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BUDDHISM
DEBATE
With her book, Traveller
in Space: In Search of Female Identity in Tibetan Buddhism, the
Scottish philosopher of religion, June Campbell, opened the floodgates for
an honest and sound debate about Tantric Buddhism. She worked as a
translator for Tibetan lamas, including Kalu Rinpoche, whose "secret
sexual consort" she became. Here we reproduce an article about her
from the Independent.
The Independent
- 10. February 1999 - Paul Vallely
I
was a Tantric sex slave
For
years June Campbell was the`consort`of a senior Tibetan Buddhist monk. She
was threatened with death if she broke her vow of secrecy. But then
enlightenment can be like that.
Feet of clay?
No, it was a different part of the anatomy - and of all too fleshly substance
- which caused the trouble. But, I suppose, you don`t expect Tantric sex to
be a straightforward activity. Then again, sex of any kind isn`t really
what you`re planning when you become a celibate nun.
It was, said
June Campbell as she began her lecture, only the second time she had been
asked to give a talk to a Buddhist group in this country since her book. Traveller
in Space came out three years ago. Small wonder. The topic of her talk
was "Dissent in Spiritual Communities", and you don`t get much
more potent types of dissent than hers. For she not only revealed that she
had for years been the secret sexual consort of one of the most holy monks
in Tibetan Buddhism - the tulku (re-incarnated lama), Kalu Rinpoche. She
also insisted that the abuse of power at the heart of the relationship
exposed a flaw at the very heart of Tibetan Buddhism.
This was heresy
, indeed. To outsiders, the Rinpoche was one of the most revered yogi-lamas
in exile outside Tibet. As abbot of his own monastery, he had taken vows of
celibacy and was celebrated for having spent 14 years in solitary retreat.
Among his students were the highest ranking lamas in Tibet. "His own
status, was unquestioned in the Tibetan community", said Ms. Campbell,
"and his holiness attested to by all".
The inner
circles of the world of Tibetan Buddhism - for all ist spread in
fashionable circles in the West - is a closed and tight one. Her claims,
though made in a restrained way in the context of a deeply academic book
subtitled - "In Search of Female Identity in Tibetan Buddhism" -
provoked what she described as a primitive outpouring of rage and fury.
"I was reviled as a liar or a demon", she said during a public
lecture last week at the nonsectarian College for Buddhist Studies in
Sharpham, Devon. "In that world he was a saintly figure. It was like
claiming that Mother Teresa was involved in making porn movies".
But it was not
fear of the response which made her wait a full 18 years before publishing
her revelations in a volume entitled Traveller in Space - a
translation of dakini, the rather poetic Tibetan word for a woman used by a
lama for sex. It took her that long to get over the trauma of the
experience. "I spent 11 years without talking about it and then, when
I had decided to write about it, another seven years researching. I wanted
to weave together my personal experience with a more theoretical
understanding of the role of women in Tibetan society to help me make sense
of what had happened to me."
What happened
was that , having become a Buddhist in her native Scotland in the hippie
Sixties, she travelled to India where she became a nun. She spent 10 years
in a Tibetan monastery and penetrated more deeply than any other Westerner
into the faith`s esoteric hierarchy. Eventually she became personal
translator to the guru as, during the Seventies, he travelled through
Europe and America. It was after that, she said, that "he requested
that I become his sexual consort and take part in secret activities with
him".
Only one other
person knew of the relationship - a second monk - with whom she took part
in what she described as a polyandrous Tibetanstyle relationship. "It
was some years before I realised that the extent to which I had been taken
advantage of constituted a kind of abuse".
The practice of
Tantric sex is more ancient than Buddhism. The idea goes back to the
ancient Hindus who believed that the retention of semen during intercourse
increased sexual pleasure and made men live longer. The Tibetan Buddhists
developed the belief that enlightenment could be accelerated by the
decision "to enlist the passions in one`s religious practice, rather
than to avoid them". The stategy is considered extremely risky yet so
efficacious that it could lead to enligthenment in one lifetime.
Monks of a lower
status confined themselves to visualising an imaginary sexual relationship
during meditation. But, her book sets out, the "masters" reach a
point where they decide that they can engage in sex without being tainted
by it. The instructions in the so-called "secret" texts spell out
the methods which enable the man to control the flow of semen through yogic
breath control and other practices. The idea is to "drive the semen
upwards, along the spine, and into the head". The more semen in a
man`s head, the stronger intellectually and spiritually he is thought to
be.
"The
reverse of ordinary sex expresses the relative status of the male and
female within the ritual."
More than that,
he is said to gain additional strength from absorbing the woman`s sexual
fluids at the same time as withholding his own. This "reverse of
ordinary sex", said June Campbell, "expresses the relative status
of the male and female within the ritual, for it signals the power flowing
from the woman to the man".
The imbalance
is underscored by the insistence by such guru-lamas that their sexual
consorts must remain secret, allowing the lamas to maintain control over
the women. "Since the book was published, I`ve had letters from women
all over the world with similar and worse experiences".
So why did she
stay for almost three years? "Personal prestige. The women believe
that they too are special and holy. They are entering sacred space. It
produces good karma for future lives, an is a test of faith". The
combination of religion, sex, power and secrecy can have a potent effect.
It creates the Catch 22 of psychological blackmail set out in the words of
another lama, Beru Kyhentze Rinpoche: "If your guru acts in a
seemingly unenlightened manner and you feel it would be hypocritical to
think him a Buddha, you should remember that your own opinions are
unreliable and the apparent faults you see may only be a reflection of your
own deluded state of mind...If your guru acted in a completely perfect
manner he would be inaccessible and you would be able to relate to him. It
is therefore out of your Guru`s great compassion that he may show apparent
flaws... He ist mirroring your own faults".
The
psychological pressure ist often increased by making the woman swear vows
of secrecy. In addition June Campbell was told that "madness, trouble
or even death" could follow if she did not keep silent. "I was
told that in a previous life the lama I was involved with had had a
mistress who caused him some trouble, and in order to get rid of her he
cast a spell which caused her illness later resulting in her death.
There are those
Buddhists, like Martine Batchelor - who spent 10 years as a Zen Buddhist
nun in a Korean monastery and who now teaches at Scharpham College - who
insist the religious techniques the Buddha taught can be separated from the
sexist, patriarchal and oppressive culture of many Buddhist countries. But
June Campbell is not convinced. "You have to ask what is the
relationship between belief and how a society structures itself," she
said. In Tibetanism, power lies in the hands of men who had often been
traumatised by being removed from their mother at the age of two and taken
to an all male monastery. "Some were allowed visits from their mothers
and sisters but always in secrecy - so that they came to associate women
with what must be hidden".
But there is
more to it, she believes than that. Teaching at Sharpham last week she gave
the students a whole range of material about different kind of feminism -
from the political to the psychotherapeutic. She then asked them how it
relates to the fact that there are no female Buddha images or to why in
Tantric sex images the woman always has her back to the viewer, or to why
Buddhist women are told to pray that they will be reborn into a male body
in their next life -for only in a man`s body can they attain full
enlightenment.
"Once I
started unravelling my experiences, I began to question everything,"
she said. That meant not just the actions of a particular guru But the very
idea of the guru. She began to wonder whether the Tantra was just a
fantasy, and whether there is really any difference between Tantric sex and
ordinary sex. She questioned the very concept of enlightenment itself and
the practice of meditiation. "I realised that in order to be myself I had
to leave it all - completely an utterly."
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