This chapter provides an overview of Buddhist sexualities ranging from monastic celibacy in India, China and Japan, to Buddhist lay sexualities, to altruistic sexuality in Indian Mahayana Buddhism. It then examines religious sexuality in tantra in India and Tibet, including transgressive discourses in Indian Buddhist liturgies and sexual yoga techniques in Tibetan Buddhist literature. The chapter argues that these diverse and contradictory discourses all represent a shared concern with regulating sexuality and harnessing it for soteriological purposes. Both the renunciation of sensual experience in Indian monastic literature and the embrace of sensual experience in Tibetan sexual yoga have been framed as means for relieving suffering and attaining soteriological success. With examples from Vinaya literature, yogini tantras, premodern and contemporary literature, this chapter highlights the rich diversity of Buddhist sexualities and gender constructs.

Chapter three focuses on south India from the mid-fourteenth through mid-fifteenth centuries with an emphasis on Vijayanagara. We consider the rise and fall of this powerful kingdom including its military nature and its cultural orientation. While the rulers of Vijayanagara cast themselves as exemplary Hindu kings, they also embraced Islamicate cultural expression in their courtly dress and their palace buildings. The robust economy of Vijayanagara allowed for successful territorial expansion facilitated by active and successful trading. Contemporary with Vijayanagara was the Muslim ruled Bahmani kingdom situated to the northwest. The prime minister Mahmud Gawan’s ability to control its two dominant factions, nobles from Iran on one hand and Indian Muslims on the other, is among the topics explored.