Sex is not Zen

 Unlike the Buddha's Dharma, sex can certainly lead to suffering if we are not careful.  It can be like eating fish without removing the bones.  Sometimes three minutes of huffing and puffing followed by a superficial ecstasy can lead to nine months, and more, of pain if we don't use some kind of contraception.  However, by taking precautions we can avoid a huge amount of future suffering and still have many delightful orgasmic thrills!  

With regard to the path of enlightenment, having lots of orgasms doesn’t help us one bit to understand the Buddha’s Dharma or Zen’s pure Mind.  Frankly, we would be idiots to imagine sex can enlighten us.  Sex is something human bodies do not to mention many other animals, including even the gods.  But reaching enlightenment is something that surpasses the human sexual drive including the physical instrument’s ecstasy.  The most sublime sex in the world, in other words, will not take us to Bodhicitta (i.e., the awakened Mind).

Malcolm Muggeridge hit the nail on the head when he proclaimed that “Sex is the mysticism of materialism” reminding us of the fact that sexual ecstasy is no more profound than being behind the wheel of a BMW 550i Gran Turismo (some would argue that owning and driving a BMW is better than sex—my neighbor sure would agree who drives his BMW after work so he can relax).  To be sure, such ecstasy is in the imagination of the beholder!  

The most profound aspect of sex as mystical materialism is when it enters religion as sexual mysticism which has a rather rich and detailed history especially in Christianity.  But even this is not without limits, the limit being, naturally, the psychophysical body, itself, which can also give us fifty false enlightenments (cp. Shurangama Sutra: The Fifty Skandha-demon States).  The important point to grasp is that sexuality can’t take us beyond the Five Aggregates of form, feeling, thought, inclination, and sensory consciousness.  

Being on the path of enlightenment demands of us that we must go through and transcend all the subtle traps that the Five Aggregates, i.e., the psychophysical body, has to offer (yes, Mara the Evil One lurks close by!).  If anything, sexual ecstasy is low man on the totem pole when it comes to what the psychophysical body can throw at the adept to get him off the path.  In fact, the sexual trap, if we can call it that, should be the least of our worries.  The real problems lie with the more subtle kinds of false enlightenments, noted earlier, not to mention the one hundred and sixty types of mind mentioned in The Maha-Vairocana-Abhisambodhi Tantra that have to be transcended for Bodhicitta to manifest (utpada).  For example, compared with the mind of non-attachment and the mind of hatred, sexual ecstasy is not at all that sophisticated.  It is almost self-limiting insofar as the orgasm is followed by a marked deflation of the sexual urge.

Comments

[minx]

One could very much liken the american mind to a confused ghost imprisoned in a state of sheer famine, that is, constantly starving for food, sex, money, position, beauty and youth and so on.

This is a beast that cannot get enough; a hungry ghost locked in a permanent cycle of suffering, constantly distracted by its own insatiable hunger for more, it always craves more of whatever that "more" might be.

This is a most vicious cycle, close to impossible to escape. I mean, with such hunger for more, when will you ever stop and find time for to contemplate and practise the dharma?

[Alex]

It has the original mouth but remains wordless;
It is surrounded by a magnificent mound of hair.
Sentient beings can get completely lost in it
But it is also the birthplace of all the Buddhas of the ten thousand worlds.

Ikkyu