Religion, the Body, and Sexuality

An Introduction

Nina Hoel, Melissa M. Wilcox, Liz Wilson, Melissa Wilcox

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781138728103
• eBook ISBN: 9781351749565
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Eastern Philosophy

How does religion relate to bodies and sexualities? Many people would answer, simply, "through repression, " but the relationship is much more complicated than that. While many religions draw boundaries between what they consider to be appropriate and inappropriate use of the human body, especially in the realm of sexuality, the same religions often celebrate human sexuality and even expect sexual partners to provide each other with sexual pleasure. Celibacy, too, is more than just repression, and sometimes it is even seen as providing the practitioner with great spiritual power; in other settings, the sex act itself is understood to provide this power.

Religion, the Body, and Sexuality offers students and general readers a sophisticated and accessible exploration of the connections between religion, sexuality, and the body, through case studies and overviews in the following thematic chapters:

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• Celibacy

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• Regulation

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• Controversy

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• Violence

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• Innovation

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• Instrumentalization

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• Ecstasy

Each chapter includes suggestions for further reading, questions for further thought, and a list of relevant media resources.

This engaging book is an excellent addition to introductory courses on religion or sexuality and is a much-needed new volume for advanced courses on the intersections of these areas of human experience.

1 Celibacy

Case study 1

Our first case study is the Buddha. The founder of Buddhism was born in present-day Nepal and lived most of his life in the sixth century B.C.E. He discovered what is known as the middle path between the extremes of self-denial and self-indulgence. He taught that life is subject to constant change, that what appears to be permanent is in fact ephemeral. The Buddha used contemplative techniques to focus the mind on reality as it really is and allow the mind to divest itself of the expectations that we typically place on objects and persons. In this way, the Buddha taught, we are able to avoid the dissatisfaction that comes with misperceiving the nature of things and experience nirvana: the satisfying state of freedom from ignorance and attachment.

The Buddha first came to realize the pain of how life fails to meet our naïve expectations of permanence and pleasure in a dramatic way. He had led a sheltered life as a prince, protected from the realities of old age, disease, and death. His father had heard a prediction about the boy becoming a religious teacher. To prevent that outcome, the Buddha’s father attempted to shield the child from the painful realities of life. One day, however, the young prince took an excursion on a chariot in the countryside, far away from the palace where he’d been living in great ignorance. He saw an old man and asked his charioteer what manner of thing stood on the road in front of him. Shocked to hear that this was a human being and that what the man experienced would also be his own fate, the young prince asked to return home. He went out the next day and saw a sick man with similar results. On another occasion, he encountered a dead man. He nearly fainted from the emotions the sight of this corpse engendered in him. Later he encountered a man who lived a very simple existence with one set of clothes, who wandered from place to place and spent his days in yoga and meditation in search of a deathless state. The renunciant lifestyle of that man attracted the young prince. He made plans to leave the palace and follow the example of the renouncer. But it was not an easy thing to leave the palace. The youthful Buddha was married and had already established a family life. He had a chief wife along with a large harem of lower-ranking wives and female consorts, as was appropriate for men of the warrior caste in the Buddha’s time. Moreover, his chief wife had given birth to a son (in some versions of the story, the child was not yet on the scene but rather was conceived the night that the Buddha fled from the palace). The Buddha chose to leave in the dead of night, while his family slept, and flee quietly into the wilderness. Living a peripatetic lifestyle, the Buddha eventually gathered a band of monastic followers who emulated his celibate lifestyle. Others joined the religion as married householders who provided support for the celibate women and men who walked with the Buddha.

Scriptures attributed to the Buddha praise the celibate life as one that affords unique opportunities for focusing the mind and emotions without the complications and aggravations of family life. One might compare Buddhist nuns and monks to people in secular communities who are resolutely single as a way of focusing on personal exploration or career achievement. Steven Collins (Collins 1988) analyzes scriptural metaphors about monastic life that others have interpreted as being about solitude and suggests that what Buddhist texts really value is a state of companionate singleness. To be single, to separate oneself from the social world of the Buddha’s day that was defined by a thick web of family and vocational obligations: that is the freedom that Buddhist monastic life offered women and men, according to texts that praise it. To be in a sorority or fraternity of like-minded single people offered the highest levels of freedom available in ancient India. Sayings attributed to the Buddha praise celibate renouncers, people who have opted out of the social world, the world of production and reproduction by renouncing vocation and family, as single-minded and single in social status. They wander the land or reside in monasteries in such a way as to be available to all beings but attached to none. In this, such people operate socially as a singular presence. They are a unit of one. Metaphorically speaking, they are like the mighty rhinoceros, a forest creature with a single horn. The Buddha was born in a tropical region on the border between India and Nepal (today’s Chitwan National Park) that has known rhinos for a long time. No doubt the Buddha, or those who attributed this metaphor to him, would have been familiar with the ways of this powerful animal. Weighing up to a ton, the rhinoceros is a large herbivore that has no predators other than humans and can wander freely. Its only need is to fuel a body that is tough, composed of a horn that is mostly cartilage and protective skin that is formed from layers of collagen. Metaphors in Buddhist texts suggest that the Buddhist nun or monk who chooses celibacy wears an armor formed by self-control. The teeth and claws of most animals are ineffective in tearing into the hide of a large formidable rhinoceros. Likewise, changing fortunes in day-to-life do not readily penetrate the consciousness of one who practices a celibate path. The arrows of sexual attraction and the attendant highs and lows that sexually active people experience in romantic life and in the fickle, sometimes dangerous business of reproduction, are likewise ridiculously impotent when it comes to penetrating the hide of a committed celibate.

According to early teachings attributed to him, the Buddha explained his choice to be celibate by situating sexual desire within the larger doctrinal framework that holds desire or craving for pleasures of the senses responsible for continual rebirth and endless suffering. He taught the value of self-awareness and control of craving in the first teaching he gave after his enlightenment, offering four propositions about the nature of existence known as the four noble truths. The four noble truths of Buddhism are: suffering, the origin of suffering, the end of suffering which is the state of nirvana, and the path that leads to nirvana. The four truths have often been compared to a medical diagnosis. According to this analogy, suffering is the illness or problem condition that Buddhism cures. Craving is the cause of this suffering. Hearing the Buddha explain that our unreasonable craving or thirst for pleasure in the face of short-lived phenomena that will not endure long enough to sustain pleasure is equivalent to going to visit a doctor and having her explain that the symptoms one suffers are caused by behaviors that one can control. Thus the second noble truth is essentially a diagnosis that shows how to achieve health. The abolition of craving is the cure for suffering. The Buddha taught an Eightfold Path to cure us. It is the treatment plan that leads to the alleviation of suffering.

In his work as a teacher of the path to alleviate suffering and transcend death, the Buddha is reported to have had many frank conversations with followers about sexual impulses and actions. In the Buddhist context, sexuality must be seen not as a sin but as a signifier – namely, the sign of an untamed mind that is greedy for sensual gratification because it is unaware of the ills to which all flesh is heir. Because it is associated with ignorance, sexual desire has its locus in the head or the heart (the word citta, identical in Sanskrit and Pali, denotes both) as much as the genitals. What Peter Brown suggests of the Desert Fathers tradition, which also emphasizes the renunciation of familial bonds, applies here as well: sexual desire is seen as an indication of one’s mental state, a “seismograph” that tells what is going on deep inside a person (Brown’s insights are summarized in an essay by Michel Foucault and Richard Sennett in the London Review of Books, Foucault and Sennett, 1981). A person who has rooted out sexual desire is free from the psychic and social forces that cause suffering.

The Buddha often recommended specific types of meditative practice to counter the lustful impulses of his followers. For love-smitten monks considering leaving the monastic order and returning to lay life on account of their romantic and sexual feelings, the Buddha is reported to have sent the men to the charnel fields of cremation grounds, where the bodies of paupers were abandoned to rot (cremation can be expensive in areas where trees are scarce, and burial was not a culturally accepted practice). Commentators develop this theme. Buddhaghosa, a writer of commentaries on the Buddha’s words and compendia of the Buddhist path who lived in the fifth century of the Common Era, explained that there are ten types of corpses that a lust-filled monk may select to examine in a cremation ground, each one serving as an antidote to one of ten different types of attraction to physical form (Rhys Davids 1920, vol. 1, 193–94). The ten types of corpse differ according to circumstance: there is the bloated corpse that is filled with the gases of putrefaction, the livid corpse that is discolored by all the chemical activity within, the festering corpse that is erupting with all manner of nasty things, the cut up corpse that has been dismembered by accidents or animals, the gnawed corpse that has been a meal or a snack for animals, the scattered corpse that has had parts removed, the hacked and scattered corpse that has been subject to much disruption, the bleeding corpse that has been cut, the worm-infested corpse that is host to parasitic worms and other creatures, and the skeletal corpse that is desiccated. Buddhaghosa followed the Buddha’s example in dealing with sexual desire. He trained lustful men to look for signs of decay and cultivate a feeling of disgust toward female bodies (Wilson 1996). According to legends about the Buddha’s teaching methods, he occasionally arranged elaborate scenarios whereby horny monks ended up in cremation grounds looking for trysts with their beloved, only to find that the objects of their affections had died and become pus-filled corpses or skeletons.

There are many ways that a corpse can be hideous; a vulture-inviting stench that is ideal for deflating one man’s arousal may not be effective for another man. Buddhist meditation manuals recognize that just as there are different strokes for different folks, there are different corpses that serve as good remedies for different types of sexual desire. Each one of the ten different corpses that Buddhaghosa describes has something to say to those troubled by specific types of sexual desire. The discolored corpse speaks to those who love a creamy skin-tone; the bloated corpse instructs those who desire voluptuous curves by showing them precisely what will become of a shapely body. This contemplative practice, known as aśubha-bhāvanā in Sanskrit and asubha-bhāvanā in Pali, still goes on today in Buddhist countries such as Sri Lanka in the absence of charnel fields. In contemporary Buddhist countries, the autopsy room where bodies are dissected today provides the occasion to observe how death ravages sexy bodies (Boisvert 1996, 47).

The Buddha not only recommended that horny monks do meditation in charnel fields. He also, as indicated above, arranged elaborate scenarios whereby monks hell-bent on romance and sex learned the folly of their ways. According to one legend, a monk was in love with a beautiful courtesan named Sirimā. Thanks to orchestration by the Buddha behind the scenes, this monk ended up in a cremation ground thinking he was going to see Sirimā (due to their privacy, cremation grounds were often used in ancient India as places where lovers would meet). But the lovely courtesan had died and her body had been rotting for days. The Buddha had calculated the amount of putrefaction Sirimā’s body would undergo and arranged for the naïve, love-smitten monk to arrive at the charnel field just as the courtesan’s body was exploding with maggots. To drive the point home in a way that even a foolish young man would get it, the Buddha held an auction of sorts. The Buddha offered a night of pleasure with Sirimā to anyone who would pay a thousand copper coins. This macabre auction and the harrowing evidence of how quickly beauty fades quickly cured the young monk of his ignorance.

Celibacy is clearly a hallmark of Buddhist practice for many monks and nuns. It was central to the identity of the Buddha as a single man who left family behind to roam the countryside in search of teachers and contemplative practices that would free him from the cycle of birth and death and give him access to a deathless condition. In order to engage in contemplative practices, the Buddha had to disengage from his role as a family man and a representative of his warrior clan. Others followed in the Buddha’s footsteps, adopting a celibate lifestyle to facilitate the process of disengaging from the world of production and reproduction. Many men sought ordination as monks. Women also wished to join the religious order the Buddha had founded. Five years after the Buddha established an order of monks, his foster mother Mahāprajāpatī Gautamī went to him and requested that women, also, be allowed to “go forth from the home to the homeless life” (as many Buddhist scriptures and ritual formulas put it) and be ordained as Buddhist nuns. Permanent voluntary female celibacy was unusual in ancient India, although the Jains accepted women as nuns. According to some accounts, the Buddha initially refused to grant his foster mother’s request. He was likely to have been worried about the loss of financial support from the lay community. Laity may have been scandalized by the prospect that women and men would mix in remote forest settings. But the Buddha was eventually convinced to allow women to enter the order. He allowed his foster mother and her companions to take ordination, but he established eight special rules to guide the lives of nuns. These rules ensured that the women of the Buddhist monastic community would not be perceived as breaking away from male social control. One rule, for example, mandates that within the monastic order women display a high level of respect and bow to a man in robes no matter how long the man had been a monk and no matter what the man’s level of achievement. This rule states that any nun, no matter how long she had been in the order, must treat any monk, even the rudest novice, as if he were her senior. Other rules subordinate the women’s order to the men’s in matters such as setting penances for nuns.

Despite these restrictions, women were attracted to the prospect of living as Buddhist nuns. For some, ordination as nuns meant escaping from unsatisfactory marriages. The nun Muttā, for example, was married to a hunchbacked husband. She convinced him to let her take ordination and she eventually achieved the deathless state of nirvana through Buddhist practice. Muttā left behind this verse (my translation of verse 11 in Pruitt 1998, 15) celebrating her enlightenment:

Free am I, so deliciously free

Free from three mundane things—

From mortar, from pestle and from my hunchbacked lord,

Freed from rebirth and death I am,

And all that has held me down is tossed aside.

Sumangala was another nun whose poetry records her life story. She was born into poverty and married a basket-maker. Her son became a monk and she eventually took ordination as a nun. In her enlightenment verse (my translation of verse 23 in Pruitt 1998, 27–28), she exalts in the freedom to meditate, far away from the dreary kitchen that was once her world:

Free, I am free

How delighted I am to be free of my kitchen things

My cooking pot seems absurd,

So too my unpleasant husband & his workshop.

Aversion & desire are gone, eliminated. I live foot of a tree, meditating, at ease: “What bliss!”

Wives who left their husbands for life in Buddhist monasteries had legal protections in doing so. When former husbands sought the return of their wives, we know from the historical record that such men were thwarted in their efforts to recover their wives. Ordination as a Buddhist nun effectively dissolved the marital bonds between a man and a woman. Unmarried women evidently also felt the allure of monastic life. For them, celibacy seemed a smart choice in a world in which bodily decline and economic uncertainty was inevitable. Better to train the mind and gain perspective on the nature of reality than to invest in rickety supports for happiness like beauty and wealth. In the Therīgāthā poetry collection, the last entry is that of Sumedhā, who made an eloquent plea to be allowed to become a nun rather than marry the man her parents had chosen for her. Sumedhā had been taking instruction from the nuns as a lay disciple for many years and, as a young woman of marriageable age, had decided not to marry but to join the nuns order. When she learned that her parents had promised her in marriage to King Anikaratta, Sumedhā retired to her room and defiantly cut off all her hair in imitation of the tonsure ceremony that heralds entry into monastic life. While getting their heads shaved, novice nuns and monks are given a lock of tonsured hair as an aid to meditation on impermanence; Sumedhā, recreating the ordination ritual in her own home, likewise focused her mind on impermanence while contemplating her shorn hair. In doing this meditation, she entered a trance state and was absorbed in contemplation when her parents entered her room to prepare her for marriage. Sumedhā was a very persuasive speaker, and in the end she not only convinced her parents to let her join the monastic order, but she also made Buddhists out of her family and household staff as well as her bridegroom and his retinue. Not only does Sumedhā speak most eloquently to her parents and bridegroom about the folly of sensual pleasure – she also shows a certain dramatic flair in using her symbolically laden tresses as a stage prop. Interrupted from her hair-induced meditation, Sumed...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Preface for instructors
• Introduction
• 1. Celibacy
• 2. Regulation
• 3. Controversy
• 4. Violence
• 5. Innovation
• 6. Instrumentalization
• 7. Ecstasy
• Glossary
• Resources for teaching
• Bibliography
• Index