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Dalai Lama XIV, Janet Gyatso, José Cabezón, S.N. Goenka, Thomas Aquinas, Tibet, Tsong kha pa, vinaya
José Cabezón has an interesting article on Buddhism and sexuality in the latest (summer 2009) issue of Buddhadharma: The Practitioner’s Quarterly. The article examines the tricky concept of “sexual misconduct” (kamesu micchācāra in Pali); one of the basic Five Precepts is a vow to refrain from “sexual misconduct.” But what exactly counts as misconduct? A fellow student asked me this when I took a Goenka vipassanā course. Goenka, in keeping with his general emphasis on non-harming, himself listed only rape and adultery as examples. But premodern Buddhists have typically gone further than this.
Cabezón probes the point that the present Dalai Lama, while defending the “full human rights” of gay people, nevertheless treats male homosexual sex (and oral and anal sex more generally) as a form of sexual misconduct. Understandably, the Dalai Lama’s claim startles and worries many Western Buddhist practitioners (surely not least Cabezón himself, whom I believe is himself an out gay man). Cabezón rightly, I think, tells readers that it’s not enough to dismiss such teachings as “un-Buddhist”; they have been found in Buddhist tradition for a long time. The Dalai Lama himself derives them from Tsong kha pa, one of the most respected thinkers in Tibetan tradition; Cabezón notes that one can find them in other Tibetan thinkers like Gam po pa. Cabezón argues – correctly, to my mind – that if one is to “take refuge in the Dhamma,” acknowledge oneself as a part of the tradition, then one must attempt to deal with the whole tradition, warts and all, not merely picking and choosing what one likes oneself. It’s entirely fair to try and modify the tradition (an action that Cabezón himself is trying to do, and that I have previously defended here as well), but one should do it with open eyes. Cabezón argues in particular (again rightly, in my view) that one needs to pay attention to the context in which such words were written – specifically, to ask why their writers wrote them.
Ascertaining a writer’s reason, of course, is typically far from an easy task; and it’s at this point that I think Cabezón goes awry. In asking why monastic writers forbade certain lay sexual practices, he claims that as monks, they would “read lay sexual ethics through the lens of monastic discipline, reading monastic norms (like where penises can and cannot be inserted) into lay behavioral codes…. The result was to make lay sexuality increasingly more restrictive and monastic-like.” (p. 68)
But this, I think, is an inadequate explanation, if we look at what’s actually in those monastic codes. It’s not just that the vinaya codes forbade heterosexual sex along with these other forms. Rather, Janet Gyatso has noted in her chapter on sex – rightly, I think – that at least in the early Pali vinaya, heterosexual vaginal sex is the paradigm of monastic sexual misconduct, “woman as fertile mate (with her particular kind of sexual organ) is the paradigmatic and most proscribed kind of partner…” (p. 281) For a male monk, on this line of reasoning, sex with a woman is a significantly worse crime than sex with a man. The reason, likely, is that heterosexual vaginal sex can produce children, which endanger the monk’s lifestyle and the monastic institution. The more other sexual acts resemble that one, the worse they are, because the more they symbolize the act which constitutes a rejection of the monkhood. (There’s more to Gyatso’s argument than this, but this is the part that’s most relevant to this discussion.)
If all this is so, then if Tsong kha pa or his Indian predecessors were imitating monastic codes as Cabezón claims, then they should have treated heterosexual sex as worse than homosexual sex. But they didn’t. As Cabezón notes, they allow heterosexual men five orgasms a night. Why is this?
I don’t know the answer to that question. I blog about it because I’m philosophically intrigued as to what the reasons could be. The most common philosophical objections to gay sex tend to be phrased in terms of natural law, à la Aquinas: nature (usually representing God) has designed us for heterosexuality, so we should not go against that plan. But I can’t imagine a Buddhist saying that – at least, not a South Asian Buddhist. Nature’s laws are what mire us in suffering; they’re what we’re trying to get away from. Natural law can’t be what’s going on here. So what is it?
I will certainly look at Janet Gyatso’s paper (I cannot access the full article of Cabezon in my university’s library), but let me provisionally propose that nature (and the fundamental fact of reproduction) surely played an important role at least in the non-Buddhist Indian milieu. Consider, in this regard, the stress laid on the fact that one is only allowed to become a sanny?sin only after the birth of one’s grandchild (that is, when one’s reproductive life is presumably over) and the discontent when Śaṅkara decided to become a sanny?sin at a young age. Consequently, male homosexuality is illicit because it inhibits reproduction. Buddhist milieus might have been influenced by the wider Indian context. Typically, ‘heterodox’ movements, after an initial revolutionary time, try to adjust to the established social norms, and this might explain the shift highlighted by Gyatso (in the Vinaya, one only deals with monks, later on, one is influenced by the general condemn of male homosexuality).
Female homosexuality is usually not condemned for two reasons, I believe. 1st, it does not inhibit reproduction (women get married anyway and usually get children even if they do not enjoy having sex with their husband). 2nd, it is less striking than male homosexuality. Probably, it occurs/occurred among close friends and was thus considered as a form of intimate friendship.
Of course, this might explain why Buddhist thinkers have been inclined to condemn male homosexuality, but it does not explain (nor justify) why they positively decided to do so. But I cannot find any positive argument against homosexuality in particular.
Well… the idea that one becomes a sannyasin late in life is a much later development. See Patrick Olivelle’s The Asrama System on this: it came out of a conflict between householders and renouncers, and the first astika idea was that one had to choose one of the four asramas for one’s whole life, and only then (probably not until CE/AD years) did the idea that sannyasa is a later stage enter dharmasastra texts like Manu. And even Manu (where one of the strongest astika prohibitions on homosexuality is found) has a stronger penalty for heterosexual anal sex than for homosexual, if memory serves.
The Buddhists, by contrast, were basically one side of the earlier householder-renouncer conflict, privileging the renouncer side as the Jains did. The idea of the importance of reproduction was one of the most fundamental ideas that they rejected. Manu would have been written before the later scholastic texts that codified prohibitions on homosexuality, but Buddhists surely wouldn’t have been reading those.
I’m skeptical of the idea that Buddhists were simply reproducing the prejudices of their time. There might be something to it, but I think if we were going to look for a deeply ingrained pan-Indian prejudice against homosexual sex, we would have to look to pre-Buddhist texts, basically the Vedas (including the Upanishads). Are there condemnations of homosexual acts there? I’m not sure.
Well, I’m not an expert (as you already noticed!), but I was trying to find a solution for the different perspective of Vinaya and later authors such as Tsong kha pa. So, the point is not what happened before the Vinaya (which rejects the importance of reproduction, as you say), but after it. I am not sure that “Buddhists surely wouldn’t have been reading those [=non Buddhist texts condemning male homosexuality, such as Manu]” As fas as philosophy is concerned, Buddhists read a lot of non Buddhist texts. Apart from reading, the influence of the non Buddhist milieu might have been considerable even in other fields, possibly because of converts.
But still, you are right, if one want to take Tsong kha pa’s position seriously, one should be able to detect its philosophical rationale.
Finally, thanks for mentioning J.Gyatso’s paper. It is very well written and I deeply enjoyed it.
For another Buddhist perspective on gay sex beyond the Tibetan tradition and Cabezon’s musings, go to http://www.buddhismatoz.com and look up ‘Sexual Behavior’ and ‘Homosexuality’
Thanks for your comment; those references make an interesting point. The sexual behaviour page (which I’ve linked because it was a little hard to find) makes an interesting reference to the Anguttara Nik?ya. I hadn’t realized that there was a codification of sexual misconduct in the suttas that didn’t involve homosexuality (and a quick check of the Pali suggests to me that it is indeed kamesu micch?c?ra that’s being spelled out here). So this does suggest that it’s a later development to understand gay sex as misconduct. That’s important to know.
On the other hand, I think the page on homosexuality goes a little far in saying that homosexuals were viewed as the “third nature” rather than being perverted or deviant. As I understand it, there was always something seen as not quite right about the “third nature” – expressed in the fact that they weren’t allowed to become monks (or nuns).