Brad Warner - Sex, Sin, and Zen: A Buddhist Exploration of Sex from Celibacy to Polyamory and Everything in Between

Copyright 2010 by Brad Warner

All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced in whole or in part, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, or other without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review.

Text design by Tona Pearce Myers

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Warner, Brad.

Sex, sin, and Zen : a Buddhist exploration of sex from celibacy to poly-amory and everything in between / Brad Warner.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references.

ISBN 978-1-57731-910-8 (pbk. : alk. paper)

1. SexReligious aspectsBuddhism. I. Title.

BQ4570.S48W372010

First printing, September 2010

ISBN 978-1-57731-910-8

Printed in Canada on 100% postconsumer-waste recycled paper

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Every night I tell myself

I am the cosmos

I am the wind

That dont bring you back again.

Chris Bell, I Am the Cosmos

M y chest hurts. Thats the thought that keeps recurring as I sit cross-legged and stock-still in front of a room full of dedicated meditators. A wood-burning stove in the corner keeps the early-morning mountain chill at bay, the sun is shining, and it is calm and peaceful, with only the pine logs crackling sutras to disturb the quiet.

I want to die. Or cry. Or cry myself to death.

My chest hurts.

Im the leader of this three-day retreat at the Southern Dharma Retreat Center near Asheville, North Carolina. Im supposed to be the calmest and most in-control guy in the room. These people have paid good money, and some have traveled long distances, just to be in my presence, just to have me give them the secret to being as together as I am. They look up to me, respect me. And all I want to do is evaporate, disappear, dissolve into the ether, never to be seen again. Whats even worse is its all because of some girl.

What a fucking Zen master I am.

That day I finally understood exactly why they call it heartbreak. My heart hurt just as if someone had punched a hole through my chest and ripped it out still beating, as in some Aztec sacrifice ritual. Sometimes it hurt really bad. Sometimes it was just a dull persistent pain. Sometimes it hurt for a while and kind of came to a crescendo and then stopped just as suddenly as it had begun. I tried as best I could to let go. Sometimes I found myself obsessing over some fantasy, maybe one in which we got back together or I told her exactly how I felt. Or maybe one in which she was happily meditating next to some bearded douche-nozzle at the retreat center where she was staying who liked to tell his friends he was a very spiritual person, after which he fucked her from behind like a hyena in heat while she squealed Sanskrit chants of ecstasy hed taught her during phony-baloney tantric rituals.

Whats that you say? As a so-called Zen master I should be above such matters? I should be able to allow my thoughts to simply float past like clouds in a clear blue sky? I should be beyond the tawdry things of the world like romantic entanglements? Otherwise why would anyone care what I had to say about Zen?

Thats what I would have thought, too. But I wasnt like that. In my twenty-five years of Zen practice and training no such perfection had come. And yet I handled this breakup differently from how Id handled them before. Ive never been a good breaker-upper. I remember when Becky Wagner dumped me and I couldnt get on the phone to her because I was sharing a punk rock house that had one telephone and Logan, one of my housemates, was on it. So I ran, literally almost blinded by tears, to the gas station on the corner and kept feeding quarters into the pay phone to leave increasingly distraught messages on her answering machine.

This time Id been able to accept what needed to be accepted. I didnt beg, I didnt plead. Not much, at least. As one Zen monk said, A man never got a woman back by begging on his knees.

Oh, I could allow these thoughts and worse to pass. Thats true. But I couldnt stop them from coming up. And that doesnt mean those thoughts didnt hurt when they did come up. Or that it didnt hurt when I dropped them. This, too, is part of the process. Dropping thoughts like that often hurts worse than holding on to them, since dropping thoughts youre convinced are correct is like denying the existence of your self.

So maybe youre wondering, if this Zen stuff cant even cure a broken heart, what the hell good is it? Sometimes I wonder that myself. But Zen practice has shown me the clear way never to have a broken heart ever again. Wanna know the secret? Never fall in love. Some Buddhist practitioners have put this into effect very successfully and live absolutely free from heartbreak. Well talk about them in a little bit. But thats not the answer you wanted, is it? Maybe you wanted a magic mantra that would make it all go away. Sometimes the true answer isnt one we like. But its always the best answer because its true.

A lot of what gets written about Zen is based on abstractions and idealism. Too many people who write about it dont have a clue. They write all about the way things can be, or might be, or should be, not how they really are. Because very often they dont even know how they really are. The caricatures of Zen in pop culture are even worse, picking up on these abstractions and turning them into parody. Im not interested in telling you what I might be like or what I could be like if only I did this or that. Im interested in reporting on what life is actually like.

Still I sat there, leading the retreat. And I sat. And sat. And when the bell rang, I got up and joined everyone for the formal walking practice that punctuates each round of zazen. And then I sat some more.

And as I sat things changed, as they always do. Thoughts and sensations, feelings and perceptions, flowed through like a Technicolor river. Some were pleasant. Some were not. Most were neither. They just were. Sometimes nothing seemed to go on in the conscious portion of my brain for a long, long time. I didnt pass out or enter some mystical zone. Its just that the thoughts sort of gave up. And sometimes after a long while of feeling great my chest would start to hurt again. So it goes.

But I made it through. Just like everyone else at the retreat. We all survived. All of us, with our broken hearts, our family issues, our fears, our desires, our aspirations, our losses: we all sat through them together, and it was beautiful.