The Red Thread: Buddhist Approaches to Sexuality

Well, you have to hand it to him. Faure has done his homework here. Sure, he can't pass up an obligatory mention of Foucault, but he manages for the most part to make his obsession with French "theory" take a back seat to real solid work in original source materials. And the result is sometimes a real blast to read because he has an audacious knack for digging up the strangest, most bizarre (and often shocking) stuff from the Buddhist tradition--seriously jarring the reader's preconceptions of this religion. But as everyone notes, this is also what gets him in trouble; he seems to have such a profusion of material (none of which he can resist sharing with the reader) that he keeps losing the thread of his argument, making the reading experience of "The Red Thread" simultaneously frustrating as well as fun, confusing as well as illuminating. That said, it is one of the few books I know of that really takes on these issues of sexuality, desire, and gender in Buddhism with gusto after Liz Wilson's excellent work "Charming Cadavers" (which is limited to India), so despite its lack of coherence it is still a book with which anyone interested in Buddhism should aquaint themselves.