 |
 |
 |
Personal Heaven, Personal Hell
Sex and the Five Precepts
A Sri Lankan monk once told me, “There is no doubt: if you follow the five precepts, you will be happy. You will live a good life.” We were standing outside the Mahabodhi Temple, in Bodh Gaya, India, discussing the Buddhist path for lay followers. At that point in my life, the monk’s words struck me as uncomplicatedly true. I was living in a Buddhist monastery as part of the Antioch Buddhist Studies program and observing the five precepts with such fervency that I wouldn’t borrow my roommate’s flashlight for even a minute without asking first. “What if she comes back to her room and needs her flashlight while you have it?” my teacher asked sensibly. “It’s a way of avoiding unnecessary complications.” The four months I spent in India were undoubtedly the happiest, simplest days of my life.
So I have complete faith that Shakyamuni Buddha knew what he was talking about when he offered a group of five hundred lay followers a prescription for leading a virtuous life, as told in the Dhammika Sutta: do not injure others, lie, steal, consume intoxicants, or “go with another man’s wife” (nowadays understood to mean “engage in sexual misconduct”). But these guidelines are much stickier to apply in the “real world” than in an Indian monastery filled with devout meditators and robed men and women. Back in the States and back into the swing of college life, I once again began to lie for the sake of convenience, get drunk a couple of nights a week, sleep with people I didn’t love, and subject the ants in my kitchen to death by tile cleaner.
Apparently I am not the only American who considers myself a Buddhist even as I routinely break the precepts. Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche, the founder of the Shambhala lineage, famously showed up drunk to dharma talks and was known to have had sexual relationships with students. And Richard Baker Roshi, Shunryu Suzuki Roshi’s successor as abbot of San Francisco Zen Center, was pushed out of the organization following an affair with a married student, which catalyzed long-simmering resentments about his leadership style. In a 1985 Yoga Journal article, Jack Kornfield wrote that of 54 teachers and gurus he interviewed, 34 said they had been sexually involved with their students.
It’s no coincidence that the most controversial transgressions against the precepts in fledgling American dharma centers have been related to the open-ended admonition against sexual misconduct. The difference between a white lie and a manipulative untruth is relatively clear; sorting out the wholesome signals one’s body gives from the unwholesome ones presents a much more complicated challenge. It actually took me several years to realize that simply feeling attracted to someone is not a good enough reason to sleep with him.
I’m not sure where I got the idea, which I carried with me throughout college, that pleasurable sex was a virtuous, guilt-free activity. This outlook was at least partly societal: the general consensus among my peers was that orgasms made you happy, pure and simple. And they did make me happy, but they also irrevocably tied my life, however trivially, to the person who gave them to me. Sexual contact is always a commitment, if not to a relationship, then to future dealings—a talk, awkwardness, avoidance, an unrequited crush—stuff my Bodh Gaya teacher would call “unnecessary complications.” As an undergrad, I failed to accept this. I noticed the anxiety caused by sexual encounters, but I never considered changing my behavior. I suppose I had an idea that being open with my sexuality indicated that I was liberated, a freethinker who acted as she chose—and the baggage that came with that freedom? It was just something I had to learn to deal with.
Perhaps this is not so different from the thinking that gave rise to infidelity and teacher-student romances in emergent American sanghas of decades past. Just how hard and fast does the precept against sexual indiscretion need to be? Turning to the Dhammapada for guidance, we are presented with a seemingly unequivocal view: “Whoever [breaks the five precepts],” the Buddha is quoted as saying, “digs up the roots of himself even here in this very world.” But Shakyamuni’s overarching message throughout his life was that one must be one’s own wisdom. In the Kalama Sutta, he states, “Do not go upon…what is in a scripture. Kalamas, when you yourselves know: ‘These things are bad’…abandon them.” I read this as: always follow the five precepts. And figure out what that means on your own.
