How does a person’s sexuality relate to his or her practice? Zen teaches that everything is a part of universal inter-connected and inter-dependent beingness. This beingness is complete and perfect just as it is. Furthermore, it teaches that all of us share in this perfection, right here, right now. If I accept this I must believe that I have complete and unconditional worth. Unconditional means not accepting any ‘ifs’ (conditions). It is not that I am worthy only if my Mommy says so, if people like me, if I do not get angry, if I do not have sexual desires, much less unconventional sexual practices, etc. It is that I am worthy no matter what I think or even do. Regardless of everything else, my fundamental beingness is already Buddha (an Enlightened One). My practice is to awaken to this. In other words, practice is realizing my present wholeness or non-dual Buddha nature, and thereby becoming free from self-alienation or the painful duality called samsara. To practice constructively one must do so with one’s whole being. If I am alienated from or feel negative about my sexuality, I am not giving my whole self to my practice, much less accepting my unconditional, Buddha worth. It is not who I am, or am not, making love to that is important in my striving for truth, but that I am always acknowledging my partner’s unconditional worth as much as my own. Unconditional acceptance is perfect love and morality.

The Zen tradition deals with sexuality within the broader category of sensual indulgence. The general rule is to avoid abuse of sensuality. This covers both over-indulgence in, and extreme deprivation of, the senses. Most people live by extremes. We make ourselves fat by excessive eating; we get sick from overly rich foods; we shorten our lives with alcohol, drugs and tobacco; we deafen ourselves with loud music; we dull our minds with moronic entertainment; and we often exhaust ourselves working at jobs we hate so we can dress in the latest fashions, drive a new car and have the best house on the block. We do all of this, Zen teaches, because we think it makes us feel more valuable or real. We think it will take away that barely conscious fact that nothing, especially ourselves, is permanent. We think that if we can keep our bodies and minds occupied enough, we will not have to deal with the pain of getting old, getting sick, and dying. On the other hand, depriving the body or mind of things needed to retain health and alertness is also an abuse of the senses. Both hedonism and ascetic masochism can be violations of the Middle Path.

Truly realizing that we already have the unconditional worth of Buddhahood means that we recognize that our most essential need and want (passion) is already fully satisfied. Thus all other wants are recognized as merely auxiliary and so we should be able to partake of them without attachment to them. Too often, however, this teaching that one can have passions and still be enlightened has been misinterpreted or willfully distorted into the teaching that passions or desires in and of themselves are enlightenment. This distortion is called Mad or Wild Cat Zen, and is guaranteed to ultimately lead to the increasing of our pain.

The great mistake of hedonism is that it is usually very selective. It generally elevates sex to a sacred status, but rejects all the other bodily functions as equally worshipful. Zen says that all these are equally sacred, and thus no one of them should be treated in more than a normally casual manner. Life as a whole may be worshipped, but making more out of sex than it deserves is false spirituality. Also, most cultic hedonism arises as a reaction against societal or individual Puritanism and hence an attitude of sexual guilt or shame. A spirituality based on such a reaction is unhealthy. One of the reasons Zen continued to hold on to the monastic tradition was to counter Wild Cat tendencies which lead to the further delusion that I am my conditioned passions rather than the unconditional Buddha-Nature beyond them. An enlightenment experience is a profound and long term relieving of our pain. Hedonism at best is just a superficial and very temporary anesthetizing of the pain.

When it specifically comes to sexuality, the traditional Buddhist rule for lay persons states that a person should avoid sexual intercourse with minors, with persons who are betrothed or married to another, and with those institutionalized in prison or mental institutions. Aside from this, lay peoples’ sexuality is their own business. What Zen does ask is that we examine carefully our relationships in the context of the teachings on suffering and impermanence. Sex can easily be used to increase suffering. From its beginning Buddhism has pointed out, in its teachings on desire, that if we desire and do not get what we want, we experience misery. If we desire and get what we want, at first we experience joy, but then we become anxious about holding on to this. And when we lose it, as we must do, due to impermanence, we experience even more misery. It is not sex that creates suffering, but our over attachment to it. Only by being able to gain and lose with equanimity can we at peace with our sexuality. Zen asks us to keep this in mind at all times.

Promiscuity is another activity which Zen calls us to look at carefully. It encourages us to see whether we are trying to find and establish a relationship, even if only for a single night, or are we trying to avoid commitment to another? Is our activity a genuine searching for the right partner or is it a disguised attempt just to use another to make ourselves feel more complete, but actually caring little, or nothing, for the other person’s needs?

Prostitution is, in itself, not condemned in Zen. What a person does with her or his body is that person’s own affair. But what is to be condemned is the harming or exploiting of another person, even if it is seemingly voluntary on the part of the exploited. Compassion toward others must not be abandoned for the sake of sexual desires.

Recreational versus reproductive sex is not something on which Zen makes a moral judgment either. Nor does it make a distinction between heterosexual and homosexual, or so called natural or unnatural sexuality. Why should it, since ultimately the Zen goal is to get the person to realize a non-dual, hence non-judgmental awareness of Self, in which case all of the differentiation’s above are meaningless. Zen recognizes that lay life, in general, and sexuality in particular, can often interfere with achieving the above goal, which is why it encourages a monastic lifestyle for those who wish to make achieving that goal a full-time activity. But it also recognizes that the decision to give up lay-life is neither practical nor even necessary for most people. Therefore, Zen says that whatever sexual relationship we have should be totally one that is mutually loving and supportive.

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