Brad Warner's Hardcore Zen: Who Would Buddha Fuck?

The answer to the question "who would Buddha fuck?" is that he wouldn’t. He left his wife to pursue the deeper Truth of the Universe. Later on she dropped whatever grudge she must have had and became a Buddhist nun. But as far as we know they did not get back together as husband and wife again even after she joined the order.

But, y’see, before Buddha became Buddha he got more ass than a toilet seat. Compared to the founders of most major religions Buddha was the Gene Simmons of the spiritual scene. One of the randiest saviors this planet has ever produced!

Siddhartha Gautama, the Buddha-to-be, was born into a royal family and reportedly had quite a harem in his youth. His dad, the king, had a special “chamber of love” built for the boy where the raunchy little tyke spent his days partaking in all kinds of debauchery. According to Lust for Enlightenment by John Stevens, the ever horny prince availed himself of pleasure girls adept at such skills as “war of the tongues,” “kissing the stalk,” “sucking a mango,” “opening the blossom,” as well as sex positions known as "the union of cats," "the pressing of an elephant," "bee buzzing over honey" and, best of all, "the union of three." Sometimes the girls teamed up to perform the yogini chakra in which the salivating Siddhartha made love simultaneously with three, five, seven or nine partners.

Suffice it to say, by the time Buddha gave up sex he’d tried pretty much everything there was to try.

The first Buddhist monks attempted to emulate Buddha’s later life in terms of sex, meaning they usually became celibate.

Later on other Buddhists in the Tantric tradition took a completely different outlook, turning to Buddha's earlier life and trying to make sex into a meditative practice. According to the all-knowing Wikipedia*, “When enacted as enjoined by the tantras, the (sexual) ritual culminates in a sublime experience of infinite awareness, by both participants.” Uh huh. I’m sure it does. I have a couch right over here where we can try it out if you like…

In Zen practice we strive for the balanced state that Dogen called, “Dropping off both body and mind.” People come to this state of balance in a variety of ways. One of the reasons sex is so appealing is that for many people the only time they truly drop off body and mind and enter fully into the present moment is while fucking.

Yet, in spite of what the Tantrics say, I remain unconvinced that sex is a viable path to the Absolute. It’s just too easy to abuse and it’s too potentially emotionally charged of an activity for most people to maintain equilibrium while engaged in it

In medieval Japan a Zen monk named Ikkyu celebrated his own sexual escapades -- which, by the way, he never equated with his Zen practice -- in a series of poems dedicated to bar girls and prostitutes. My favorite goes like this,

I am infatuated with the beautiful Mori of the celestial garden
Lying on the pillow, tongue on her flower stamen
My mouth fills with the pure perfume from the waters of her stream
Twilight comes, then moonlight shadows, as we sing our new song

He also said of fair Mori, “She is a master of love play. When my jade stalk wilts she can make it sprout.” Yay-yah!

There is clearly no single unified line of thinking when it comes to whether or not Buddhists should fuck. But Puritanism was never part of the Buddhist tradition. Even where celibacy is practiced it is only required of the clergy. There has never been a Buddhist-led movement to suppress sexuality among the general population.

As far as lay people were concerned, Buddha only said that a lay Buddhist man should, "avoid unlawful sexual intercourse. He (should have) no intercourse with girls who are still under the protection of father or mother, brother, sister, or relative; nor with married women, nor female convicts; nor lastly with betrothed girls." We can assume the same advice in modified form was expected to be adhered to by women.

We don’t live in ancient India or medieval Japan, and most of us are not Buddhist monks. But a lot of young people in the West these days are interested in Buddhism. And they’re interested in fucking.

And while ancient Buddhist texts may be able to tell us how the folks who composed them dealt with sex and marriage, they don’t really address the subject of dating at all, since it’s a very modern concept.

I joined one of the Buddhist dating services on the Internet recently, to see what might be going on in there. I’d seen the ads these guys placed in the Buddhist rags with an appealing young couple meditating back to back and thought they were hilarious. I didn’t get too far, though. The “free” site asked me to pay $15 if I wanted to send a message to any of its members. But what I found in my brief excursion was pretty dire.

For starters, it looks like most of the Southern California based women on the site identify their religion not as Buddhism, but as Scientology. I found that a little surprising. Scientologist or not, most of the folks there are looking for the elusive “soul mate.” It’s just such a sad place to visit. So many people wanting something so desperately that even if that something should cross their path they wouldn’t recognize it since they’re so blinded by wanting it. They get so into the mindset of looking for their ideal that the real world becomes a mere shadow.

As Mr. Spock said, “Sometimes having is not so pleasing a thing as wanting. It is not logical, but it is often true.”

A lot of the pain we face in life comes down to wanting what we don’t have. Maybe even all of it. Wanting is a function of thought. It’s disconnected from reality. It involves imagining a situation that would be better than the one you have right now and lamenting your current situation for not being like the thing you’ve imagined. Dating sucks**, generally, because we’ve been steeped in a culture that celebrates romantic love as the ultimate pleasure, yet in reality romantic love is an elusive thing that, even when actually experienced, has a lot of aspects that are not anything close to ultimate pleasure.

Zen teacher Shunryu Suzuki, author of Zen Mind Beginner’s Mind, only once gave dating advice. He said, “It’s all right to have as many sex partners as you like, as long as you can remember all of their names.” I think that’s an interesting piece of advice.

He said this at a talk in San Francisco in the late Sixties when free love was all the rage. He knew his audience were not going to turn to celibacy or even get married as Suzuki had three times. And anyhow, he didn’t think it was crucial that they did. But he did think it was crucial that they entered into each relationship with full conscious awareness.

I don’t like to use the word “mindfulness” to describe this kind of awareness because it has been driven into the ground through overuse by people who have no clue what mindfulness means. It does not mean, “thinking about stuff a whole lot.” It means paying full attention with body and mind. It has nothing at all to do with thought. Thought is only an infinitesimally tiny part of what we mean by the word “mind” in Buddhist philosophy.

Casual sex is not the Buddhist way. Which is not to say that sex has to always be a heavy activity fraught with meaning. But it does mean that sex ought to be handled with care. It has a deeper meaning, whether we’re aware of it or not.

A woman told me recently that when a man penetrates her physically she feels like she takes on his karma. That’s not exactly how I’d have stated it. But I believe what she said is true. And the same goes for a man, who also draws energy and karma from his partner. The identical sort of interaction happens between same-sex couples and in multi-partner situations as well, of course. This sort of thing should not be approached casually.

We’ve come too far culturally and historically to need to be very concerned with who the Buddha would fuck. Yet Buddhist philosophy and practice has a lot to tell us about how we can conduct our own sex lives in a conscious and careful manner.

By the way, uh, unicorns!

* This is sarcasm.
** This I know very well, right now.

Brad Warner is the author of Hardcore Zen and Sit Down and Shut Up! and the newest Zen Wrapped in Karma Dipped in Chocolate. He maintains a blog about Buddhist stuff and a MySpace page too. If you're in Southern California and you want to try some Zazen for yourself, he has a group that meets every Saturday in Santa Monica.

Buy the new CD by his band Zero Defex at CD Baby now!



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