexuality
ISBN: 9781400822607
Platform/Publisher: JSTOR / Princeton University Press
Digital rights: Users: unlimited; Printing: chapter; Download: chapter
Subjects: Sex -- Religious aspects -- Buddhism; Buddhism -- Social aspects;
This book opens with an intriguing question: Why have so many prominent Buddhist leaders in recent times (e.g., roshi Richard Baker, Osel Tendzin, Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche) been involved in scandals of excess, especially sexual? Faure's answer is that behind such "antinomianism" there is a deep-seated ambiguity in Buddhism, rooted in the pivotal place that desire (the "red thread" of the title) holds in the Second Noble Truth. The author, a religion professor at Stanford, finds this ambiguity at its height in the Mahayana tradition, particularly in its notion of the Two Truths (bodhisattva-ultimate and lay-conventional), and most especially and predictably in Tantric Buddhism. But more telling, perhaps, is the evidence in the canonical and extra-canonical stories of Gautama himself, as well as in the ostensibly rigorist Vinaya (monastic discipline) of the more conservative Theravada school. Though the book is informative and at times entertaining with its numerous anecdotes and stories from Buddhist tradition, the warning to the reader in the introduction is well founded: the thesis and line of argumentation tend to get lost, sometimes hopelessly, in the veritable barrage of source material, most of which is far more illustrative than probative and is thus ultimately distracting. (Dec.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Bernard Faure is Associate Professor of Religion at Stanford University. He is the author of The Rhetoric of Immediacy , Chan Insights and Oversights , and Visions of Power (all from Princeton University Press). |
