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.

Canon law rules of marriage became the legal means for policing forbidden sex in Iceland during the Middle Ages. These rules were adapted to various needs: enforcing morality, encouraging adherence to Christian sexual norms, and managing inheritance practices and property rights. This chapter explores sex in Iceland in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries by focusing on legal regulation, the archbishops’ and bishops’ statutes, and selected court cases. In all the Nordic countries the regulation of sexuality was highly influenced by canon law, but a study of sex in Iceland needs to be understood in relation to the special character of the society. It was highly literate, because of Christianity, but decentralized, with no towns and a distant royal administration. There had never been a strong executive authority in Iceland, and its absence seems to have encouraged widespread interest in documenting personal disputes and property rights. This makes Iceland special. Written documents and historical writing were mostly kept at the farms of leading families, for use in disputes over property rights in the local courts. This differs from more urbanized societies elsewhere in Europe.

Shortly after the conclusion of the Korean War in 1953, the Buddhist monastic community in South Korea was beset by an internal schism concerning celibacy that turned into a power struggle for control of the Korean sangha. Aside from the temples themselves, the secular courts were the primary battleground in this dispute over monastic marriages and celibacy. The legal case at the heart of the “purification movement” (chŏnghwa undong) offers insight into the monastic community’s attempts to navigate the legal landscape of post-war South Korea. The secular courts had no legal basis under the post-1948 Constitution for deciding whether celibacy was required in order to maintain one’s status as a Buddhist monk. The cases focussed instead on the legality of revising the Chogye Order’s own Constitution (chonghŏn), or more specifically the meeting or gathering in which these changes were authorized. This chapter looks at the intersection of Buddhism and constitutional law in Korea as revealed in these historical events.

In the period from 1050–1150 we see law and life ricocheting off each other, and rapid changes in both. Early fifth-century canon law provided a basis for imperial intervention in doubtful papal elections, legitimating Leo IX, who initiated the papal turn. In a number of areas the earliest papal jurisprudence provoked reform. The mismatch between law and life was a long-term result – in an age of urbanization! - of the post-Roman ruralization of Christianity. Ancient canon law was designed for city Christian communities concentrated around the bishop. It was ill-adapted to a world of isolated parish priests who could not be expected to maintain celibacy within marriage. Similarly, election of bishops by the ‘clergy and people’ was less practicable in a large rural diocese than in a concentrated urban community. The papal turn found expression in new legislation, notably about celibacy, which now meant something different from the celibacy required by late Antique papal law. But the new rules proved too simplistic, and further legal evolution followed. ‘Gratian’ expanded by his own commentary the meaning of canons – including papal decretals from late Antiquity – for his own age.