Sexual morality, Buddhist style

Sexual morality, Buddhist styleA monk's thoughts about the process of growing up as a sexual being

By Jampa Kaldan, a 47-year-old Australian-born monk studying textual Tibetan at Sera Je Monastery and overseeing the building of Sera IMI House.
...This story of my own journey of growing up sexually explores my developing understanding of what the Buddhadharma is teaching about sexuality, and how this relates to the pervasive values of Western culture.
Simple cooking analogies help to illustrate the way I see the stages I have gone through. These stages are: the empty pot of childhood, the pressure cooker of teenage, the stewing saucepan of adulthood, the pot cooled down, and finally the distillation unit.
The Empty Pot of Childhood
I was bought up in a devout Christian family. We belonged to a denomination which was not anti-sex as such, but which saw sexuality as a gift of God to be used wisely in the proper context: that is, once you had entered into the lifelong commitment of marriage. Unlike Buddhist practice, there was only one level of sexual ethics in this Protestant tradition, simply requiring one to avoid masturbation, homosexuality, sex outside of marriage, or sex with someone else's marriage partner, on pain of God's wrath in the future. My wife was to come from the Catholic Church, which seemed to give its members an extra load of guilt about sexuality, and to have a more complex ethical system in that it provided the option of celibate practice...
In comparison with the raging sexual fires of the years to come, childhood was a time of innocence and freedom from overt sexual desire. I was like an empty pot sitting on the stove with the gas turned off...
The Pressure Cooker of Teenage
Adolescence arrived, and suddenly the pot was filled, the flame turned on and the tight fitting lid of taboos and moral injunctions was felt to be firmly in place. The new experience of sexual energy became a constant seething background to life, vague and unpleasant, driving a vivid fantasy world about girls, without really knowing what it was that I wanted, but at the same time knowing that, whatever it was, was out of bounds. The lid of morality and fear was intensely frustrating and it was to keep me a virgin until I married, despite several girlfriends....By late teenage the pent-up frustration had become a constant obsession which showed itself in my never being able to keep my eyes off the opposite sex, a secret voyeurism that would have shocked my young Christian companions as together we were trying to convert the world to Jesus on the streets of Sydney...
The Stewing Saucepan of Adulthood
It was not surprising that I found myself soon abandoning my temporary abstinence and getting married when I was 22 years old. A significant part of my motivation at the time was to provide a means to legitimately release the pressure of my pent-up sexual energy. After getting married the sexual activity with my new wife was, I believed, completely stainless and thus to be enjoyed without any negative consequences. It now felt more like being a stewing saucepan with the lid on, but with the lid able to jiggle around and thereby prevent the build-up of pressure ...
Removing The Saucepan Lid
..I was soon to discover that even though my marriage had allowed me to get out of the pressure cooker and into the saucepan, a restrictive lid was still in place and my mind was filled with a variety of unfulfilled fantasies. I found myself longing to be able to explore these elaborations of attachment, and seeing as I had by this time abandoned my Christian faith, there seemed no longer to be any moral injunctions against doing this. Nevertheless, my moral habits were still so strong that it was unthinkable for me to indulge in such activity while I was living with my wife, and so I would have to leave my marriage if I wanted to do this. Thus, after nine years of marriage, it was primarily the sexual frustration, which had driven me into marriage in the first place, which drove me out of it again. I stepped out of the familiar and comfortable nest of my marriage into the terrifyingly lonely world of adult singlehood in search of a fantasy, a quest for the holy grail of ultimate sexual fulfillment...
... In stark contradiction to the moral habit which had required that I leave my wife, I became involved with a married women, in effect becoming her "mistress," and we held each other in a mutual fiery embrace of sexual chemistry. The lid of the saucepan was now off, and with the gas flame turned to full, it tended to make quite a mess.
... I began to realize that sexual morality was about working skillfully with others and with one's lived experience, and that it was not some outwardly imposed restriction. I gradually began to see the ten commandments of my upbringing as a basic commonsense practical wisdom for looking after one's mental wellbeing. The new wisdom that began to dawn on me was that this bliss I was experiencing with my lover came with a hefty price tag, that the indulgence had implications for the state of mind of myself and others around me. When I discovered the Buddhist teachings several years later, I was to be amazed to see this new insight clearly set out as the "small capacity" practitioner's level of spiritual practice. That is, out of concern and compassion for oneself, one freely chooses to restrain oneself in certain ways.
During those years with my lover I had a vague sense that if only I could deal with this high-energy relationship in a more mature way, then my problems would become much less. I am, in fact, very grateful for her fierce kindness to me during those years, her refusing to bend to my will, and thereby forcing me to grow up and face some very unpleasant things about myself. Perhaps she was a compassionate dakini, or at least that was the effect she had on my life.
The Pot Cooled Down
When I was thirty-eight years old, the elderly Tibetan lama who was to become my spiritual teacher stepped into my life – at a business conference in a ski resort in the Australian Alps. As I began to explore the Buddhist teachings over the next two years, I found myself being profoundly moved by its ideals of self development, testing things out for oneself as opposed to blind faith, the radical concepts of bodhicitta and emptiness, and the extraordinary personage of this strange lama. I began to taste the determination to be free (often translated as renunciation); that is, the motivation that stands at the center of the middle capacity level of spiritual practice.
This insight opened up the realization that despite its skillfulness, the value of the small capacity practice of morality was rather limited. Even while scrupulously avoiding the ten non-virtues, one is still basically trapped in the cycling habitual patterns of thought and behavior. In contrast, the middle capacity practice sees morality as being harnessed to a much greater task, that of liberation, and its purpose is primarily to provide a stable ground for one's meditation practice, rather than just to keep oneself relatively free of future troubles. With this understanding it became clear that every one of my actions, which arose from ignorance, attachment or aversion, tended to reinforce and deepen the dysfunctional habitual patterns in my life. Included in this is any sexual activity which arises from such motives, in other words all the sexual activity that normally goes on in the world, be it classed as sexual misconduct or not. Unlike what I had earlier believed when I became married, ordinary sexual activity does have negative consequences in terms of one's ability to grow up as a person, and to be liberated...
This article can be read in its entirety in Mandala

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