Sex, Sin, and Zen: A Buddhist Exploration of Sex from Celibacy to Polyamory and Everything in Between

Sex, Sin, and Zen: A Buddhist Exploration of Sex from Celibacy to Polyamory and Everything in Between

by Brad Warner
Sex, Sin, and Zen: A Buddhist Exploration of Sex from Celibacy to Polyamory and Everything in Between

Sex, Sin, and Zen: A Buddhist Exploration of Sex from Celibacy to Polyamory and Everything in Between

by Brad Warner

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Overview

With his one-of-a kind blend of autobiography, pop culture, and plainspoken Buddhism, Brad Warner explores an A-to-Z of sexual topics — from masturbation to dating, gender identity to pornography. In addition to approaching sexuality from a Buddhist perspective, he looks at Buddhism — emptiness, compassion, karma — from a sexual vantage. Throughout, he stares down the tough questions: Can prostitution be a right livelihood? Can a good spiritual master also be really, really bad? And ultimately, what's love got to do with any of it? While no puritan when it comes to non-vanilla sexuality, Warner offers a conscious approach to sexual ethics and intimacy — real-world wisdom for our times.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9781577319115
Publisher: New World Library
Publication date: 10/12/2010
Sold by: Barnes & Noble
Format: eBook
Pages: 304
File size: 535 KB

About the Author

Brad Warner was born in Ohio in 1964. In 1983 he met Zen teacher Tim McCarthy and began his study of Zen while he was still the bass player of the hardcore punk band Zero Defex, whose big hit was the eighteen-second masterpiece “Drop the A-Bomb on Me!” In the 1980s he released five albums of psychedelic rock under the band name Dimentia 13 (that’s the way he spelled it), though Dimentia 13 was often a one-man band with Brad playing all the instruments. In 1993 he moved to Japan, where he landed a job with Tsuburaya Productions, the company founded by Eiji Tsuburaya, the man who created Godzilla. The following year Brad met Gudo Nishijima Roshi, who ordained him as a Zen monk and made him his dharma heir in 2000. Brad lived in Japan for eleven years. In 2003 he published his first book, Hardcore Zen, followed by Sit Down and Shut Up! in 2007 and Zen Wrapped in Karma Dipped in Chocolate in 2009. These days he travels around the world leading retreats, giving lectures, and looking for cool record stores. At last report he was living in Minneapolis with two rambunctious kitties.

Read an Excerpt

Sex, Sin and Zen

A Buddhist Exploration of Sex from Celibacy to Polyamory and Everything in Between


By Brad Warner

New World Library

Copyright © 2010 Brad Warner
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-57731-911-5



CHAPTER 1

The Piece of Ass Chant

We reflect on the effort that brought us this piece of ass and consider how it comes to us.

We reflect on our virtue and practice and whether we are worthy of this piece of ass.

We consider sexual greed to be the obstacle to freedom of mind.

We consider this piece of ass to be good medicine to sustain our lives.

For the sake of attaining the Truth we now receive this piece of ass.


The above is a paraphrase of what is known as the Five Reflections. It's the standard chant intoned by Zen monks before every meal during temple practice. Of course, in the orthodox version the words piece of ass would be replaced by the word food.

The reason we chant this (the original version) before eating is because eating is literally vital; it's indispensable for survival. If you stop eating for long, you die.

Sex, on the other hand, is not essential. You can live to be a hundred without ever getting a single piece of nookie and do just fine. But most of us don't think of sex that way. Most of us consider sex almost as crucial as food, water, or air. We'll spend incredible amounts of time, effort, and energy to get it. But when we do get some we often find ourselves in just as much of a quandary as we were in when we didn't have any.

Rewriting the Buddhist meal chant as a chant of thankfulness for sex and chanting it each time we get some action may not be the best way to deal with the problems that sex inevitably introduces into our lives, along with the pleasure it gives. But it may be useful whenever having sex to reflect briefly on how privileged we are just to be able to do it, and to accept it with gratitude and grace.

A lot went into that sex! Not only was there the obvious stuff, like going to the bar, getting up your nerve to talk to the person, getting the cold shoulder but trying again, getting rid of his or her friend, the dinner, the movie, the make-out session with the dog trying to hump your leg the whole time, and so on. But just the simple fact that you have a body and mind healthy enough to enjoy sex and the opportunity to do it at all is nothing to take for granted. Not everyone has that. And there will come a time when you won't have it either.

The reason Buddhists chant a verse of reflection and thankfulness before each meal is because most of us take eating very lightly. We sit in front of the TV shoving handfuls of Fritos in our mouths without even the slightest awareness of what a great and rare privilege it is just to be able to have food. We complain about our food when there are plenty of humans and other sentient beings who would do anything just to be able to eat. The meal verse is intended to remind us that eating is a significant matter. Even the strictest vegan in the world has to take life to sustain his or her own life. Carrots and potatoes are living things too.

Most of us don't take sex as lightly as we take eating. But we do often come to it with very little awareness of how very special it is. Sure, maybe we feel lucky to get a really hot piece of ass. We may be thankful to be with someone we love. But there are plenty of times when we quickly forget what a wonderful thing it is just to be able to have sex at all when we're caught up in the moment. That's not necessarily a bad thing. Still, a bit of reflection can never hurt.

And there are a lot of times when we approach sex in a dangerously unreflective way. We get so caught up in our carnal desires that nothing much else matters. We're prone to behaving in careless and inappropriate ways. We'll often stop at almost nothing to get into a position where bodily fluids may be exchanged. We don't care who we step on or what kind of trouble we cause, just as long as there's some four-legged frolic involved. All kinds of trouble have resulted from the simple desire to shag someone without the necessary reflection on what that shagging might entail.

So now that we've chanted, let's get started with the discussion, shall we?

CHAPTER 2

Are Buddhists Allowed to Jack Off?

Let's start out by clarifying some of our terms. Although Zen Buddhism is probably the most talked about form of Buddhism among Westerners these days, it also seems to be the least practiced one. Very briefly, Zen is a specific form of Buddhism that developed at the beginning of the Common Era around five hundred years after Gotama* Buddha's death as a reaction to the way Buddhism had strayed from its origin as a meditative practice and become more of a religion. The Zen movement sought to strip away all the inessential rituals, costuming, and other trappings and get back down to basics. This is evident in the name of the sect. "Zen" is the Japanese pronunciation of the Sanskrit word dhyana, meaning "meditation."

Not all Buddhism is Zen, however. I don't have the statistics, and as far as I know nobody else does either, but my educated guess, based on what I've seen and read, is that Zen is a fair ways down the list after Soka Gakkai, Pure Land, Tibetan, and Vipassana Buddhism in terms of popularity in the West. So if you walk into a random Buddhist center in your town, chances are it might not be a Zen temple — unless you live in Minneapolis–Saint Paul or in the San Francisco Bay Area, where there is either a Zen center or a Starbucks on every corner.

A lot of Americans I meet are surprised to discover that there are often vast differences in practices and teachings among the various schools of Buddhism. But, really, that's like being surprised to discover that Catholics and Baptists have different practices and beliefs, even though they're all Christians. Because of the diversity within Buddhism, and also because I personally tend to have somewhat idiosyncratic views, you may find that the Buddhist places you visit have far different ideas about sexuality than what I am laying out in this book. I only really know Zen, myself, so that's all I'm going to be addressing here. I don't even claim that what I'm saying here goes for all, or even most, Zen people. And, just FYI, we Zen Buddhists tend to be so arrogant that we just call what we believe "Buddhism" without specifying the sect. I'll be doing a little of that, too. Deal with it.

Also, I will use the word meditation from time to time to refer to zazen practice. I do this mainly to keep from repeating the same word over and over, as well as to remind those who may not be familiar with the word zazen that I am talking about a practice that most people consider a form of meditation.

In these cases I'm using the word meditation as a blanket term to cover sitting still in that way that, y'know, like, meditators do and stuff. I'm sorry to get all vague and "teenage" on you here, but let me unpack this a bit, and maybe you'll understand why. According to the dictionary function on the word-processing program I'm using, meditation means "emptying the mind of thoughts, or concentration of the mind on just one thing, in order to aid mental or spiritual development, contemplation or relaxation." That's not zazen — which the same dictionary function tells me is "a form of meditation in Zen, practiced sitting in a prescribed position." Actually, that's a good definition and a good use of the word meditation, just as a rather neutral term for a type of familiar activity.

But most forms of meditation are pretty much what the folks at the software company think they are — methods for emptying the mind or developing concentration aimed at some kind of spiritual goal. Zazen, on the other hand, looks like meditation in that you sit up straight and cross-legged staring at a wall. But there is no goal to the practice. You're not trying to empty your mind of thoughts or concentrate on anything. You allow thought to proceed as it needs to without deliberately adding to the stew. This is, of course, far easier said than done.

Zazen is not a means to any end. It's not a method to get spiritual enlightenment or anything else. It just is what it is. This is a very tricky subject. So rather than attempting to comprehensively describe what zazen actually is right here, I will do so piecemeal throughout the book. I've also added an appendix to try and explain it more succinctly.

At any rate, the foregoing is just a heads-up for you, so we're clear on a couple of things. But let's get started with the discussion about sex. That's what you paid for, after all!

In April 2009 I was giving a talk at a place called Casa Del Popolo in Montreal. I had given a talk there once before, about four years earlier. That one was kind of a tense gig. And a weird one. I'd never been there before, and I'd been told the place was a coffeehouse. But when I got there, the audience was drinking beer and wine and smoking cigarettes. This, I gathered, was normal for coffeehouses in Montreal. Mais sacré bleu! I had never spoken about Zen in a place where people were getting drunk. I wasn't sure what kind of reaction I'd get in a place like this.

One guy in the back seemed angry about some of the things I said. From up on stage I could see him getting agitated as I spoke. When I opened the talk up to Q & A he was the first to raise his hand. He said, "Are you saying that there's no difference between truth and what is true?" He seemed pretty pissed off about this. But I couldn't quite get the question. This made him even angrier. I thought he was going to rush the stage and slug me.

But he didn't. I answered as best I could — I think I said something about how there is no distinction made in Zen philosophy between Big Ultimate Truth and the small things that are true and factual right now — and I moved on to the next question. After the show the guy lingered, which worried me. But we just chatted for a bit. I got his email address. We emailed back and forth for a while, and then I stopped hearing from him.

But a lot of people who came to the talk in April remembered the guy and the incident at that talk all those years ago. They kept saying stuff to me like, "I wonder if that guy is going to be there again?" I was a little concerned myself. I didn't know if he was a known psycho or something.

Anyway, the event went okay this time. But there was a guy standing by the door with a slightly ornery look in his eye. He looked a little like the guy from a few years ago. Maybe he was the guy. Sure enough, when the Q & A started he was one of the first to raise his hand.

"Are Buddhists allowed to jack off?" he said.

"They're encouraged to!" I replied.

It was a weird question, and I'll get to my full answer in a second. But it was that question, among other things, that inspired me to write a book about Buddhism and sex. Because when I answered that question, I ended up doing what every book I'd seen that addressed the subject of Buddhism and sex did. I regurgitated the history of Buddhist monastic rules regarding sex.

The history of sex in Buddhism in a nutshell goes something like this. The earliest monastic Buddhists were strictly celibate. Buddhists in those days were not allowed to jack off, much less have sex with any person, animal, or celestial being — this last one was something they considered a real possibility, so it had to be addressed. When Buddhism reached Tibet things changed drastically, to the point where a certain sect began to use sex as a kind of meditation. Then when Buddhism got to China, things became even a bit more varied. Most Chinese monasteries favored celibacy, but there were numerous notable exceptions. Later on, when Buddhism migrated to Japan, the government declared that Buddhist monks could be legally married. Then Buddhism migrated to Europe and America, and everything went crazy.

Or maybe it didn't. Maybe we're finally coming to terms with something those other folks never really dealt with. The dude's question is significant and concerns me and, I assume, you as well. As I said, there are better books to read if you want to know the history of how Buddhism has dealt with sex. But I don't know of any books that address the question of how contemporary Buddhists deal with it.

In trying to come to terms with the true Buddhist way of sexuality, I'm much more interested in how Western Buddhists of the twenty-first century approach sex than in what the ancients did. This might strike some readers as odd. We're used to the idea that the best way to understand what a religion really stipulates about some subject is to go back to its earliest texts and discover what the founders of the religion in question said about it. If we want to know the proper Christian attitude toward sex, we consult the Bible, particularly the words of Christ himself. If we want to know how a good Muslim should deal with sex, we just open up the Qu'ran and see what Muhammad had to say on the subject. So if we want to know how Buddhists should view matters of sexual interaction, the best way would be to find out what Buddha himself had to say, right?

Well, no, actually. Buddha himself said in the Kalama Sutra, Rely not on the teacher, but on the teaching. Rely not on the words of the teaching, but on the spirit of the words. Rely not on theory, but on experience. Do not believe in anything simply because you have heard it. Do not believe in traditions because they have been handed down for many generations. Do not believe anything because it is spoken and rumored by many. Do not believe in anything because it is written in your religious books. Do not believe in anything merely on the authority of your teachers and elders. But after observation and analysis, when you find that anything agrees with reason and is conducive to the good and the benefit of one and all, then accept it and live up to it.


Thus Buddha himself left us with completely different criteria for determining what is and what is not real Buddhism from those of any religion. If we accept Buddha's words about his philosophy, it obviously won't do to just look at history, even the most ancient strata. It also won't do to accept at face value what has been said by great Buddhist teachers, or even by lousy Buddhist teachers like me.

If we want to know how to behave adequately and morally in terms of sex we can't rely on solutions provided for other cultures and other times.

The specific matter of whether Buddhists were allowed to jack off was actually very important to me when I first started this Zen thing. I was a freshman in college and dating a woman who described herself as a born-again Christian. It's a very long story. Don't ask. Anyhow, she had strong opinions about pretty much everything, including masturbation. She didn't necessarily think of it as sinful, though that was probably in the back of her mind. But she did think it was a form of cheating.

Her opinion was based on the famous quote from the Bible that to lust in your heart is the same as committing adultery. As far as I was concerned, even though I didn't really believe in God in the sense of believing in a gigantic white man on a throne up in heaven who judges our actions, I still thought that maybe somewhere out there was a cosmic scale by which morality was measured. What I mean by this is that I thought maybe there was some absolute measure of right and wrong action, and I supposed that the Bible might possibly be a source of information about that absolute scale of right and wrong. So maybe masturbation was the same as sexual infidelity.

My parents, as far as I know, were the very model of sexual fidelity They'd been together since high school and stayed together right up until my mom died in 2007. If they ever cheated on each other, I did not know and do not need or even want to know. But in all the time they were together I never even heard a rumor that either one was unfaithful. So the idea of sexual fidelity was very important to me. If the Bible was right, then I was in big trouble! But then I started to wonder: What if there were other sources of information about what was right and what was wrong?

I was attracted to Buddhism for a whole lot of reasons. One of the things I hoped to find was some way of determining the real nature and content of this absolute scale of right and wrong that I believed might exist.

I discovered that the question of what is and is not acceptable sexually in Buddhism is actually a small part of a much bigger matter. It's about morality, what Buddhists call "right action." In Western culture, many of our questions about moral action involve sex. We Western people tend to take for granted that our decisions about sexual action are all rather weighty moral matters. We believe this to such a degree that we even question whether or not even our thoughts about sex are moral issues.

But in Asian cultures traditionally far less attention has been paid to sex as a matter of morality. Which is not to say it's all free love and orgies over there. But the Asian attitude toward sex has always been much freer — or at least lighter — than the Western one. Buddhism, being an Asian import, has a relationship to sex that is completely unlike the ones found in Christianity, Judaism, or Islam.


(Continues...)

Excerpted from Sex, Sin and Zen by Brad Warner. Copyright © 2010 Brad Warner. Excerpted by permission of New World Library.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

Table of Contents

Contents

Introduction: Brokenhearted Zen,
1. The Piece of Ass Chant,
2. Are Buddhists Allowed to Jack Off?,
3. [SEXUAL ANGLES ON BUDDHISM] All Sex Is Suffering: Sex and the Four Noble Truths,
4. You Celibate, I'll Buy a Bit!,
5. [SEXUAL ANGLES ON BUDDHISM] Saving All Beings ... from My Dick!: Sex and the Bodhisattva Vow,
6. Attached to Nonattachment,
7. [SEXUAL ANGLES ON BUDDHISM] Ouch! Mind Where You Put That Thing!: Sex and Mindfulness,
8. Is Orgasm the Highest Form of Meditation?,
9. How Have I Come to This?,
10. Zen and Porn,
11. [SEXUAL ANGLES ON BUDDHISM] Filling the Void — If You Know What I Mean!: Sex and Emptiness,
12. Women, Evolution, and Buddhism,
13. Getting Naked,
14. [SEXUAL ANGLES ON BUDDHISM] How Can I Play with Myself If I Don't Have a Self?: Sex and Nonself,
15. Paying for It,
16. The Real Porno Buddhist,
17. What's Love Got to Do with It?,
18. [SEXUAL ANGLES ON BUDDHISM] I Love It When You Do That: Sex and Metta (Compassion),
19. Hug Is the Drug,
20. BDSM and Cult Behavior,
21. I Fuck, Therefore I Am What I Fuck?,
22. [SEXUAL ANGLES ON BUDDHISM] I Prefer Being Juked with a Baby Octopus: Sex and Preferences,
23. Is Zazen Dangerous?,
24. God Knew My Soul Before I Was Born,
25. [SEXUAL ANGLES ON BUDDHISM] If You Do That, You'll Go Blind: Sex and Karma,
26. Zen Dating and Marriage Advice,
27. When Good Spiritual Masters Go Bad,
28. When Good Spiritual Masters Go Really, Really Bad: AIDS and Other STDs and Buddhist Practice,
29. [SEXUAL ANGLES ON BUDDHISM] Sex with All the Lights On: Sex and Enlightenment,
30. Happy Ending, Buddhist Style,
Appendix: How to Do Zazen,
Acknowledgments,
About the Author,

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