A real hot button issue with me are so called Buddhist teachers who coerce their female students into having sex with them. Some of them are quite famous, like Richard Baker, Chogyam Trungpa, Joshu Sazaki, Dainin Katagiri, and Surya Das.
Without going into much detail, it should be obvious that the Third Precept specifically forbids this type of behavior. More deeply, according to the Buddha there are four stages to enlightenment. In the second stage you lose most of your sexual desire, and it goes away completely in the third stage of enlightenment. I once heard Surya Das—a notorious sex offender—state that he is enlightened. Obviously, he is not.
But apropos of some of my recent posts about the Buddhist cosmology, let’s look at this from a macro standpoint.
According to the Buddhist cosmology, as I have mentioned before, time is cyclical and infinite. There is a big bang, the universe expands, the universe contracts, and then there is another big bang. Science still has not quite caught up to Buddhism on this point, and we are patiently waiting. However, there are now at least theories about the existence of “a” previous universe based on “leftover radiation.”
The current universe is between 13 and 26 billion years. Our solar system is about 4.5 billion years old. And depending on how you look at it, the human race is about 300,000 years old, although the modern human race is probably something more like 60,000 years old.
According to Buddhist cosmology, we are tied to a world system. The Buddha often referred to world systems in his discourses. We have got one right here. Our non-human realms are likewise tied to this world system. So we won’t be reborn in a different world system.
One question is that given all this time without an Earth and without a world system and without the human race, what happens to all its beings? The Buddha never addressed issues like this because he was exclusively interested in solving one problem, and that is teaching us how to escape from saṃsara and suffering. He was not interested in explaining metaphysics other than to the extent necessary to help us accomplish this purpose.
But later theories say that some beings stay in their non-human realms during this time, and other beings—who would normally be born as humans—go into a kind of stasis or holding pattern. In this state they are genderless. And note that there are heavenly—deva—realms that are genderless as well.
The Buddhist cosmology goes on to say that genders are formed as the human race is formed. It is a kind of de-evolution. We go from a higher kind of being without gender to a lower form of being that includes gender and, of course, sex.
So think about people like Surya Das in this context. I mean, wow.
Now to be sure, who knows how much of this is true. But one reason this is such a hot button issue with me is that all those miscreants who manipulate their female students into having sex with them are not even in the same universe as the Buddha’s Dharma. They are clueless. On the micro scale are the Precepts. That is about as simple and straightforward as it gets. Don’t use sex to cause harm. Of course, you are not supposed to do anything that causes harm. That is karma. But on the macro level, wow. You are not even in the same league as the Buddha and the Dharma.
finis.