The distinctive Christian horror towards same-sex practices is the subject
of Mark Jordan’s The Invention of Sodomy in Christian Theology(1997)—
Christian horror being so different from the indifference towards such practices
found among Japanese warriors and monks in pre-industrial Japan, as shown
in Gary Leupp’s Male Colors(1995). Other valuable studies of sexuality in
the Buddhist world include Buddhism, Sexuality and Gender, edited by José
Ignacio Cabezón (1991), and two volumes by Bernard Faure, The Red Thread
(1998) and The Power of Denial(2003). The connection between sexual
activities, pregnancy and, sometimes abortion—unaccountably disregarded in
Miranda Shaw’s study of female Tantric practitioners, Passionate Enlighten-
ment(1994)—is the subject of Willaim LaFleur’s Liquid Life(1992). In the
case of China, partly under the influence of Kristofer Schipper’s—and, before
him Henri Maspero’s—pioneering work on Daoism, renewed attention is
being paid to sexual and dietary practices as well as to gymnastics; Livia Kohn
has been at the forefront, both as author and editor. India has been traditionally
regarded as the land in which bodily techniques of one kind or another have
been carried to their extreme, research on asceticism and Tantrism having
shown that extremes frequently meet. David White—who has proposed
considering Tantra, rather than bhakti, as ‘the predominant religious paradigm,
for over a millennium, of the great majority of the inhabitants of the Indian
subcontinent’—has devoted substantial volumes to alchemy, The Alchemical
Body(1996), and to Tantric sexuality, The Kiss of the Yogin¥(2003). No less
interesting, insofar as it deals with less obviously religious aspects of bodily
techniques, is Joseph Alter’s work on Indian gymnastics, The Wrestler’s Body
(1982), and on ‘somatic nationalism’ in general. Mention must also be made
of Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney’s splendid Rice as Self(1993) and of The Mani-
chaean Body(2000), a book in which Jason BeDuhn shows the importance
of bodily processes in a religion generally regarded as if it were, literally,
disembodied (and whose parallels and possible historical connections to
Jainism, another religion more often than not regarded as immaterial, deserve
close scrutiny).TraditionsA comprehensive survey of the work carried out by North American scholars
on the main religious traditions would be beyond the competence of anyone.
What follows constitutes, accordingly, only an arbitrary sample, which, like
those found in the preceding sections, has been determined by the interests of
the author of this essay.
Hinduism. Because of their complexity and continuity, the religions of
India have exercised a continuous fascination on scholars of religion, including
those who have devoted themselves to comparative or theoretical pursuits.258
GUSTAVO BENAVIDES