Buddhist Tantra: Is it all about Sex?

 

Approximate script, with some variations and possible errors:

Tantra – is it all about sex?

Hello Dear Listener, or listeners. Welcome – or welcome again – to the Double Dorje podcast. I’m Alex Wilding, and I wonder if this is the episode you’ve been waiting for. I hope not, because in that case you are probably going to be disappointed. The thing is that while it would be silly to say that sex is completely irrelevant to Buddhist tantra, it doesn’t have nearly as much to do with it as you might at first think.

 

Before we get much further into this, I think it’s important to underline the way our modern culture has become so highly sexualised. So much so, that we hardly even notice it anymore. Depending on the context, as of course everything always does, it pays to remember that an image of two deities in sexual union is not necessarily actually sexy!

The second of several factors not to forget is that the Christian view of monogamy, adopted by the Christians from the Romans in the middle of the first millennium and hardened step-by-step into an absolute rule, did not make the same inroads into other cultures, such as those of India. That is not to say that there was some kind of free love, anything goes culture in India. I think we can take it that the rules were just as strict, but they were not the same rules, and sex was not viewed as a dirty activity best kept out of sight.

I have heard people say that “of course tantric Buddhism is all about sex – just look at the pictures!” After all, these people might add, even when the high Tantric deities are shown without consorts, the consort is very often held to be there conceptually, very often in the form of a trident. Vajrayogini’s consort is with her in the trident she carries in the crook of her left arm, and Guru Rinpoche’s consort is often conceived of as being with him in the trident that he holds.

Leaving such cases aside, when we look at pictures of deities with consorts, if the main thing we notice about them is the fact that they are in union, and conclude that it is all about sex, I think we have really taken a walk down the garden path, particularly that of seeing everything in a sexualised light. Why would we not conclude that Tantric practice was all about having freakish numbers of extra arms and legs, perhaps four arms or 42 arms or a thousand arms. Or about having skin of a colour quite different from human skin, or having eyes in unexpected places such as the palms of our hands, soles of our feet, or in the middle of our forehead. We don’t, after all, assume that Christianity is all about torturing someone to death or being tortured to death simply because of the way that crucifixes are displayed. The death of Jesus may be central to the Christian story, but I don’t think many of us think: “Oh, Christianity – torture!”. Similarly, if we can see past today’s tendency to see everything in a sexual light, it’s possible to understand that these images do represent great, sacred bliss, without being intended to provoke an erotic reaction in the viewer. While there are, indeed, some sexual practices in the higher reaches of Tantric yoga, something to return to a bit later, it is simply mistaken to have the reaction of “Oh, Tantric Buddhism – that’s sex, innit?”.

At this point, and to avoid a few more unnecessary side tracks, I should point out that the word “tantra” has been completely hijacked by the marketing of modern, pseudo-yoga, pseudo-Asian, pseudo-self-development courses aimed at what they call enlightenment. For that reason, some people prefer to avoid the word tantra and speak only of vajrayana Buddhism or mantric Buddhism rather than Tantric Buddhism. I have a lot of sympathy for that view, but unfortunately the term is so baked into many centuries of teaching and practice that it can be quite difficult to avoid it just because a bunch of hyped-up would-be yogis have hijacked the term to make money from it.

It is perhaps older listeners who might remember a once well-known piece of fakery based to a significant extent on an ignorant misreading of Buddhist iconography. I refer to Cyril Hoskin, better known under his pseudonym of “Tuesday Lobsang Rampa”. His first book, “The Third Eye”, came out in 1956, and actually fooled some not unintelligent people into thinking that he really was a Tibetan lama. His later books became more and more ludicrous, but we can have some sympathy for those who were taken in during the early days. It only takes a minute knowledge of Tibetan Buddhism to know that his story is nonsense, but who had that in the 1950s or early 60s?

He filled his stories with a lot of material culled from Theosophy, a sort of spiritualism-adjacent mystical movement originating in the late 19^th century, mostly from the imagination of the then-famous Helena Blavatsky. I once met her in a dream, but that’s another story.

The reason I mention Hoskins/Lobsang Rampa is that one of his central claims was about his “third eye” with which he could see the “auras” around people and things. His claim was that the third eye in the middle of the forehead of many Tantric deities was not just a matter of iconography, but was a real thing based on a gland in the head, and that the halos and auras shown around the images of Buddhist deities were again, not a matter of iconographic convention and symbolism, but were a real thing that this third eye would see. All of this simply spun out of ignorant speculation on the basis of a totally misunderstood iconography. The fantasies of Lobsang Rampa may seem like a joke now, but it is a reminder that seizing on an isolated detail from an unfamiliar cultural artefact and spinning a fantasy out of it is not really a good way forward. And when people try to make money out of their fantasy, presenting themselves as experts, it’s a positively bad way forward.

As for the content of what we know as the “high” tantras, that is to say the bald content without any explanation or commentary, or teaching or whatever, and if we asked how much of the colourful material that is found there does reflect the actual practice of the authors, I think we have to admit that it’s very difficult to know. There were no impartial invesigative reporters around making documentaries at the time. I’m not a scholar of these things, but I do believe that scholars, while they will have their own opinions, would also agree that it’s very hard to know. It is quite clear that some of that material is simply a literary genre, created for whatever reason, describing transgressive sexual activity, ritualised sacrifice and so on, and quite possibly seeking to be the most outrageous tantra of its day. The Kalachakra tantra, for example, was one of the last of the “high” tantras to emerge in India. I myself have no particular connection to it, but it has been influential. I have known people who got hold of translations of the later chapters of the Kalachakra tantra, and, believing that these contents were – or even are – carried out as described has pushed some of them into a state of outrage. Given their belief, their reaction is perhaps not unreasonable, but the relationship between the written contents and the actual intentions or activities of the practitioners is really not at all clear. Personally, and this really is a personal opinion of mine with which others are bound to disagree, this kind of super-transgressive Tantric literature is a bit of a dead end. Maybe it was inspiring in its day, and of course it is still preserved to some extent on the Tibetan tradition, but the understanding of the contents and its development in further commentarial literature over the centuries has put it in a very different, and much less concrete, context. Suffice it to say that in a ritual empowerment, not necessarily that of Kalachakra, the disciples, male and female, are expected to taste the “nectar of the union of the god and goddess” and to experience physical bliss as a result. I leave it to your own imagination to figure out what that mixed red and white nectar is supposed to be. Somebody, somewhere, sometime has in all probability done this literally, but what you or I are likely to find if we take part in such a ceremony is that we are given, in a duly reverential and devoted manner, a couple of drops of hooch, most likely vodka or whiskey. The moment may feel quite magical, but I would stress again that it’s not particularly sexy even if, on the surface, it sounds a little bit hardcore.

[Punctuate]

So that’s a fair bit about what sex does NOT have to do with Tibetan Buddhist tantra, so let’s take a quick look at where Tantric sex may indeed come into play. I have often heard it stressed that being qualified for that sort of practice is extremely rare, and that only people like Guru Rinpoche or Milarepa ever reached that point, having enough control over their bodily energies and having “opened their central channel”, as it is said, to the necessary extent. It is perhaps also appropriate to be honest about the fact that while the texts quite explicitly say that both the male and female partners in this activity have to have reached the same level of experience and skill, most of the texts that we have are written from a male-centred point of view, unsurprisingly in the light of the way the Tibetan Buddhist hierarchy is, for the most part, even more male-centred than lay society. There ARE cycles of yogic practice that include consort practice that originated with great female teachers such as Niguma, but let’s not pretend – they are very much in the minority.

So having, I hope, made it clear that in context a lot of this material is not anywhere near as sexy as its hijackers would like to make out, I’d like to say a few things to sketch out what that context actually is. Tibetan Buddhism is huge and varied, and that in itself might be one reason why there exist quite a number of “practice cycles”, bodies of teaching that have a relatively consistent focus. Big practice cycles include teachings that take a student from the very beginning up to the most advanced practices. What do they contain?

Let’s imagine a student, male or female, who has a strong enough connection with one of these lineages that they are going to spend some time working through pretty much the whole cycle. This might be in a long retreat, which would classically be three years. That’s not a fixed rule, but the scheme that I’m about to describe is more likely to be followed in this way in that retreat setting, where the retreat Lama is specifying which practices have to be done when and for how long. Outside that setting, things may well be done in a more piecemeal way, with bits left out or postponed, some later bits perhaps done earlier, all depending on the way in which the Lama wants to teach. So now the gate of the retreat compound is closed, and the strict retreat begins…

Somewhere near the very beginning there will be meditation exercises designed to give the student an initial orientation – the “four thoughts” to turn the students’ mind away from the cycle of suffering. I mentioned them in passing in a previous episode, and they will be the main feature of an episode sometime in the future, so, very briefly, we have the good fortune of a human birth suitable for the practice of Dharma, we have impermanence and death, the inevitability that all our actions their corresponding fruit sometime in the future, and the ever-presence of suffering. These are called the “ordinary preliminaries”.

The special preliminaries, the special “ngondro”, follow, most likely with 100,000 full length prostrations, refuge and bodhicitta prayers, visualisations to offer the universe, in the form of a mandala, to the Buddhas and lamas of the lineage, many recitations of the 100-syllable mantra of Vajrasattva for purification, then prayers, visualisations and many, many mantras to join the disciples’ mind with that of “the Lama”. Details vary, perhaps quite a lot, but these are only relevant to somebody actually starting the practice. The personal teacher will make them clear.

The meditations that we actually consider “Tantric” will now begin, focusing on one deity, or perhaps more, in which the practitioner learns to identify with that deity. The deity, after all, is an expression of the enlightened mind. In a special, ultimate sense, the deity is and always was one with the essence of the practitioner’s mind, but this practice should make that shine out.

For quite an extended period this will mainly involve visualisation, recitation, offerings and other ritual designed to make the deity a vivid experience. This is known as the developing phase, because the student develops an experience of the deity. When this has gone far enough, yogic practice may begin.

The foundation of the yogic practice is based on breath control, where of course details have to be learnt from a personal teacher. To a greater or lesser extent this will entail the blissful “inner heat” known as tummo. This should then prepare the student for a bunch of other practices such as dream yoga, the transformation of sleep, and preparation for death.

In theory, the practitioner’s body and mind are now sufficiently tamed and focused to provide the perfect basis for the more subtle meditations known as mahamudra or dzogchen. The student has now been introduced to the whole of the path, and only has to actualise it. Only! Ha!

Those who know anything about these things, will realise that I have been appallingly rough-and-ready here, but I only want to suggest a framework to explain where sexual practice might – or might not – fit in.

And where is that? Or rather, where was that? At the point where breath control has become sufficiently developed, there are two options, known as the upper gate and the lower gate. The upper gate comprises the meditations on inner heat that I mentioned a minute ago, brought to an intense level where the practitioners’ inner energies are brought into the central channel. The lower gate, which is said to be very powerful, makes use of a real, physical consort. As I already said, only very few people are held to be capable of this, although there are more who will think that they have that capacity.

This kind of practice strictly requires “coitus reservatus”. The release of sexual secretions will mean that the practice completely fails. One famous practitioner in India long ago referred to these wannabes as “those who have the mark of a yoga practitioner – many bastard children”.

In short, if we think of this whole path is having a dozen or so stages, there is one stage about three quarters of the way through at which practice with a physical consort is held to be an option. Is that option a good idea? Not everybody thinks that it is. I can’t put numbers on it, but there is also a good number of teachers who feel that while some experience of the breath control and associated practices may indeed be valuable, the cultivation of pure perception in the developing phase, and the penetration to the true nature of the mind in the mahamudra and dzogchen practices, are far more important.

A further point is of particular relevance today, as we try to negotiate these extraordinary teachings. While it is true that there are female-centred versions of these practices, it is particularly in this matter of consort yoga that a very high proportion of the material is male-centred. De-emphasising this particular option has the twin advantages of reducing one of the avenues for sexual abuse, and of levelling the playing field a bit for male and female practitioners.

Someone who is cultivating very intense practice will be using mantras, and perhaps visualisations, for everything: for waking up and getting up in the morning, for going to sleep, for eating, for drinking, for pooping, for breathing, dreaming and dying so OF COURSE also for sex. Obviously enough, this particularly applies to non-celibate practitioners.

So we can see that most of the sex that may indeed happen in the West between gurus – usually male – and their students – commonly female – is EXACTLY what you would think. It’s not uplifting, it’s not an experience of bliss and emptiness. It’s abuse. It’s exploitation, pure and simple. A handful of Tibetan teachers in the west have indulged in this on an industrial scale. A considerable number – it’s obviously impossible to say what that number is – have taken the occasional wrong step. And there are plenty who have, at least as far as we know, behaved quite properly.

So let’s not be puritanical. Of course there can be a real spiritual connection between highly experienced practitioners, perhaps effectively married, for whom these practices are deep and meaningful – not that the committed and possibly lifelong relationship in Tibetan culture can be fitted exactly into the Christian-based concept of marriage. The operative word here is “can”. Merely calling a woman a “dakini” or a “secret mother” (sangyum) does not make it so. Always remember to keep your head screwed on. If sex had been the shortcut to enlightenment, the world would be a better place. But it ain’t.

So that’s it for today. Was it all about sex? Not really. Don’t forget to like, subscribe, tell your friends and do whatever it is to support this podcast on whatever is appropriate for the channel you are using! And keep your head screwed on.

 

Words or phrases you might want to look up:

• Tantra
• Guru Rinpoche
• Milarepa
• Niguma
• Vajrayogini
• Lobsang Rampa
• Tummo
• Vajrayana
• Dakini
• Sangyum

#Buddhism #Vajrayana #Tibet #DoubleDorje #tantra #mahamudra #dzogchen #lama #mantra #meditation #nyingma #kagyu