Lust for Enlightenment

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If one’s thoughts toward the Dharma
Were of the same intensity as those toward love,
One would become a Buddha,
In this very body, in this very life.
—THE SIXTH DALAI LAMA

Gotama was not convinced by the ascetics’ argument that such severe penance would lead to inner peace: “If suffering is all there is to salvation, most of brute creation would have attained liberation aeons ago.”

Gotama said to the Three Daughters, “I am no longer a slave to passions and lust, those razors smeared with honey, which captivate the mind and lead to fever, pain, vexation, and despair. My body is calm and my mind set free.”

First he passed through the four stages of meditation: observation and reflection, pure concentration, awakened awareness, and perfect equanimity.

Buddha taught far and wide until his death at age eighty. His final admonitions were, “Everything decays; train with diligence; rely on yourselves, no one else.”

sex is karmically unwholesome, a negative force stirring up an unending flow of wants and needs. Certain Buddhists, who may be described as puritan elders, believed that the only way to achieve lasting peace of mind was to rid oneself of all sexual passion and seek non-attachment.

Buddha concluded, “Behold this body disfigured and corrupt, a vile mass of sores and maggots, now despised. Nothing is stable, nothing remains.”

Buddha conjured up a maid lovelier than any mortal could imagine. “Look at her,” Buddha told the vain woman as he caused the beautiful phantom to age while they watched—first a sixteen-year-old virgin, then a twenty-year-old bride, next a young mother, a mature matron, a decrepit old woman, and, finally, a festering corpse oozing pus, covered with worms, and torn at by crows and jackals. “Behold the emptiness of externals; do not cling to the body, a bag of bones plastered with flesh and blood.”

“With a chance for nirvana, what need is there for sensual pleasure,

The Vinaya, the huge rule book for the Order of Celibates that developed from this and subsequent episodes, contains a compendium of sex and sexual misbehavior.

Buddha praised him by repeating the familiar litany, “Monks, there is no real delight in passion; real delight is to be free of passion.”

“Take a vow of chastity when you are old and gray. Then you can have it both ways.” The nuns were “confused” by that persuasive argument and reported back to Buddha. “Life is impermanent and you may be dead tomorrow,” Buddha reminded them,

“Lord, how should we behave toward women?”
“Not look at them.”
“But what if we must look at them?”
“Not speak to them.”
“But what if we must speak to them?”
“Keep wide awake.”

Others maintained that Buddha’s message had nothing to do with celibacy—insight and compassion were the two pillars of Buddhism, and those two faculties could be developed regardless of one’s station in life. Such is the position presented in the Vimalakīrti Nirdeśa Sūtra,1 featuring an astute layman who confounds all Buddha’s monastic disciples.

Sāriputra, the wisest of Buddha’s disciples, was sitting in solitary meditation beneath a tree deep in the forest when he was suddenly approached by Vimalakīrti. The layman told the monk in no uncertain terms, “This is not the way to meditate. You must place yourself in a state of contemplation where there is neither body nor mind; where you manifest ordinary behavior while in nirvana; where you act like a normal person without losing your spiritual nature; where your mind neither settles nor moves about; and where nothing troubles you at any stage of practice. In short, you must attain liberation without avoiding the passions that rule the world!” Sāriputra was dumbstruck.

Later on in the text, arhats are criticized for becoming monks primarily out of fear, for attempting to circumvent samsara by totally negative, one-sided means. “Nirvana,” the sutra states, “consists of the elimination of all faults and impurities,” a condition not dependent on either the lay or monastic state; if one realizes the innate purity of mind, there will be liberation.

Still another important sutra that downplays the distinction between lay and monastic Buddhists is The Pilgrimage of Sudhana.13 In this text, the young seeker Sudhana sets out to attain supreme awakening and along the way encounters fifty-three spiritual guides.

Saigyō passed to her this poetic plea:
Before I renounced the world
Your rejection would have been just,
But now why should you
Deny this black-robed monk
A night’s lodging in this dream world?
The lady was adamant:
I know that you are
One who has renounced the world,
But in this dream world
I must spare you even
The thought of attachment.

Hyo, nicknamed the “Unbridled Monk,” was a Korean master of the seventh century. He is venerated as that country’s most profound and creative thinker. One day, one of Won Hyo’s masters took him to a brothel. “It is not good for a monk to live in heaven all the time,” the master said to Won Hyo. “It is necessary to visit hell once in a while to assist the inmates there, too

Won Hyo’s motto was, “Only one with no worries and no fears can conquer life, death, and transmigration” (a verse from the Avataṃsaka Sūtra of which The Pilgrimage of Sudhana forms a part).

Many sages, East and West, have recognized that ==“Detachment can only come after attachment” and that “By passion the world is bound and by passion it is released.”==

Tantric Buddhists, advocates of the Vajrayāna, were dissatisfied with the unhealthy emphasis on celibacy and withdrawal maintained by the puritan elders, and they were impatient with the grand philosophizing and convoluted intellectual superstructure of much of the Mahāyāna; they wanted instead something more positive, direct, and concrete. Sex should be part of the Buddhist equation, some insisted: “Sex was the main preoccupation of Gotama when he was a prince in the palace, which must have had something to do with his subsequent Buddhahood, so why shouldn’t we follow in his footsteps?”

In the Tantra, the sex act is neutral; if one acts like an animal or is in any way evil-minded, the repercussions are most grave, but if one behaves as a bodhisattva, liberation is close at hand for both partners. Sexual intercourse is generally marred by animal appetite and superficial relief

Most contain an explicit warning: “These teachings will, if correctly understood, allow one to attain Buddhahood in this very life; if misconstrued, however, one will burn in hell forever.” Few are truly qualified for these practices, and genuine Tantric masters were extremely selective of their students. Buddhist gurus typically insisted that prospective candidates complete years of Hīnayāna (monastic) and Mahāyāna (moral) training before initiation. Some teachers were so cautious that they maintained that the rites should only be visualized and not actually carried out. In any case, the sole motivation of a Tantric Buddhist must be the wish to liberate all sentient beings from suffering and distress

The Buddhist tantras were organized into four levels of difficulty—kriyā-, caryā-, yoga-, and annuttara-yoga—corresponding to the stages of sexual love: smiles, longing gazes, embrace, and union

The Tantra draws this conclusion: “Every time a couple make love, if they view each other as Lord and Lady, when the stalk enters the lotus there will surely be enlightenment.”

In some Tantric texts, ejaculation on the man’s part is optional, but, in general, release of the semen was strongly discouraged, because “the bliss of retaining and rechanneling the semen is a hundred times greater than that of ejaculating it.”

practically, retention of the semen was a form of birth control, and in Tantric schools the ability to control ejaculation was a requirement for admission

the champion of sexual yoga was the “divine madman” Drukpa Kunley,

it was suggested that the ritual begin at midnight and not reach climax until the first crow of the rooster. During sexual congress, the breath should be harmonized according to the a (in) un (out) rhythm; the optimum beat is eight (or nine) shallow strokes followed by one deep thrust.

Unrestrained indulgence in sexual intercourse was never advocated by the Tachikawa-Ryū. Fast days and periods of abstinence were mandated. Sex must be avoided in the following cases: just after menstruation and other inauspicious times; when either partner has skin eruptions; when either partner is in mourning; when either partner has a high fever; and when the female partner is pregnant or in mental distress.

Apologists claim that the Tantras are composed in “twilight language,” which is never to be taken literally. “Kill,” for instance, does not really mean “slay,” but rather, “take the life out of dualistic thinking”; and “have sex with all women” means “communicate with all the feminine principles contained within one’s own body and mind.”

Zen classics ignore the subject almost entirely, as if it did not exist. The dense, ninety-two volumes of the Shōbōgenzō by the Japanese monk Dōgen, for instance, analyzes every aspect of Zen doctrine and practice in numbing detail (there is an elaborate chapter on proper toilet procedure) with the sole exception of sex, an incomprehensible omission, considering the nature of flesh-and-blood human beings.

Tao-chi was constantly berating dour ascetics, “Becoming a monk is easy; returning to the world is the real challenge. Too much moralizing destroys the spirit of Buddhism; sometimes it is necessary to refresh oneself in a pleasure pavilion.”

Knocking at the door, she said in a tiny voice, “I shouldn’t have refused you this afternoon. My husband gave me permission to come, so here I am.” Ikkyū chuckled and said, without opening the door, “I don’t want to any more, thank you. I felt like it then, but not now. Please go back home.” Tatsu-jo was furious, but there was nothing to be done, so she went back home and told her husband the conclusion of the story. He clapped his hands and said, “When he moves, he moves, but no one can move him.”

In other words, marrying, having sex, and bearing and raising children were all aspects of moving meditation, the kind of zazen Hakuin valued most highly: “Meditation in action is a billion times superior to meditation in stillness.”

which sums up the way many Zen people feel about love:
Falling in love is dangerous,
For passion is the source of illusion;
Yet being in love gives life flavor,
And passions themselves
Can bring one to enlightenment.

Indeed, monks and courtesans came to be thought of as complementary in Zen.

In Japan, visits to brothels were a regular (if unspoken) part of traditional Zen training.

In his book Zen Activity, Mokurai, longtime abbot of Kyoto’s Kennin-ji, relates a number of interesting anecdotes about sex and Buddhism.78 Mokurai compared Zen training to entering a gourd. The opening is extremely narrow, so practitioners must keep themselves under tight control in order to squeeze through.

Mokurai concurred: “So many Buddhists believe that it is necessary to seclude oneself in the mountains in order to really practice Zen. That is a great error. One should be able to do Zen even in a brothel. Those who are agitated by sex should place the blame squarely on themselves and not accuse others of causing temptation.

Mokurai summed up Zen training in this way: “When you are a novice, keep a firm hold on your balls; when mature, let them swing freely like a bull’s!”88

As we can see from the Tibetan example, it is clear that the type of sexual relationship an individual enters into has no direct bearing on his or her ability to practice Buddhism.

Most young men who keep themselves strictly chaste find themselves visited by sexual fantasies and torturing longings which are worse for them than occasional visits to the flower-houses, while marriage is far better still. . . . Perfect chastity is dangerous, unless you really have mastered such longings. Buddhism does not enjoin enforced chastity, which is the road to madness, but the gradual mastery of desire. . . .

Since birth control could be interpreted as an attempt to interfere with the workings of karma, there was a tendency in Buddhism to discourage artificial contraception. In reality, however, the necessity of birth control was tacitly recognized, and a contraception was controlled in a variety of ways—abstention from sex (the rhythm method), control of the male’s ejaculation, and, from the time of Buddha, birth control pills.

Abortion, however, was an abomination. In addition to being a violation of the precept against killing a living being, it was destruction of a potential Buddha and a crime against the maintenance of the human race.57 Mitigating factors such as impregnation by rape or incest may have been considered, but the Buddhist position against abortion was clearcut and has only been questioned in modern times.

Equally controversial, past and present, is the problem and nature of homosexuality, perhaps the only sex act condemned by both the puritan and Tantric Buddhists.

Buddhist sexual ethics are both situational and absolute. Each sexual encounter is unique, with a special network of contributing factors. It is the motive, not the act itself, which must be ethical.

If your heart is pure, all things in your world will be pure.
When this is true, even lust may win us enlightenment

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