The Buddha of classical India may have been celibate, but he did not lack manly vigor. Indeed, as John Powers documents in his monograph A Bull of a Man: Images of Masculinity, Sex, and the Body in Indian Buddhism, the Buddha is commonly depicted in Buddhist texts and art as hypermasculine, physically powerful, and sexually magnetic despite his famous rejection of wife, kingdom, and lineage. Furthermore, Indian Buddhist traditions defend the masculinity of Buddhist monks through rhetoric, narrative, and monastic law. Powers plots the ways in which masculinity and the Indian Buddhist path are discursively intertwined, and he offers explanations for an Indian Buddhist discourse of masculinity that many have ignored or found counterintuitive. He situates his work within emerging scholarship on religion, gender, and the body, noting the central importance of somatic displays of virtue and of the male body in particular as a symbol of spiritual accomplishment in Indian Buddhism. Calling on the theoretical work of Michel Foucault, Judith Butler, Pierre Bourdieu, and others, Powers further suggests that Buddhist discourses of masculinity were a vital resource for Indian Buddhists who had to perform their masculinity in order to succeed in their local social environments.

Powers begins with Sanskrit and Pāli narratives of the Buddha's life, highlighting relevant tropes such as the many epithets that liken him to powerful male animals, his military and sexual prowess as a young nobleman, his physical attractiveness to women, and the ease with which he trounces the fearsome Māra. Because the male is preferred to the female in patriarchal ancient India, the celibate Buddha, who has achieved the highest spiritual state, is not androgynous but fully masculine, the very finest of men. Powers then turns to vinaya literature, outlining the ways in which rules governing sexuality and deportment for monks construct a monastic community that is suave, well groomed, and bursting with sublimated sexual power. As such, Power argues, Buddhist monks were easily distinguishable from other less disciplined ascetic groups and attractive to wealthy lay donors.

Next, Powers provides background for Buddhist ideas about somatic virtue and sexuality by delving into analyses of the body in Buddhist and Ayurvedic texts. Particularly germane are Indic theories about the beneficial effects of semen retention through celibacy, and about embryology, which links past actions to present physical endowments. The chapter following, which contains some of the most original material in Powers's volume, describes how male friendship and communality is encouraged in monastic legal texts and celebrated in Buddhist narrative, generating a culture of male sociality that Powers suggests increased the sangha's ability to lure young male recruits. In his final chapters, Powers takes readers on a whirlwind tour of virtuous male bodies and the religious uses of male sexuality in Mahāyāna texts and Buddhist Tantra.

Powers's employment of masculinity as an interpretive category in the study of Indian Buddhism is fresh and extremely useful. His mastery of a wide range of textual sources in several Buddhist languages makes his discussion substantive and well balanced. Furthermore, he takes a pedagogical tone throughout, always providing a basic discussion of Buddhist traditions even while advancing more sophisticated arguments about gender and the body in Buddhism. These qualities make his volume one of a rare few that are both challenging for experts and accessible to students.

While his core insight is brilliant and his scholarship solid, Powers gives us bits and pieces rather than a magisterial discussion of the uses of masculinity in Indian Buddhist traditions. Furthermore, his book is not as original as it claims to be. Much of the material in the early chapters on Buddhist hagiography, sexuality in the vinaya, and Buddhist theories of the body has already been written about in previous publications by Bernard Faure, Janet Gyatso, Liz Wilson, Frances Garrett, Susanne Mrozik, and others. This redundancy would not be a problem had Powers engaged, critiqued, or at least built on these earlier works. Aside from Mrozik, however, Powers largely seems to ignore the existing corpus on Buddhist constructions of gender, sexuality, and the body. Even more troublesome is Powers's lack of historical contextualization and attention to textual genre. Just to give one example, in discussing themes of masculinity in hagiographies of the Buddha, Powers makes no distinction between unauthored Pāli canonical accounts, whose date may be early, the later Theravāda commentarial tradition, and Sanskrit compositions such as the Buddhacarita, a poetic work by a Brahmin-educated Buddhist apologist living in first- or second-century northwest India. Powers's arguments would have gained power and cogency had he connected text to context, relating images and representations to particular literary, ritual, institutional, or social environments. Finally, in arguing that the Buddha's perfect male body encodes his superiority, not his virility, Powers weakens his discussion of masculinity in general. Still, no author can be all things to all people, and Powers's A Bull of a Man is a solid and worthy study that will be revelatory to many.