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In the Realm of Relationship

Mark Epstein interviews Jeffrey Hopkins

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Jeffrey Hopkins, professor of Tibetan Studies at the University of Virginia and author/translator of twenty-one books, has been practicing Tibetan Buddhism since 1962. His latest manuscript, Sex, Orgasm, and the Mind of Clear Light: The 64 Arts of Gay Male Sex, is a variation of Gendun Chopel’s Tibetan Arts of Love. Hopkins was interviewed for Tricycle in December 1995, in New York City by Mark Epstein, psychotherapist and author of Thoughts Without a Thinker (Basic Books).

Tricycle: In your article “The Compatibility of Reason and Orgasm in Tibetan Buddhism,” you talk about the physical act of sex as being an opportunity to work in a meditative way with the mind of clear light. In our understanding of Tibetan iconography, of consorts coupling with each other, is it misleading to think of these in terms of being purely symbolic—symbolizing the union of wisdom and compassion? Because now you’re talking about the physical acts of sex.

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