CAMP Spirit

When one examines homosexuality in Buddhism, the religion founded upon the spiritual awakening of Siddhartha Gautama ("the Buddha") in India ca. 540 b.c.e., it is important to realize that there is a "dearth" of scholarship regarding Buddhism and sexuality. Gautama, disillusioned with Hinduism, found through meditation that one’s worldly pain ceases when one is able to overcome earthly cravings through moral and spiritual discipline. Thus, according to the Buddhist mindset, the "best" or most successful Buddhist is a celibate monk who is undistracted by the pleasures of the world or the flesh, hence its emphasis upon world denial and renunciation. From India, Buddhism spread into China and Japan; modern Buddhism is primarily descended from the Buddhisms of Tibet and Japan.

Buddhism is a religion of diversity and adaptability, however, and one consequently finds different attitudes, customs, and religious practices, depending upon the culture of the geographical locale. For example, Indian Buddhism was essentially neutral on the subject of homosexuality; this basic neutrality was the foundation upon which developed the toleration of sexual diversity in other Buddhist cultures and the actual extolling of male love in Buddhist Japan.

Implicit in many of the views against homosexuality expressed in the other world religions is an underlying sexism and misogyny, which manifests itself in disdain, hostility, and outright violence against those who are perceived as acting like women (i.e., male homosexuals) or subverting gender expectations (i.e., lesbians). In many ways, Buddhism has avoided this due to its basic teaching that gender, like caste or class, posed no barrier to religious freedom, which was a revolutionary soteriological assertion in its historical context. Nevertheless, as Buddhism adapted itself to the various cultures in which it was situated, there were varying attitudes of repression and tolerance both of women and of homosexual activity. Thus, we find the attitude that any sexual activity that deflects one from a spiritual path is to be avoided but that heterosexual relations within marriage are permitted due to the need for procreation. However, one also sees the extolling of same-sex love (as in Islam), the acceptance of same-sex genital activity, and an ambivalence toward those who are considered a type of "third sex."

Historically Japan has been the Buddhist environment most accepting of same-sex relations. Pederastic relations and noble love (shudo or nanshoku) between an adult male and an adolescent boy flourished in the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries of the Common Era under the rule of the samurai and did not become an object of prohibition until the modernization and industrialization (i.e., westernization) of Japan in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. When the Jesuit missionary Francis Xavier arrived in Japan in 1549, he was horrified by the widespread practicing of the "sin abhorred by nature," particularly in the Buddhist monasteries; religious acceptance of homosexuality was so established that Lord Yoshitaka cast the Jesuits out of his presence when they began to preach on "the sin of Sodom." It has been suggested that the widespread homosexuality among Japanese Buddhist monks was considered by them a "way out" of the contradiction between the traditional injunction to celibacy and the avoidance of women and the Tantric encouragement of sexuality.

Modern Buddhist attitudes toward homosexuality are ambiguous. The Four Noble Truths and the Middle Way are espoused by the majority of Buddhists in Mahayana Buddhism, which one may refer to as the "lay" movement, while Theravada Buddhism is the monastic strand. In examining these attitudes, one must again divorce oneself from modern western views of sexual orientation; for example, the Pali canon from Theravada Buddhism contains references that disapprove of homosexual behavior. However, these do not match contemporary notions of homosexuality or homosexual people and must be understood against the general disdain for all sexuality found in Theravada, which is concerned with clerical celibacy, seeing any sort of lust as a betrayal of dispassionate equanimity; homosexual and heterosexual acts are viewed as equally repugnant. Mahayana attitudes vacillate between the conservative belief that homosexual tendencies result from a willful sin which can controlled, and the liberal belief that those who reveal a proclivity for same-sex affinity "can’t help it" and are paying for something in a past life.

Contemporary Buddhist groups in America have been sporadically welcoming and rejecting of gay and lesbian adherents. On the one hand, Buddhism has an attractiveness for gay and lesbian refugees from Christianity, due to the widespread misapprehension that Buddhism is silent on the issue of homosexuality, leading to the formation of exclusively gay/lesbian Buddhist groups. On the other hand, there has been intolerance from those who have been Buddhist for longer duration, who see this as a "fad" and a gay/lesbian co-opting of their tradition. Moreover, there has been recent controversy as to the status of gay and lesbian people in Buddhism due to remarks made by His Holiness the Dalai Lama, who stated in an interview that sexual acts involving the mouth and the anus as well as masturbation are examples of sexual misconduct for Buddhists. His Holiness has since added that even though he stands by his statements, to persecute or discriminate against any person is antithetical to the spirit of Buddhism.

For Further Reading:

• Jose Ignacio Cabezon, ed., Buddhism, Sexuality, and Gender (State University of New York Press, 1992)
• Bernard Faure, The Red Thread: Buddhist Approaches to Sexuality (Princeton University Press, 1998)
• Winston Leyland, ed., Queer Dharma: Voices of Gay Buddhism (Gay Sunshine Press, 1998)