Tricycle | Awake in the World

AT TINTERN ABBEY, a medieval Cistercian monastery located on the border between England and Wales, a young monk was caught having an affair with a village girl. The abbot had the girl strangled, and the monk buried up to his chin in the river mud, where the tides rose over him and he drowned.

Punishments of maiming and death for sexual misconduct are prescribed in both the Old Testament and the Koran. Buddhists call this approach to morality "theistic" and "dualistic," meaning that it defines right conduct by an external reference point, such as divine law, and splits the world into good and evil. The guardian of morals imposes the law with particular harshness against the sexual offenses of spiritual practitioners, because flesh and spirit are thought to be enemies. What comes from the flesh is evil, and must be chastised.

As American Buddhists, we like to think that our own ethics are more enlightened than this, but our deepest moral reflexes are still conditioned by theism. The revelation that a spiritual teacher is sleeping with his students seems to affect some of us like a rock thrown into a hornet's nest. It presents a radical challenge to our preconceptions about spirituality.

Since the recent sexual scandals that have surrounded several teachers of Eastern thought in the West, a climate of opinion has sprung up in the mental health industry that sex between teacher and student ought to be considered taboo, and that strong sanctions ought to be applied against anyone who becomes involved in such a relationship. There is a disparity of power between teacher and student, so the thinking goes; therefore, sex between them is always and necessarily an exploitation of the student, who is turned into a sex object by the experience, feels abandoned, and will need to be rescued afterward by therapy.

Years ago one of my spiritual teachers was a woman, whom I found attractive; she did not refuse my physical overtures, but turned them into epiphanies. Part of her teaching was that our passion reflects our own basic goodness, and that being in love—inseparable from sexuality—is a path to enlightenment. After we became lovers I developed a strong attachment to her, and I felt deeply betrayed when I learned that the attachment was not mutual. Yet my sense of betrayal was my own problem: my teacher had done nothing to cause it. I did not need to pay a therapist for the privilege of perpetuating an image of myself as her victim. Any insightful person would have been amused if I had tried to claim that she had exploited me. I knew perfectly well that I was taking a chance. I wanted to get close to the Source of power so it would rub off on me; I wanted the imagined prestige, even if known only to myself, of having slept with an "important" figure; I wanted to be swept away. My whole approach to love was full of this "I want." It was only by not getting what I wanted that I gained any lasting insight into my own motives, or any power to respond differently. The love affair was an essential part of the teaching. Through it I met one of the places where I had always held back and protected myself. Then I softened and let go. It was the first time I had been able to love and let go, to love without expecting anything in return.

Untitled watercolor by Francesco Clemente, 1991

As for power, I learned that my teacher had no more of it than I. No teacher has any inherent power or wisdom that cannot also be evoked in the student. This is a basic premise of the relationship between them. Otherwise, there would be no point in the relationship, except to mirror the teacher's grandeur and the student's inferiority. Teacher and student are equals from the start. The so-called power disparity is an illusion, a function of the student's fear and sense of inadequacy. The difference between them is that a good teacher knows this, while the student often does not.

Perhaps I could have learned these lessons without sexual involvement, but the vulnerability induced by passion sped things up. I was brought quickly to a crossroads where, in order to go on loving and learning, I had to move past my fixation on self-defense. This choice is basic to the path—in fact, it is the path, since every stage of realization presents us over and over again with this same choice in many different guises.

The Buddhist challenge to conventional Western notions of spirituality illuminates the way we set flesh and spirit at war with each other. In Buddhism there is no original sin. Although noticing how we express our sexuality can certainly lead to an awareness of right conduct, the flesh is not regarded as representing a corruption or punishment of any kind, nor as an obstacle to the attainment of enlightenment. The root of human suffering is not sin, but our confusion about ego. We suffer because we believe in the existence of an individual self. This belief splits the world into "I" and "other." The "I" may strive to maintain itself by identifying with spirit at the expense of flesh, or merely by identifying with the values of a particular social group. The role played by ethics in this process is to perpetuate some kind of division between us and them.

The origin of the words ethic and ethnic show how these concepts are related to the idea of ego: both words have the same Indo-European root, seu, or "self," extended to swedh, "that which is one's own," from which came the Greek ethnos, "people of one's own kind." Thus ethnos and the ethos are an expanded version of the ego. What is implied about ethics by this analysis is that ethical systems have no absolute validity; they are devised by the conceptual mind to protect self-interest and group interests.

For a Buddhist, any standard of right conduct that does not transcend conceptual mind has not addressed the root of human suffering, which is the dualism of self and other. Concepts are not objectively real; we invent them, usually to serve our own prejudices. Ethical codes that originate in concepts are not necessarily bad on that account, but they are less than true, and may also be less than beneficial or wise. Some ethical codes might demand that we uphold the rights of slaveowners, burn witches, or turn political refugees over to the secret police. The source of right conduct in Buddhism is not ethics but karuna, or compassion, and prajna, or egoless intelligence. Neither has any taint of self-interest.

The object of the Buddhist system is to bring the disciple to the point where the discovery of egolessness becomes a direct personal experience, comparable to waking from a dream. Suppose that my ordinary life is a drama that I have authored; I am its main character. I experience hope, fear, anger, competition, good and bad luck, joy and grief, all according to the plot sequence, identifying with my role so completely that I forget this is only a drama that I myself am creating. Others are doing likewise. We all want to be the star. To keep from eliminating one another, we devise rules that define our parts more clearly. But the whole show is unsatisfactory.