The Red Thread: Buddhist love and sex

Saturday 5 May 2012 5:05PM

This week we’re looking through a Buddhist lens at the emotionally rich, spiritually challenging and sometimes painful area of love and sex. We’ll meet a monk and a nun, a scholar of Tantra and several lay teachers who’ll explore the 21st century dilemmas of dating, one-night stands, celibacy, love, sex, pornography, and broken hearts. Theravadan, Tibetan and Zen practitioners will talk about the Buddhist teachings on desire and attachment; the qualities of an open heart and what constitutes sexual misconduct.

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Subhana Barzaghi: In the Zen tradition we do have a koan about the red thread. And a koan is a question; it’s a question that we contemplate at a deep level. And the question is why is a perfectly enlightened bodhisattva and a saint attached to the red thread? And the red thread is the line of sexuality, the line of passion.

My name’s Subhana Barzaghi and I’m a Zen roshi in the Zen community and I’m also a meditation teacher in the Insight tradition as well.

The red thread has many layers of meaning. The red thread was, for example, women in the geishas wear a red garter around their leg. The red light district: sexuality. His Holiness the Dalai Lama would bless people and Tibetans have the red thread as a blessing, a sacred red thread. There is the bloodline dating back to the Buddha. So there’s this contemplation about attachment and detachment here, contemplation about sexuality.

In the Zen tradition it’s not about denial of sexuality and denial of our sexual urges, but a real quest here about how can we bring this sensitivity, the awakened mind, compassion and love, into this very arena and find freedom right also in the midst of that intimacy.

Kerry Stewart: As TV, movies and the internet bombard us with erotic images and language, that question of how we can bring the awakened mind into the sexual realm is a timely one. If you’re single, or in a long-term relationship, there are challenges all along the way. So let’s start at the beginning: the dating scene. Lodro Rinzler is a teacher in the Shambhala school of Tibetan Buddhism, and he’s the author of The Buddha walks into a bar: A guide to life for a new generation.

Lodro Rinzler: I do think that young people are facing difficult times in terms of figuring out how to actually incorporate the religious traditions of their race or that they are now exploring into all elements of their life, particularly when it comes to modern day. Because some of the very traditional Buddhist teachings around the precepts of sex, in particular, sexual misconduct, you know, the Buddha didn’t have things like internet porn, he didn’t have all of this negative sexual imagery that now exists. So we have to figure out for ourselves how to work with these very potent topics.

Kerry Stewart: Now, the dating scene can be tricky for anyone, so how can you apply Buddhist principles when going into a bar, for example?

Lodro Rinzler: I’m reminded of an event I did at a bookstore in Portland, where I walked up and I saw that there was a book there, right behind my head, a book about ‘the pickup artist industry,’ where people actually look to get laid by putting other people down, negating their confidence and then sort of scooping themselves in by proving their value and their own worth.

And I thought, you know, the Buddhist principles would actually directly negate this idea and instead of saying, OK, from a Buddhist point of view you already have everything you need—you’re already innately wise, you’re innately good, you’re innately kind—all you have to do is show that and offer that to others and actually be fully present with another human being.

So if you are going to go out to a bar and you want to meet people and you can actually go out there and do something that’s completely counter-cultural, which is listen to someone, really get to know them, try and figure out who they are genuinely, as well as offer yourself genuinely.


Kerry Stewart: There’ve been a lot of films lately about people who have one-night stands or couples who agree to have ongoing sexual relations with supposedly no strings attached. So are these encounters OK for a Buddhist? Brad Warner is a Soto monk in the Zen tradition, which doesn’t have rules of celibacy, and he’s the author of Sex, sin and Zen.

Brad Warner: Indiscriminate sex always has… always has led me to problems. And it has to be reined in somehow. But not because sex itself is immoral, but because it’s the way that you do it, because there’s always… when we’re talking about sex we’re not talking about masturbation, you know? As Woody Allen said, ‘Don’t knock masturbation; that’s sex with somebody I love.’ But when you’re talking about actual sex you’re involving at least one other person—in some cases there may be more, I don’t know—but at least one other person is going to be involved in that and so it means you are placing a certain burden on that other person and you’re involving that person in your life and your karma, to use a Buddhist term. And so that’s a significant thing.

I don’t believe in the existence of no-strings-attached. I often wish there was such a thing, but I often wish there was a Loch Ness monster and Bigfoot, you know? I think it would be really cool. But the evidence—as in the evidence of Loch Ness monster and Bigfoot—always seems to fall apart when you examine it, and so it does when I’ve examined the concept of no-strings-attached sex. It never really is.

And I feel like any time you have any sort of involvement with another person on that level, you’re getting into something. Even if—I’ve never tried this myself, but I’d make the assumption—that even if you’re dealing with a prostitute, who is supposedly paid and the transaction is very clean in that sense, I think you’re even then involving yourself with another person and you’re still not free of so-called strings.


Lodro Rinzler: If you were going to talk about things like one-night stands, in the same way that I would not condemn or condone anything, in some sense, it’s what’s our intention behind doing these things. Are we going out to sleep with someone because we are lonely and we had our heart broken and we want to numb out? Because that is one intention that’ll lead just down a rough road. Is it because we’ve made a connection with someone, we may never be able to see them again because they’re moving across the land, and this is the only chance we’ll ever have to connect with them? That’s a whole other motivation that’ll lead you down a different path with this person.

So the question here is: if that act in itself isn’t good or bad, what’s the marker? The marker would be: are you causing harm? So the traditional precept within Buddhism is Kamesumicchacara veramani sikkhapadam samadiyami, or ‘I vow to abstain from engaging in sexual misconduct.’ So, you know, it’s going to be a case-by-case scenario. At the end of the day, the simplest marker of whether you’ve pulled off a compassionate one-night stand is examining how you feel the morning after. You can apply curiosity to your own state and see if you find elation or humiliation. If it’s the latter, you likely won’t want to attend to such a thing again. It’s unfortunate if you feel this way, but mistakes along the path are helpful. Now you know something you never want to do again and can vow not to repeat the same set of actions. As one of my teachers, Tsultrim Gyamtso Rinpoche, said, ‘By making mistakes and more mistakes, you’re gradually nudged onto the right path.’


Subhana Barzaghi: As a young adult growing up in a community, an alternative community in the Northern Rivers of New South Wales, in that culture there, there was very much a free love free sex culture, so I was very much a part of that scene. And of course much of that earlier life was acting out a lot of those sexual kind of desires, experimenting in a number of different ways. And that led to, in fact, quite a degree of suffering. I ended up having an affair and I was really devastated that I had caused others pain and my partner pain. I felt ashamed, I felt guilty, I felt remorse, I felt really bad that I had acted in that way, which led to a sense of really putting a kind of policewoman in my psyche. I installed this like a guardian figure in my psyche around sexual desires, sexual expression. I just, whenever I had any fantasies I would just then sort of stamp that out, cut it off.

So there was a very punishing judgement that I put on myself around that experience. So for years that judgement and that guardian in my mind was useful for quite a while. It kind of protected me to think about and contemplate about ethics and sexuality and what this really meant and what the precepts meant. After some time, however, this sense of guardian as policewoman in my psyche was really dissatisfying. It was really like cutting off all of that, felt like it was cutting off a deep part of myself. So I did a lot of exploring how to not just cut off and deny and suppress these vital energies, these powerful energies, but then how to work with them. And so it was like reclaiming that sexual energy and passion and pleasure, but being able to express that in a safe way in an intimate relationship that was in the context of love and commitment.

Kerry Stewart: As we’ve just heard, the third Buddhist precept is to abstain from sexual misconduct. So what do the ancient texts say about this? Bante Sujato is the Abbot at Santi Forest Monastery in the Southern Highlands of New South Wales.

Bante Sujato: Sexual misconduct is almost a literal translation of the original pali phrase, and the meaning of it is not entirely apparent. And one of the problems with that particular rule is that of course sexual relations and the way people relate to each other differs very, very widely from culture to culture. For example, in the time of the Buddha there was polygamy and all different kinds of relationships which are not tolerated these days.

So what exactly does it mean? Well, it’s explained in the Buddhist texts and it’s explained from the male point of view as being that one has sexual intercourse with a woman who is protected by their mother, who’s under the protection of their father, who’s under the protection of their sister or their brother, who’s under the protection of a guardian, or somebody who’s married, or somebody who’s engaged. So that, in a sense, is not too dissimilar from what we think of as inappropriate sexuality today, to having sex with somebody who’s under the legal age limit, who’s under the protection of their guardian or parents, or with somebody who’s married or engaged.

What it doesn’t mean—I think this is important to note—there’s nothing in the third precept that says that you have to be married to have sex; as long as the person you’re having sex with is not married then that’s not a problem. Even things like, say, prostitution, homosexuality, these kinds of things were not considered to be violations of that precept, as long—of course—as long as they’re consensual and they don’t cause harm.

Lodro Rinzler: And there is a story of the Buddha, it’s said that after he became enlightened he sought out his former colleagues, a group of ascetics that had been meditating with him for quite some time. And they were… basically, written him off. He’d eaten some food, which is a huge no-no in the ascetic community, so they had written him out of the will, they’d de-friended him on Facebook, the whole nine yards.

But as they saw the Buddha approach, they were overwhelmed by his presence, they were magnetised to him. He was brilliant, radiant, so they couldn’t help themselves but come forward and say, ‘How can we be like this? How can we be awake like you?’ And at that moment, the Buddha really could have said, ‘Here’s what you do, here’s what you don’t do, here’s my ten commandments, here’s all of the things that you should or should not do around sex.’ Instead, it’s said that the first words that the Buddha uttered were, ‘Come and see for yourself.’ And that’s a really powerful statement to contemplate 2,600 years later: that we actually have to see for ourselves what sexual misconduct means.

And it will look very different for me than it will for you. But at the same time I do feel like in the west we could do a little bit better than just saying, ‘I’m not going to cause harm when I have sex.’ If we’re actually going to bring compassion practices and an open heart into this particular aspect of our life, then maybe we could actually switch this negative thing—abstaining from misconduct—into something positive, which is how could we be of benefit when we engage sex, how could we actually make this into a very positive situation for both parties, so that it’s a little bit more than just not causing harm?


Subhana Barzaghi: And of course in a family life, in a lay life, it’s not just like sex is on-tap, you know, with your partner, just because you’re married and just because you have a relationship, an intimate relationship. As women, we know that when you give birth to a baby and then you’re breast-feeding and your libido and your desire level for sex diminishes while you’re breast-feeding and you have a new baby who’s sucking on your breasts every four hours. And of course one’s partner has to then work with the lack of sex for that period of time—maybe frustration there.

And so we have all of these ebbs and flows of urges throughout our lifespan. What do we do about that? What is our relationship to sexual desire? What is a sensitive, compassionate, kind relationship to both oneself and one’s needs, and to your partner?

Kerry Stewart: Brad Warner trained as a Zen monk and lived in Japan for over 10 years. While there, he couldn’t help but notice the differences between his Christian upbringing in the States with that of Buddhist Japan.

Brad Warner: The main difference between sexual morality in Buddhism and sexual morality in Christianity, which are the two that I know best, is that Buddhism doesn’t have the concept of sin. There’s no idea that there is anybody out there watching you and keeping tabs on what you do and declaring certain acts to be sins and certain ones not. There is an idea of karma, which is the notion that—among other things—that if you do something to somebody else, that will come back to you. The idea is that the consequences of your actions, if you become attuned to them, make it obvious where you’ve gone wrong in the same way that touching a hot stove, you know, you go, ‘Ow!’

The theory in Buddhism has it, though, that most of us are so insensitive, so to drag the metaphor even further, we’ve got huge calluses on our hands, so that we touch the hot stove and don’t understand that we’re being burned.

I remember one of my first times going into a video store in Japan. I walked in there and I saw a bunch of sort of soft-core porn films with naked boobies and things on the cover, on the bottom shelf. And I went, ‘Whoa!’ And I didn’t even know at the time why I went, ‘Whoa, why are these on the bottom shelf?’ And I realised, ‘Oh, because we have this idea that children shouldn’t see these things, but the Japanese don’t have that idea,’ that it’s OK for children to see these things. They don’t really want them renting those things, but as far as just knowing they exist, that’s not a problem.

And to me that’s part and parcel of this idea of not having any idea of sin. In Buddhism there isn’t an idea of the body being evil. I think part of what we have inherited in the Christian ideas is that even those of us like me—I wasn’t raised religious at all, but we imbibe it—is this idea that there is spirit and there is matter, and spirit is elevated and good and wonderful and pure and this is what we should strive for, and matter is gross and ugly and it’s what we need to get away from. So I think this is at the basis of considering sex in itself to be wrong or sinful.

I mean, in Japan, or in other Buddhist countries I’m sure, there is an idea that certain kinds of sex are immoral, but there isn’t an idea that sex itself, just the very act of it, is somehow bad.

Kerry Stewart: On RN you’re listening to an Encounter about love and sex from a Buddhist perspective.

In some traditional teachings of Tantra, the sexual act is used as a path to awakening. Iain Sinclair is a scholar of Buddhism and in particular the practices of the Newar people of Nepal.

Iain Sinclair: Tantra is a means of attaining liberation by following the practices described in texts called Tantras. And typically to undertake tantric practice you need to gain initiation through a qualified tantric teacher. Now the range of practice that you can undertake as a tantric practitioner is really quite vast. There are forms of Tantra which involve sexual practice, practice with a partner, and it’s these forms of practice that are considered to be most effective, most liberating, fastest, but also most risky, most difficult and most fraught with problems.

Kerry Stewart: Indeed. As sex is often. So can you set Tantra into context? I mean what’s the history of Tantra in the Buddhist world?

Iain Sinclair:  The history of Tantra begins in South Asia, within the Buddhist tradition, in about the sixth or seventh century. In these early texts you have people reciting mantras, worshipping deities, and not so long after, beginning to identify themselves with the deity through the recitation of mantras and visualisation and various forms of yoga. And these practices, these kind of yogic visualisation practices, the process of identification of the deity, later comes to become synonymous with what we now call Tantra or Vajrayana Buddhism.

So it starts off as a kind of practice that everyone can do, that doesn’t have any particular secrecy attached to it, and from there, not so long after these practices appear, you have a proliferation in the kinds of practice; you have different mantras, different deities, who represent different things. So if Avalokitesvara represents compassion, then you have deities such as Heruka, who personify a kind of primordial, primal energy of enlightenment and the practices associated with that. This is coming towards the more secretive side of tantric practice. And tantric deity who is shown in union with his partner, represents perhaps the highest values and the highest state of enlightenment of the Buddhist tradition.

Lodro Rinzler: I am a tantric practitioner, a Vajrayana practitioner, within the Tibetan Buddhist tradition, but Tantra is understood and misunderstood in a gazillion different ways and has been for generations. Now, the Vajrayana practices of visualisations, prostrations, mantra recitation, mandalas, all of these sorts of things, they’re very potent in wonderful ways to actually bring ourselves fully into the present moment.

So it’s not necessarily… I think a lot of people think of Tantra as a very sexy idea, but at the end of the day, that’s what it is. It’s actually surrendering into the present moment.

Kerry Stewart: And so there’s no sex involved.

Lodro Rinzler: When you think about Vajrayana Buddhism and Tibetan Buddhism, you have to remember that the primary way that people practise Tibetan Buddhism Tantra is in monasteries. So all across Tibet we have these monks and they obviously are not practising sexy Tantra. So, no, in some sense it’s not particularly sexy, but it certainly has been made into that by the media, which we always appreciate. We love the business. (Laughs)

Iain Sinclair:  If the Tibetan Buddhist tradition represents, let’s say, the celibate, monastic way of doing Tantra, in which that view is predominant, there is also another tradition, that of the Newars, the indigenous inhabitants of the Kathmandu Valley of Nepal, who have their own form of tantric Buddhism, also inherited from India like the Buddhism of the Tibetans, in which Tantra is indeed practised in a kind of literal and direct way in which you have to be effectively married before you can carry it out. So initiation into tantric practice assumes that you have a partner, a physical partner.

Nepal has a very special place in the Buddhist tradition. Not only is it reliably ascribed to the birthplace of the Buddha—the Buddha is said to be born in Kapilavatthu, which is in the west of Nepal—but the Buddhist tradition is said to have existed there continuously for about 2,000 years, so probably from a very early period of the Buddhist tradition—not necessarily the earliest, although the Newars, the indigenous inhabitants of Nepal do believe that their tradition goes right back to Buddha himself. So the Newar Buddhist tradition is indeed one with a very old pedigree, and one that has been practised in the same place, though not in the same way, for a very long time indeed.

Kerry Stewart: The first Newar Buddhist monastery was established in the west just a few years ago, in Portland Oregon. They focus there on traditional tantric dance and song. But what about those groups, with dubious credentials, that promote Tantra courses on the internet? Zen monk Brad Warner:

Brad Warner: I’ve seen a lot of quasi-Buddhist or Buddhist influenced, Buddhist-like, groups trying to get into the tantric idea of sex as a form of meditation. And I even attended one of the sessions run by one of these organisations. And I felt like they were jumping way ahead, because the idea of sex as meditation was something that the monks and nuns who engaged in it were trained in for years before they actually got into the sex itself; whereas, a lot of the western practitioners are jumping right into it with no grounding in anything. The group I attended would just turn you loose on the sexual meditation. Maybe not the first day, but within, like, the first week of being part of their organisation you were ready to go.

And orgasm is a powerful sort of bliss state, and in Zen we’re almost trying to avoid those states. I mean a lot of people get into meditation, they get in these so-called higher states of consciousness, or these uber-states of being, or whatever they call it, and orgasm can in some level manifest itself that way, but we’re actually trying to go for a more even way of seeing everything as a kind of ultimate experience, whether it is something we would usually term that way or not.

Kerry Stewart: The images of deities in sexual union are an essential part of tantric practice, so what do they actually look like? Buddhist scholar, Iain Sinclair again:

Iain Sinclair: The image of a tantric deity, one that is associated with the very highest forms of tantric practice, typically shows a man standing in embrace, in sexual union, with a female partner covered in all kinds of divine ornaments, usually with an extraordinary expression of lust on his face, and his female partner likewise has a kind of expression of bliss on her face. And they’re both supposed to be experiencing sexual bliss at that very moment in which you visualise them.


Kerry Stewart: That brings us to another form of erotic imagery: pornography. Why did Brad Warner, as a Zen Buddhist monk, write for the soft-core porn website, Suicide Girls?

Brad Warner: I started writing for Suicide Girls because they asked me to and it seemed like an interesting idea. I just got an email out of the blue from this woman named Helen Jupiter, who was then the person who ran what they called the ‘newswire’, which is their blogging site that was attached to the pictures of the girls with the naked boobs. And she felt that she wanted the thing to have a little bit more depth to it and a spiritual commentator would add to that.

And she gave me absolutely carte blanche to write about whatever I wanted to. And I thought it was a great opportunity to write about Buddhism in an area where people weren’t likely to encounter it.

Kerry Stewart: And is porn very Buddhist? I mean what about the girls that work there, show their boobs?

Brad Warner: There’s an idea within Buddhism of right livelihood, and I feel that this has become very narrow in a lot of people’s opinions. Somebody made a joke once in my presence, which they said for American Buddhists these days, the only two forms of work that are considered right livelihood are yoga teacher and therapist, you know, and nothing else—which is kind of the way it seems like a lot of people see it. But I think it’s much wider than that. I think anything you do has the potential—I mean almost anything; there may be certain jobs which don’t, but I think there are very few of those which can’t be right livelihood.

But I also feel that the porn industry is admittedly bad. I think Suicide Girls is—as far as that goes—is pretty good. Before I started working for them I asked Helen to send me the names of some of the girls who’d posed for the site so I could talk to them, to see what their experience was. And I was satisfied that they’d had good experiences, and a couple of them ended up becoming close friends of mind after that.

And their policy was very upfront: it wasn’t exploitative, the women themselves who posed were able to decide which pictures went up and to have some control over that aspect of it, and so on. But I don’t think that happens in all cases.

Kerry Stewart: What about the other side of the sexual issue, to not engage in sex at all? Why do monks and nuns decide to take the path of celibacy, and how do they deal with natural urges of the body? Bante Sujato and visiting nun Ayya Sudhamma at Santi Forest Monastery:

Bante Sujato: Well, it’s important to be celibate and for a number of reasons. The most obvious one is simply that relationships make things complicated. Relationships are hard work and obviously, in some cases, people find that they’re hard work but very valuable, and in other cases, not so. So the celibate life keeps things simpler. But on a deeper level, or on a more subtle level, sexual desire, specifically, or sensual desire more generally—and especially sexual desire—of course is one of the strongest forces in the human mind. The Buddha said it’s like a fire that burns up the human mind—the Buddha and every second pop song says it’s a fire, so we have an agreement there.

And in Buddhism we’re looking for peaceful states of mind. And what you tend to find is the more that you let go of those very strong attachments and desires and so on, that mind becomes more peaceful and you begin to appreciate the more subtle pleasures of a peaceful mind. Then you begin to realise how much of a fake sell that whole kind of path of finding happiness through sensuality and through sexuality really is.

Kerry Stewart: Very often as women in the western world, we’re brought up with images of love and desire for a man, marriage, children. Why did you give that away?

Ayya Sudhamma: It’s like asking why don’t you eat the chocolate cake that you saw the dog lick, because I’ve seen the down sides. I’ve seen the down sides of those things, and I’ve also found something so much nicer, so much calmer, so much more beautiful and empowering. If you’re really, truly, deeply in love with yourself, you don’t have to look outside; you don’t have to grab at all of those outside things to try to feel complete. You’re complete.

The phenomena that make up this body mind experience we refer to as the five aggregates. Five aggregates are a heavy burden. What do I need with ten? Why do I need a partner to give me five more aggregates to be worried about, to stress over, get upset with or be frustrated over? (Laughs) It’s enough, this life. But when we hunker down with one person and think, ‘This is it. This is my loved one,’ we get so small and the heart can even get lost.

Kerry Stewart: Do you believe that women can be in relationships and not be small?

Ayya Sudhamma: Yeah, but it takes courage, courage to actually believe that you’re worth it, the time to take some little bit of time apart within the relationship. So when there’s no relationship, if a woman can give up the fantasy, she has a broad opportunity to really find herself. But when she’s in the relationship, it’s tempting not to. But, yes, if she would take that time, if she would have the courage to believe that she’s worth it, yeah, she can.

Kerry Stewart: But sensuality doesn’t leave us. When you become a monk it wouldn’t leave you—I mean just eating a tasty peach is sensuous, you know? The flow of your robes on your thighs—I mean that’s sensuous. So it never leaves the mind, the body, does it?

Bante Sujato: Well, sensuality is very fundamental to how we are according to Buddhist teaching on awakening, is that it’s something which is let go of gradually at different levels, or through different means. So in beginning the practice you can let go of it a little bit, and then through meditation you can let go of it completely for periods of time, and then through the process of awakening itself you can eventually let go of all forms of attachment: what Buddha called ‘greed, hatred and delusion.’ So that’s a kind of a goal of practice, but of course in the meantime, yes, things are still around, the sky is still beautiful, a peach is still juicy, and all of those things.

So it’s not that experiencing sensual pleasures in that way is in itself right or wrong—actually, it’s just neutral; it’s just how the world is. And the world is like that: you wake up, you look outside, and ‘Oh, it’s a beautiful day.’ But the problem is how your mind reacts to it, how your mind responds to it. Now you can respond in a very emotionally unwholesome way to a blue sky.

Kerry Stewart: How?

Bante Sujato: ‘It’s such a beautiful blue sky! Oh, if only it could stay there forever.’ And then as the clouds come over you break down in tears and crying and fall into a deep depression because the sky will never be as blue as that again. Well except that doesn’t happen, does it? But it does happen when you fall in love. In fact it happens quite often when you fall in love. In fact it happens probably many times when you fall in love and fall out of love. So it’s the fierceness and the strength of that attachment is much greater in that situation.

And recognising that these things are limited. Again, it’s not to say that they’re bad, it’s just to say that they’re not… we don’t want to reduce our human existence to that, to finding fulfilment through a partner. If you find fulfilment through a partner, great. If you find fulfilment through eating an ice cream, that’s terrific. But that’s not the be all and end all of life. You don’t become happier as a person by having more pleasant experiences. What ends up making you happier, I believe, is having a life that’s lived with meaning. And having a life that’s lived with a profound spiritual meaning is one of the best ways that we can live.

Ayya Sudhamma: The key to celibacy is that you keep it on all levels: body, speech, and mind. When you keep celibacy by body and speech and mind, then you’re very peaceful and that dragon goes to sleep. You don’t go poking at the sleeping dragon with provocative words, provocative images, provocative thoughts. You protect your celibacy, protect your peacefulness.

Subhana Barzaghi: I think there’s a lot of Buddhist baggage, if you like, and judgements about pleasure as such, particularly sensual pleasure. It’s seen as a hindrance to practice. And in lay life and in a partnership, in a relationship, in a loving sexual union, there is delightful pleasure. How can you open to your heart to this other being in an intimate connection?

And in a way there is this sense of deep spiritual experience that can happen in that way, that it’s almost like when you get out of your own way and open your heart and mind, it’s like self making love to self. You know, there’s no division and duality between self and other. When that drops away, there’s this incredible sensual dance of intimacy. It’s like we go from small mind to big mind to no mind. And there’s just this incredible joyous expression of life merging with life.


Kerry Stewart: So what has love got to do with living a Buddhist life? Zen roshi, Subhana Barzaghi?

Subhana Barzaghi: There’s two wings in the Buddhist teachings: one is the wing of wisdom and insight, and the other wing of the Buddhist teachings is love, compassion, joy and equanimity. And these are called the four immeasurables, or the four Brahmaviharas. And they’re very beautiful qualities of the heart and mind to cultivate. And so the first quality of the heart and mind is loving kindness—it’s not just loving kindness for our loved ones, which is a preferential kind of love, and of course we do have love for our loved ones, but it’s asking us to expand our heart and open our heart to encounter love for all beings: love for strangers and love for people we don’t know, and love for even our enemies.

And the Buddah, in trying to define and clarify each of these Brahmaviharas, he spoke about the near enemy and the far enemy. The near enemy was something that looks like love but isn’t quite it. The far enemy is the opposite quality to love, which is hatred and ill will. So the far enemy is easy to see, and the near enemy, though, is often harder to kind of distinguish. So the near enemy to love, for example, would be sensual desire, lust, that looks like love, but not quite it.


Bante Sujato: So this is a traditional Buddhist chant, called the Metta Sutta, which is one of the most popular discourses in the Buddhist tradition. And it talks about the Buddha’s guidelines for how to practise loving kindness, both in one’s life and also in meditation.


Part of the practice, a very important part and one which many people find very challenging, is you start off by developing loving kindness for oneself. And it’s kind of interesting that in the traditional Buddhist texts on this it seems to take that more or less for granted, but when you do that these days, everyone goes, ‘Oh God, I can’t do loving kindness for myself. I can do it for just about anybody else, but that’s the last thing!’ So it’s very interesting that… I mean I don’t want to speculate too much as to why that is, but certainly we find that that’s a major factor.

So at the end of the day, you’re going to have to face that dark and horrible truth, which is that you are actually worthy of love. And if you don’t face up to that, then the love that you have for others is always going to be subtly undermined, because if we don’t love ourselves, then we ask ourselves why do we love that other person? And somewhere down there, the answer is we love that other person because they make us feel good, because we need something from them. And until you can really love yourself fully, you’ll never be able to give yourself to love somebody else fully either.

Brad Warner: Yeah, what does love have to do with it? You don’t find the word ‘love’ used a lot in the sutras that Zen Buddhists are most familiar with. What we deal with more is the idea of compassion, and compassion is a little bit different from love. To me the word love implies a kind of emotional state. I mean I know that the word love is a very big word, and it doesn’t always imply that. But oftentimes it does, and I think that when we get into the area of emotionality, we’re getting into an area where things become a little blurry or there are chances for morality to go wrong, because we’re involved in what I want and what I think you want and all of this sort of thing; whereas compassion is very open and intuitive.

Dogan, who founded the sect of Buddhism that I study in, said that compassion was like a hand reaching for a pillow in the night, which I think is an interesting analogy, because a hand reaching for a pillow in the night is an unconscious act: it’s something that you do when you’re asleep and you have no idea you’ve done it. And so Dogan talks about compassion in this sense, that real compassion is a completely intuitive act and completely unconscious and unmotivated by anything except relieving suffering.

Subhana Barzaghi: So the other Brahmaviharas include compassion, which is karuna in the pali Buddhist language, and the literal translation of karuna means ‘a quivering in the heart in response to another being’s pain.’ So that gives an indication that there’s a very felt sense and embodied sense of when we see another being in pain that there’s a response that comes from us that is compassion, empathy, understanding and rapport for that person who’s suffering.

The far enemy is cruelty, which is the opposite to compassion. Pity is the one closest to compassion, that looks like compassion but it’s not quite compassion. Pity is like feeling sorry for the other, but in pity there is a sense of the other person is diminished in some way as, ‘Oh, the poor soul.’ There’s a kind of sense of, ‘I’m superior, or above that.’ And so there’s a sense that pity is very close, but not quite it; it’s not quite the compassion we’re talking about, or the Buddha’s talking about.

Lodro Rinzler: Curiosity is the foundation of this Buddhist principle of compassion, in my own opinion. My understanding is that the more openhearted we are, the more we’re actually able to be curious about the other person that we’re encountering. And we know that we’re constantly changing, we’re not the same person we were two years ago, three years ago, seven years ago, so the interesting thing is that as we’re constantly evolving and changing, we often forget, particularly in romantic relationships, that the person we’re spending our time with, our years with, every night at dinner, that they’re constantly changing and evolving as well.

So the idea of getting very curious as a form of compassion is the idea that we have to look at who we’re spending our time with and say, ‘Who is this person?’ Can we get really curious about who they actually are and experience them for a genuinely changing, evolving, wonderfully unique and fresh person?

Kerry Stewart: Have you found that, in the communities that you’ve lived in, that there have been people who have fallen in love with one another in the monastic community and then what happens?

Bante Sujato: Yes, in the monastic community, like anywhere else, you find the full range of human emotions is expressed, and sometimes people become very close, sometimes they fall in love. The reality is that there’s only a fairly small minority of people who come to a monastery who end up living the monastic vocation for the rest of their life. And so for me I see this within a context of a particular person and their own spiritual development.

In some cases you can see that people actually come to a monastery because they have certain needs, they have certain issues, and need somewhere to come and just get themselves together for a while. And then they get themselves together. Then they’re OK and then they’re ready to go back out into the world.

Kerry Stewart: And have you ever fallen in love?

Bante Sujato: Since I’ve been a monk? No, I’ve never fallen in love since I’ve been a monk and honestly I haven’t even been close to falling in love as a monk. I’ve been… one of the things that you do get as a monk is you get a lot of people telling you about all their marital problems, and so that’s a fairly good reminder of why you were there in the first place.

Kerry Stewart: Has anyone fallen in love with you? Because people with an open heart are very attractive; you’re in a position of power as the abbot.

Bante Sujato: Hmm. Yes, they have, and they’ve told me so, on quite a number of occasions, actually, but I don’t know that it’s a really suitable thing to put on the radio. I’m just a little bit cautious about speaking out of respect for the other people involved. But in my case when this has happened a few times, and somebody has said that to me, and in quite an open and an honest way. And I really appreciate that. And nobody’s ever expressed to me that they wanted or expected me to actually do anything about it, right? No one’s ever tried to seduce me or anything like that, but people have said, ‘I love you.’ And I’m like, ‘Crikey!’ (Laughs) And I just say, well, you know, that’s going to be a lot of suffering for you, isn’t it?

But I just try to listen to where they’re at and so on. And one of the things, for me it’s very, very important to remember is that they don’t know me, and when I’m a monk and I’m dressed in this robe, and so on, there’s a lot of projection. And it’s quite deliberate; the way that the form works is that you blank out your personality. And very much I see the robe as a screen and people can project all kinds of things on, which can very often be a very healthy and very useful way for people to process their stuff. But sometimes it doesn’t always work well and I always remember that the person that they imagine that they’ve fallen in love with is largely composed of projection and is not really me.


Lodro Rinzler: Buddhist practice can help if you have gotten your heart broken. I think this is something that we’ve all had happen before, where we do put our heart out on the table and we hope that the other person will ante up and do the same, but in fact they come around with a hammer and just smash us. And the habitual reaction is then to try and scoop our innards up, put our heart away and close it off and put walls up around it. But from the Buddhist point of view, it’s believed that we innately want to love, we innately want to be that open, that’s who we are. We don’t want to be shut off. We habituate ourselves to be close-minded, to be aggressive, but innately we want to actually have an open heart. So it’s almost natural that over time when we heal, we want to offer our heart again.

Brad Warner: If you’re a human being, you’re going to have the experience of a broken heart. So everybody has that experience and I’ve had that experience. I’ve had that experience was brought home to me in a really, really obvious way in a Zen retreat where I was suffering from a very broken heart. And I was supposed to be the leader of that retreat, I was supposed to be the most together guy in the room, and people were kind of looking to me for that.

And I walked into this thing just devastated, just completely heartbroken. And I realised that it was my duty to respond to what the other people at the retreat were bringing me, and to leave my own thing aside. And I think that was very helpful. And I think a broken heart is always based on the difference between the way you want things to be and the way things actually are. I think that’s what most of our suffering comes down to.

And it’s not a Buddhist ideal to be complacent, but it is a Buddhist idea to be accepting. It’s not just about accepting everything just to accept it and just letting it roll over you—sometimes you have to do something about it. But you have to accept what is real in order for you to be able to take action that is appropriate. I found when I was going though my divorce that there were times… you know, you want to do something. In that case I was the one who was trying to keep the marriage together and the other party involved didn’t seem at the time to be quite so interested in that.

And so I found that there were times where there was nothing I could do, where every subject that could be talked about had been talked about, every action that could be taken had been done. And what do you do at those moments? You have to have a kind of ability to let go. And you have to learn to be content to do nothing, which is really hard for some of us, especially hard for me, because I always want to be trying to fix something. Sometimes with a broken heart there’s nothing you can do. And so you just do nothing, which I found to be very helpful. That’s where the meditation practice comes in, because it’s the actual practice of doing nothing, and I was doing a lot of meditation when I was getting divorced.


Kerry Stewart: Are you married, and how can you stay in love with your partner?

Lodro Rinzler: I am engaged, myself, to be married, to a lovely woman. And there was a teacher, Ngulchu Thogme, who was an eleventh-century monastic and scholar, and I don’t think he was talking about romantic love when he talked about this, but he, at one point in his Thirty-seven practices of a Bodhisattva, open-hearted warrior, he said, ‘When in reliance on someone, your defects wane and your positive qualities grow like the waxing moon.’ That is a true spiritual friend. That is a spiritual friend that you should care for more than your own body. That’s someone that you can really grow with. And I think that’s a really good marker for long-term relationships: are your positive qualities growing as you are in relationship to this other person, or are you becoming more negative, are you negative qualities growing?

And the other day I was actually walking down the street with my fiancée and she’s not a practitioner, but she turned to me out of the blue and said, ‘You know, I think I’m getting a lot nicer in the last few years since I’ve been with you.’ And I was very touched, and I said, ‘You know, I think I’m much kinder as well.’ And that was a really wonderful and sort of affirming moment for me that I was on the right path with this woman, that we both are growing in that positive way. So the path of a relationship can be a very juicy one and very potent and can have a lot of conflict within it, but it can also be very heart-opening and you can grow as well.


Kerry Stewart: That brings us to the end of this Encounter about Buddhist views on love and sex. My thanks to Brad Warner, Lodro Rinzler, Subhana Barzaghi, Bante Sujato, Ayya Sudhamma and Iain Sinclair. Technical production today was by Phil McKellar and Judy Rapley. I’m Kerry Stewart and it’s been good to have your company. And I’ll leave you with an old Buddhist lover, Leonard Cohen.







Subhana Barzaghi
Zen Buddhist roshi
Sydney Zen Centre
Insight Meditation teacher
Brad Warner
Zen Buddhist monk
Akron, Ohio
Lodro Rinzler
Teacher in the Shambhala school
of Tibetan Buddhism
New York
Iain Sinclair
Scholar of Buddhism and in particular the Newar people of Nepal
Bante Sujato
Buddhist Abbott,
Santi Forest Monastery
Bundanoon, NSW
Ayya Sudhamma
Visiting bhikkhuni,
Santi Forest Monastery
Bundanoon, NSW


Sex, Sin and Zen: A Buddhist Exploration of Sex from Celibacy to Polyamory and Everything in Between
Brad Warner
New World Library, Novato, California
Lodro Rinzler
Shambhala Press
An Introduction to Buddhist Ethics: Foundations, Values and Issues
Peter Harvey
Cambridge University Press
The Red Thread: Buddhist Approaches to Sexuality
Bernard Faure
Princeton University Press

Further Information

Santi Forest Monastery
Bundanoon, NSW
Sydney Zen Centre


Sound Engineer
Phil McKellar / Judy Rapley
Kerry Stewart

Comments (15)

Add your comment

  • Susan Murphy :

    06 May 2012 11:07:22am

    A beautifully constructed program, Kerry, exploring at least one of the vital dimensions of the great Zen koan, 'Even perfectly enlightened saints and sages are still attached to the red thread.' Well done!

    However, even while acknowledging the limitations imposed by a 50 minute format, I see the red thread koan drawing us into a much wider set of questions than just sexuality. 'Why should we get rid of the passions?' asked Zhaozhou, offering us a great related koan.

    The koan-like nature of this whole question is what saves it from ever being able to be emptied and turned into doctrine. I would see the red thread in this body, great body terms, incorporating our relatedness to all life and even to the life-giving urge of this planet itself, as well as in interpersonal body to body terms.

    That's where Zen (and Mahayana) departs from Theravada. A cool and peaceful self as Ayya Sudhamma describes can indeed open up a new register of infinitely subtle tastes of joy in life, but still that ideal seems to hover uncomfortably close to a chariot built for one in order to ascend the heavens.

    This is hardly a moment for abandoning our neighbour, our world, our planet. As Brad Warner (I think) seems to indicate, a loving curiosity about the other, whoever the other may be at any moment, (a curiosity founded in a practised tendency to both withhold supposing something about the other and to openly take in and accept what is real) is a form of intimacy and connectedness that the red thread holds forth as the fundamental compassion that holds all things together.

    The koan makes clear that this cannot be cut. Any religious teaching or impulse that would forsake the world right now just adds to the tide of ignorance that is threatening its very life, and instantly relegates itself to the past. That move simply cuts people out of life. Once you doubt the body as intimate friend of the mind, or more pointedly, any moment you make it the enemy of realisation, you also implicitly doubt the world as a fit place to be, and you must go on of course to doubt women as fit human beings too - after all, where else do all the bodies come from! Are we really going to waste not just half the human race but the one wondrous life-bearing planet we have, in this life-fearing fashion?

    The red thread koan says human enlightenment cannot cut off from life, and from the fate of life, the fate of the planet. If it is to be genuinely alive and of use in the world, and not a mere carefully prepared cocoon for the self, it must find its (infinitely interesting) place right there in the midst of the passions. After all, listen to the passion in this great Bodhisattva Vow:

    The many beings are numberless, I vow to save (or awaken) them.

    Which is of course not possible until you awaken yourself.

  • Peter of Maroubra :

    06 May 2012 6:07:25pm

    Thanks for the great program. For completeness, I would suggest we discuss the inscriptions on the walls of Borobudur, where the very bottom of the huge temple represent the lowest consciousness of beings and the top represent the enlightenment. The bottom carvings were full of men and women performing sexual acts. They were since been removed by the current Muslim inhabitants.

  • Greg Smith :

    07 May 2012 6:13:11pm

    An enriching program. Startling, sublime, wise, wily. A cluster of paradigm-threatening concepts, presented with loving kindness. Received with gratitude.

  • Ken :

    08 May 2012 8:26:48pm

    Sounds to me like your guests are full of fear and aversion. It seems to me that they are actually running away from life and living because they see normal human urges as suffering because they don't think they can handle the journey. Are they really trying to seek enlightenment or just using their 'Buddhist' status to run from what is natural because of their own inner fear?

      • philip :

        09 May 2012 10:26:00pm

        Ken, that was my reaction as well and I've been a Buddhist for 20 years. Fear of passion, of relationships, of the challenges of being alive, seem to drive these people into caves for years or monasteries with other terrified people. They are acolytes, unlike the historical Buddha whose greatest gift, along with the historical Jesus and all other original thinkers, was their ability to challenge orthodoxy, to view the world from a different angle, that's their gift and their message to all of us. They didn't want followers, they wanted us to take up the personal challenge of finding our own truths. I doubt you'll find a truth or the Buddhist's "middle way", if you leave out half the destinations (sex for instance) on the journey.

        Did you also notice how definitively they spoke about everything. I'm reminded of the old joke of Marx and Engels coming back to earth and overhearing 2 Marxists arguing; Marx says to Engels, "I'm glad I'm not a Marxist". I guess the Buddha (who doesn't exist) would have made a similar comment if he'd caught this program.

          • Jennifer :

            10 May 2012 11:33:35am

            Philip, for a Buddhist of 20 years' standing, you certainly have an arrogant and high-handed way of making a point. And what an ignorant point it is: reducing celibacy to fear, and saying that those in monasteries are "terrified people".

            You obviously see yourself as some sort of dauntless seeker after truth, and appear to be very pleased with your own wisdom and the fact that you’re not an "acolyte". Here's hoping life gives you another 20 years in which to learn love, compassion, selflessness, open heartedness, humility and generosity of spirit. I suggest you get started.

              • philip :

                10 May 2012 12:01:26pm

                Jennifer, to strongly challenge a view with something as weak as words, and it's all we have with this medium, is not to be automatically arrogant. The issues I raised, and indeed that were raised by the program, have been around since celibacy began. I'd also invite you to listen to the program again and ask yourself why Ken, myself and I'm sure at least a few others, might have responded the way we did. It's also very standard fare to say that the acolyte, however revered by those who must revere, has historically done more harm to the insights and work of the "deities" they follow than they could ever imagine (hence the joke about Marx). I'm also not sure how you can be so certain (oops could it be the sniff of arrogance) that after a few words about a little radio program, you've generously and compassionately deemed me loveless, compassionless, selfish etc. I'm not a "dauntless seeker of" anything, just a punter asking a few questions, wondering about how "experts" on life get to their very definitive conclusions. Unlike you, as I don't know you, I won't offer you any gratuitous advice on how you should spend the next 20 years of your life. I'm sure you will live it energetically and be true to yourself. I'm really very positive about the human spirit. all the best

  • Jack :

    10 May 2012 8:24:16pm

    And let us not forget that the Buddha never taught Buddhism!

  • paul griffin :

    11 May 2012 9:59:44am

    Buddhism's all about eliminating desire. As the monk said, desire is suspended in absorption and I have witnessed monks in that state. As the nun said, celibacy is a lot easier and it could be added, a lot more interesting than the mundane round. Unless you have practised it you are not in a position to comment.

      • Nancy :

        11 May 2012 10:25:04pm

        Yes but what about all those celibate priests who molested all those children. Surely the same thing would apply to most males who are practicing celibacy?

      • Martine :

        12 May 2012 9:57:26am

        Paul, your comment that "Buddhism is all about eliminating desire" is highly dubious! Aren't striving for enlightenment, wanting peace of mind, sending love and kindness etc also desires? How is it possible to live in the world without desire?

  • Dan :

    11 May 2012 2:45:46pm

    One of the main Buddhist tenets says that one must become an island unto one's self and seek no external refuges. But how does this tenet operate successfully in our cultural context which encourages us to look outside ourselves for security and happiness? Every day we are bombarded by advertising to think that we need a partner, the latest car, a bigger home, a better face, more friends etc in order to feel complete. This contradiction would make for an interesting future encounter program.

    Cheers, Dan

      • philip :

        12 May 2012 12:08:01pm

        Jack Paul and Dan raise three interesting points.

        Jack: I take your point but many wouldn't.

        Paul: No aspect of life can be censored out of discussion on the basis that "you haven't experienced it". To begin with the "it" could be highly contested; there is empathy and intuition to help us understand what we haven't experienced directly; probably no-one's experience of anything is identical and if the proposition is universally true then, for example, only mothers should comment on motherhood, soldiers on war etc etc. It would make for a pretty silent world and for very narrow discussion.

        Dan: I've often wondered and haven't come up with an answer about the difference between the way monastics (of any religion/type) live out their beliefs compared to lay people of the same faith. It seems the demands of both are different and as you point out, the environments are very different. I think this dilemma often disturbs and confuses the practice of any belief system for dedicated lay folk.

        All the best.

  • Sonam Norbu :

    13 May 2012 1:07:01pm

    My issue is not with the actual program but rather with the imagery used to advertise it. Such imagery plays into the exotic and totally misunderstood and plays into the realms of "new age" ink wasted in writing about "tantric sex". The misunderstanding comes from seeing Buddha-figures as couples in union and incorrectly translating the Tibetan words for the couple, yab-yum, as male and female. The words actually mean father and mother. Just as a father and mother in union are required for producing a child, likewise method and wisdom in union are required for giving birth to enlightenment. There is so much more that could be said. Please try to avoid the exotic for the sake of your story.