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The Buddha of classical India may have been celibate, but he did not lack manly vigor. Indeed, as John Powers documents in his monograph A Bull of a Man: Images of Masculinity, Sex, and the Body in Indian Buddhism, the Buddha is commonly depicted in Buddhist texts and art as hypermasculine, physically powerful, and sexually magnetic despite his famous rejection of wife, kingdom, and lineage. Furthermore, Indian Buddhist traditions defend the masculinity of Buddhist monks through rhetoric, narrative, and monastic law. Powers plots the ways in which masculinity and the Indian Buddhist path are discursively intertwined, and he offers explanations for an Indian Buddhist discourse of masculinity that many have ignored or found counterintuitive. He situates his work within emerging scholarship on religion, gender, and the body, noting the central importance of somatic displays of virtue and of the male body in particular as a symbol of spiritual accomplishment in Indian Buddhism. Calling on the theoretical work of Michel Foucault, Judith Butler, Pierre Bourdieu, and others, Powers further suggests that Buddhist discourses of masculinity were a vital resource for Indian Buddhists who had to perform their masculinity in order to succeed in their local social environments.
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