Real Bhikṣus Don’t Have Gṛhastha Sex: Revisiting Male Celibacy in Classical South Asian Buddhism

Abstract

This presentation maps two competing classical South Asian masculinities in relationship to one other: the classical Buddhist ideal of the male celibate found in Buddhist Vinaya texts and the roughly contemporaneous ideal of the married householder, or gṛhastha, found in elite Vedic Hindu religious texts. It will argue that, while the presence of intention, consent, and desire affects the severity of sexual infractions, in fact the legal and soteriological dimensions of Buddhist celibacy are distinguishable. Evidence of Vinaya lawyers’ relative indifference to same-sex female intimacy supports this claim. The emergence of ideal of the holy householder as tracked by Jamison, Brereton, and Olivelle, among others, represents a competing model of celibacy, or brahmacarya, one adapted to the reproductive demands of lineage and religious virtue.  Understanding classical forms of Buddhist male celibacy to have been in the service of a potentially hegemonic Buddhist masculinity in competition with the non-Buddhist masculine ideal of the virtuous householder provides a background against which a more fundamental insight flashes forward—namely, that the pragmatic disciplining the male Buddhist ascetic’s sexuality found in Vinaya traditions is more of a refusal of a certain kind of sex—householder sex—than a utopian attempt to eliminate sex and desire altogether.