ABSTRACT
Beginning with the biographies of the Buddha, this study has examined Buddhist practices and beliefs about gender, sexuality, and family life primarily as they are revealed in biographical texts, iconography, and rituals. Sexuality was examined both from within family life among wives and husbands and outside of it among courtesans and tantric practitioners. Attitudes toward procreation and the parent/child relationship were also explored in terms of medical theory, rituals, and the ideology of karma. This exploration of what it meant and continues to mean to be Buddhist, gendered, and sexual has revealed anxieties about the stability of masculinity and argued that the symbolic inclusion of femaleness was accompanied by the actual exclusion of real women.
