Sex

José Ignacio Cabezón has an article on Sex, that looks at it through the Gelugpa tradition. He raises a very interesting question, or rather points out a conflict. On the one hand, we don't want to just easily dismiss elements of the tradition that don't make sense to us. On the other hand, we want to not just take views uncritically and follow them, just because they are in the tradition. 

The Dali Lama points to Tsongkhapa. Looking at Tsongkhapa you come up with the conclusion that heterosexuals can have sex 5 times a night, and lesbians get a free pass, but you can't be male on male gay. That somehow seems wrong. Gender and sexuality should perhaps be treated equally. 

My first thought was, what about the Pali Cannon where the Buddha suggests to a fellow that it would be better to put his penis in a snakes mouth, than it would be to have sex with his wife because she wants a child before he goes off fully being a monk.

This brings up the question of monk versus lay, and I've always liked the phrase, "neither monk nor lay" because it points to an obvious duality. 

My understanding of Sangharakshita's problem with monasticism, is that you couldn't really know if all 5 monks were following the vinaya, all the way back to the Buddha. Ajahn Chah got a little twisted up by it for a while too. 

The literal interpretation of merit, has the lay only allowed to give stuff to the monks, when clearly there are people who don't follow the vinaya who seem to be more advanced than a rule follower, seem to do more for the propagation of Buddhism. 

OK, so we won't get into the monastic versus lay trap. My understanding of Sangharakshita is that you follow the ten precepts as principles and not literally. Sexual misconduct is fairly straight forward in these times. If someone feels hurt by sexual contact, then it's not good. Infidelity, sexual abuse, rape and other forms of coercion are wrong. The whole gay and female issues from Christianity are not to be followed. Thich Nhat Hanh's thing is monogamy. Otherwise you hurt people.

There is a book that collects the recent history of Buddhist misconduct. I can't seem to find it at the moment. John Stevens, a professor in Japan, has a kind of sexy take on Buddhism, and wrote an erotic Buddhism novel. He thinks the rice milk the girl gave the Buddha after he gave up asceticism, lead to sex. You can imprint prudery or libertine thoughts to Buddhists.

I like the approach of not pretending we are there yet, being honest and authentic, and not watering down the ideals because they are hard, and not punishing ourselves with the ideals. The idea is to transcend the worldly winds, to transcend reactivity, to not build up plans to just get pleasure and push away pain, or if you do, realize the path is the best fun.

There is no exploitation of vulnerable people seeking guidance, and no shock when it turns out Buddhist leaders have clay feet. There's avoidance of the harm of making sexuality wrong, and there's no pretending that wild sexuality isn't harmful.

We are not in the summer of love, the birth control pill didn't just become available, and there is a HIV epidemic, that in part thrives on the secrecy from the shame of homosexuality.

Sangharakshita jokes that any book called Tantric Sex Magic would sell easily. I've even used it to gain traffic on my website, along with "how can I die". That feels immature now. Sanghrakshita was sick recently and he apologized for any harm her caused with his experimentation in the aftermath, because he had been reflecting while in the hospital. I know a lot of people who, in retrospect, see they have caused harm. I have caused harm. So it's an important area to keep our eyes wide open to. Take responsibility for our actions so we can own our lives and our progress through it.

If we go back to our pagan past, we see that sexuality isn't something to be avoided, it is celebrated. In ancient Rome it was against the law not to be married and have 3 children. I'm reading a book on Marcus Aurelius and read a book on ancient Rome and it's kind of refreshing to see fewer hang ups. Of course they had their rules. It wasn't OK to be homosexual for me after 18. Before that it was fine, but after it, it wasn't. I read about Lupacallia where men run around naked and whip women in the naked butt with whips made out of goat skin. Now I don't think that just because something was in the past, they were better times. I'm just saying that in the history of humanity, we have had some interesting celebrations of sexuality.

Now birth is one of the steps on the wheel of life, that leads to greed hatred and delusion. One might get the idea that a good Buddhist would not have children. They do hinder one's free time to meditate, that is for sure, but once again, if you value your practice, parenting shouldn't be a barrier. Here we are getting into a personal decision that I've made, and don't want to come down either way on this one. I've realized how important the Dharma is to me through being a parent, and I have felt a level of love that I've never felt before (A Path for Parents).

So conclusion? A complicated set of questions from monastic versus lay, to how to go about the spiritual life, and the recent history of Buddhism. As always, live the questions.

Book Review: Lust for Enlightenment

In a previous post, I discussed sexuality through the prism of current American Buddhism and the Christianity presumptions of America, and used the catch phrase "eyes wide open" to really look at human sexuality in it's positive and negative potential. So I went looking for a book about Buddhism and sexuality. Lust for Enlightenment is positive or neutral towards sexuality, though it acknowledges there's a puritain strain of Buddhism, and that the Buddha was not longer interested in sexuality once he was enlightened.

John Stevens has been reviewed here earlier for his Japanese Buddhist erotica, which was a more recent book than Lust for Enlightenment: Buddhism and Sex, which came out in 1990, 23 years ago. In this 5 chapter book with 141 pages, John Stevens looks at sexuality through the history and mythology of Buddhism. He is a professor at Tohoku Fukushi University in Japan of Buddhist studies and is my mother's age.

The first chapter is about the Buddha, and includes his enlightenment where he transcends sexuality. It's a sexed up account, until he is enlightened, and then he's beyond temptation.

One might note he sees the Buddha as staunchly heterosexual, which he insists a few times, without proof or cites. Every time he insisted, my mind, trained in many graduate schools, shouted out, "heterosexual presumption!" In fact the book deals with homosexuality in the last pages of the book, where he noted it could be quite common at times.

In the second chapter Stevens discusses the "puritain elders" who say to try and extinguish passions in favor of non-attachment. People are persuaded to be celibate. Meditation on the loathsomeness of the body is seen as a method for calming the passions. See the body as a bag of blood, pus and filth. Also imagine the decay of a dead body. (The author identifies the voice as "puritain Buddha".) I used to have trouble sustaining the image of seeing someone throughout the life cycle, but I'm getting better and better at not reassembling the body into voluptuousness.

Chapter two is a ribald tale where for every monk's transgression, but Buddha makes a rule against such and such. Every, and I mean every, scenario is considered, and forbidden for the monks by the Buddha. This section is derived from the vinaya, which might be a fun read in terms of what people did to bring about such and such a rule. It's a kind of Starr Report; under the pretext of condemning actions, it titillates. Wild times in ancient India with salacious details. I read them out to my girlfriend because they were pretty shocking at times.

Reading what I first read in Vishvapani's book on the Buddha, that the Buddha said it would be better to stick your penis into a snake's mouth, than into a woman, I find that pretty shocking.

My complaint about chapter 2, is I don't know why he occasionally inserts more modern examples into the ancient Pali sanskrit examples. I would have preferred a historical order. But I also admire that he's read all this stuff and collected all these stories into one place.

Stevens is good at culling from the buddhist tradition sexuality, though he doesn't repeat the suggestion he had in his last book, that the Buddha has sex with the rice milk woman. He quotes a lot of primary texts from the Pali Cannon

In chapter 3 he makes the common mistake to see Vimalakirti as a "layman". Sangharakshita deftly puts that silliness to bed in his book about the Vimalakirti Nirdesa, called Inconceivable Emancipation, which is one of his best books about a text. The whole book is about how silly the different dualism of Mahayana and Hinayana are, so to say Vimalakirti is a lay buddhist is to kind of not get the whole text's point.

Stevens uses good footnotes, and he refers to a literature I'm not familiar with. But there were key Buddhist quotes that could be controversial, and called to mind Bodhipaksa's wedsite Fake Buddhist Quotes. He combines the Buddha's last two statements into one statement, for one thing.

Chapter 3 continues on into Tantra, Cha'n and Zen tradition, as does chapter 4. Which brings to mind something a friend said. Someone quoted another order member to support their position, to which my friend said, "you can find an order member who believes in everything." Just because there were times when it was OK to be a Buddhist monk and be very sexual, doesn't mean it's the right thing to do. If you are suffering under a repressive idea of sexuality, then this book might be a kind of Kinsey report for you. And I want to know what the tradition says.

Through the countless examples you see varying tolerance to sexuality by society, and how sexuality bubbles over despite "spiritual" desires. At times the guru gains status, at others he loses it.

He also mentions that in quite a few of the sexual practices, the man is not supposed to come.

Chapter 5 is about marriage, and has many examples of various configurations of polyamory, and examples of love and fidelity. You can find statements suggesting monogamy is the best. Here as in other places takes a kind of bookish sociology--what can be found out in books about a buddhist society of the past?

To refrain from sexual misconduct can be interpreted narrowly, a point to chastity, or it can be interpreted widely, and point to the potential joys, and just don't do anything extreme that hurts someone or yourself. Deceit is seen as the unskillful act. Lust, if it is pure, can be a path towards enlightenment, according to Stevens. How to purify lust, he does not really say.

I get the sense that Stevens is interested in his subject, but he doesn't share any instruction in spiritualizing sexuality that he has gotten. All the books that purport to instruct along those lines are out of print, and cost a fortune used.

Stevens is mostly an expert on the Japanese tradition, and he doesn't bring much beyond reporting things. The only implied perspective in the narrative is that collecting and reporting all this stuff is a worthy project. I don't think I was harmed by it. Buddhist culture is very diverse. I bet there existed traditions within all the major religions to spiritualize sexuality.

Writing a book isn't easy, and this one isn't bad for a trail blazer. To my knowledge it's the first English language book on sexuality in buddhism. I don't know why it's so natural to criticize. Listen to sports radio and you mostly hear about how people made mistakes. Teams win sometimes, and then it comes to testosterone filled taunting of the opponents fan base, not a real joy in success. So, avoiding that spirit, I wish to say that while I have these nit picky things to say, it's out of joy in the book that I comment, and that I'm a work in progress, who has a lot of work to do.

Now to read a book about the negative side of sexuality: Shoes Outside the Door: Desire, Devotion, and Excess at San Francisco Zen Center

Buddhist Erotica out November 1st , 2010

Got an advanced copy of this little book coming out Nov. 1st 2010. It provoked a lot of thoughts.

First off, I have to note the destructive and liberating elements of sexuality. Many sanghas have been turned upside down by the power dynamics that lead to sexual expression. I also wonder whether there has been some liberating elements. Bante is his last will and testament suggested that his experiments in sexuality did not lead to anything that was useful.

Sexuality is natural, human and can lead to quite a ruckus. I think the positive ethical statement about sexuality is to lead life with "stillness, simplicity and contentment", and sexuality can certainly be the opposite of that.

Buddhists in the good ol' USA will surely have grown up in a confusing context of Christian sexual ethics, and the sexuality of materialism, where exciting body parts are used to sell merchandise, objectifying over intimacy. It's a task to shirk off the Christianity, materialism and not embrace the hedonism.

I had a patient once, who was a beautiful rising pop star. She said sarcastically, "Buddhist men haven't transcended desire!!!" She felt their lust as much as anyone else, maybe more. In away, being more mindful, you get in tune with all of yourself. And that can lead to some interesting place. My experience, like Bante's, is that sex is not really helpful to the spiritual life, but then again, not much is helpful except the sangha (sometimes) and your own pure will and effort.

I once drew a mandala of my life, and put yellow over it to mark sexuality, and while I saw it stained yellow, another person saw a rocket ship that propelled my practice along. So I think I still have some work to do shirking my Christian conditioning about sexuality.

On another level, I have read erotica, first reading it in Nicholson Baker, and then branching out. It's a kind of safe way to explore sexuality and sexual excitement. I find erotica an interesting genera. This may be reading this book in a way that it was not intended, but that happens all the time, right?!

Sangharakshita joked in Creative Symbols of Tantric Buddhism, that if you wanted to sell a book, include the following words: secret, tantric, sex and magic. I think John Steven's title includes three of them.

Often times, when I read books that feel like ethnic Buddhism, where basic Buddhism has gone by the wayside, and ethnic expressions of culture predominate, I see the book more as a cultural study than as a study on Buddhism. I am no expert of Japanese culture, but I note it has spawned many interesting sects of Buddhism. How accurate this is about a subset of a subset of Japanese culture, only John Stevens really knows. He claims in an afterword that it is based on many things.

I found the book a smooth enjoyable read, and it challenged me in some ways. To imagine the Buddha accepting rice milk from a lovely maiden after quitting the acetic practice, and then to suggest that he slept with her, well, if Buddhism believed in blasphemy that would make me wonder. But there's no such thing as blasphemy in Buddhism, Sangharakshita has expressed that clearly in one of his booklets. Who knows it was 2,500 years ago he walked this earth. It was before he transcended desire. It's hard to imagine he had the energy after coming quite close to death, but I've often been surprised at energy arising when I thought I had none.

So in the end, I really enjoyed this book, and found it thought provoking.