Download Sex and Tantra

Sexual Desire and the Body in
Two Religious Traditions
March 27, 2000
Introduction
• Religious experience
and the body/senses
• Religion and sexual
desire
• Our focus: monastic
Buddhism and Tantra
• A word on Tantric sex
ritual
• Visit on Wednesday by
Tantric adept
Cause of Suffering: Desire
• Buddha’s rejection
of Hinduism
– ritual
– caste
– suffering
• True cause of
suffering: desire
How to end suffering?
• By achieving high level
of consciousness
– things perish
– there is no ‘I’
• Difficult idea...
– Atman?
– More radical?
• extinction of
separateness of self
• renunciation of desire
How do monks extinguish
desire?
• The disgusting
mortal body
• The rules of chastity
– for monks
– for nuns
The problem with world-renunciation
• The problems of
enduring desire,
hypocrisy, selfdelusion
The response of Tantrism to the
world
• Emerged in India 1500 years ago
• Similarities with Buddhism
• Immersion in, not escape from, in the
world
• Both pain and pleasure
• Everything is divine
• No taboos
Implications for tantric attitude toward the body
and sexual desire
• If everything is
divine, so is the
body
• If the body is divine,
so is sexual desire
• But sex is a means,
not an end
• Sex must be linked
to divinity
Siva: The underlying male
principle
• Procreative energy
(pushes dwarf of
forgetfuness toward
rebirth)
• meditative
consciousness (arms
shaped in “Om”)
Shakti: female principle
• The Female principle
– creativity
– energy
• Yoni shrines
Kali
• The goddess Kali
• The Tantric desire to
confront Kali’s dual
aspect
The sexual rite
• Preparation
• Meditation and
becoming
• The women
• transcendence of
taboo
• The experience of
bliss
Yeshe Tsogyel
• Buddhist Tantric
• Chose sexual rite to
teach disciples
More Recent Image of Yeshe
Tsogyel
• The modern version
• Note contrast
between her hair
and the hair of
Buddhist nuns
• Why long hair?