Everything is the Ass

There are only two diseases:
One is riding an ass to search for the ass;
The other is riding an ass and being unwilling to dismount.

You say that riding an ass to search for the ass is silly
and that he who does it should be punished.
This is a very serious disease.

But, I tell you, do not search for the ass at all.
The intelligent man, understanding my meaning,
stops searching for the ass,
and thus the deluded state of his mind ceases to exist.

But if, having found the ass, one is unwilling to dismount,
this disease is most difficult to cure.

I say to you, do not ride the ass at all.
You yourself are the ass.
Everything is the ass.
Why do you ride on it?
If you ride, you cannot cure your disease.

But if you do not ride,
the universe is as a great expanse open to your view.

       - Shu Chou, quoted in Fung Yu-Lan, A Short History of Chinese Philosophy

The Dew of Immortality

Today is May 5th, my son Lukas' birthday, the ancient Celtic fire festival Beltane (give or take a day or two), Cinco de Mayo, and the Japanese festival known as Boys' Day. Although it has since morphed into a more inclusive "Children's Day", all Japanese know that the festival always was and actually still is Boys' Day (girls have their own Girls' Day on March 3). The quintessential symbol of Boys' Day is the koinobori, large carp-shaped streamers that fill with wind and swim in the air from long bamboo poles. We fly our koinobori every May, and I love how it soars through the air, and I love this celebration of my son's life and good health. The Japanese revere the carp as a symbol of strength and determination, because it fights through obstacles with great spirit, swimming upstream, even scaling waterfalls, to get to where it's going. Some time ago my parents sent me a beautiful little silk painting, of a boy hanging onto the back of a big koinobori. And I thought, all of us boys ride on the back of a monster fish. The fish takes us up and down and all over the place, and we hang on because it is one exhilarating ride - truly the ride of our lives, and in some Darwinian sense the reason for our lives. This fish, of course, is our sexuality.

This essay explores the sex drive from a male, East Asian, alchemical/religious perspective. I vacillate between thinking there's something to it and thinking it's delusional nonsense. I like the idea that we can recognize the tremendous energy of our sexuality and put it to spiritual use. But I have this deep suspicion that most people are better off just enjoying sex as sex, rather than trying to control it for supposedly spiritual ends. Anyway, here it is. Happy Boys' Day!

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There is a curious notion, prevalent among certain sections of the alternative medicine and New Age subcultures, that one can improve health and possibly even attain states of spiritual perfection, by recycling one’s sperm. There are many ways to do this. You can be celibate, thereby limiting the number of emissions to those few nighttime incidents that are beyond your control. Or, you can have sex, but refrain from ejaculating through the use of certain tricks of sphincter control and qi redirection. Finally, when all else fails, you can push with your finger on the so-called “Million Dollar Point” located between the anus and the scrotum, to block the escape of semen and reabsorb it in your body.

The origins of this practice are lost in the mists of prehistory, but they almost certainly have to do with ancient man’s realization that sperm holds within it an awesome power – the power to co-create life. What if this power could be harnessed for self-cultivation? This is the origin of celibacy in most Asian religious traditions: a focusing inward of life’s energies, rather than the outward focus of the householder or “man of the world.” Many religious sects rejected sex because it represented attachment to the body and the world, the misdirection of life force into karmic entanglements and away from enlightenment. But a few schools, most notably some South Asian tantric traditions and certain Daoist sects in China, figured out how to have it both ways. They opted to utilize the energies generated by sexual activity, and incorporated non-ejaculatory sex into their rituals. Central to the doctrines of these schools is the importance of what the Chinese have termed jing: the primal “substance” variously translated as “essence,” “sperm,” and “sexual energy.”

In China, what was originally a religious practice became somewhat secularized into what we now call “internal alchemy.” In contrast to the earlier external alchemists, who attempted to create an elixir of immortality out of various minerals and herbs, the internal alchemists believed the elixir was to be created within the body, using many different psycho-spiritual techniques. The goal of the alchemist was to take the awesome life-creating power of jing, transform it into the life-serving vitality of qi (life energy), then finally transmute the qi to arrive at the elixir: a refined force of spiritual potency that circulated through the meridians and conferred health and longevity. Some alchemists insisted that the creation of elixir was a purely internal solo process; others believed the dew of immortality was to be found in the merging of yin and yang that occurred during sex. Whether pro-sex or anti-sex, the alchemists all agreed that the conservation of jing was of paramount importance.

What is interesting to me is that these ideas have become so popular now, in the West. In a culture that regards ejaculation as a healthy “clearing of the pipes,” the popularity of sperm retention seems unlikely. But then again, maybe it’s not so strange that our sex-obsessed society has latched onto this particular aspect of Asian culture.

One man is largely responsible for the current popularity of sperm retention. He is Mantak Chia, a self-proclaimed Daoist master from Thailand who runs workshops and has written a whole slew of how-to books on this topic. Chia has managed to cash in on people’s longing for transcendence, as well as their interest in sex. He teaches basic qigong techniques that are central to all Chinese meditation schools and internal martial arts, but I suspect that his popularity is due primarily to the sexual angle of his instruction. He teaches couples ways of squeezing their muscles and clenching their teeth during sex to re-direct their orgasms inward and upward. For practice prior to attempting the real thing, and as a form of self-cultivation in its own right, Chia teaches methods of self-stimulation combined with breathing and visualization: you might call this "transcendental masturbation". Chia has single-handedly made internal alchemy into a booming business.

In case I sound overly critical, let me point out that I am a firm believer in Chinese methods of meditation and self-cultivation. As an acupuncturist, I teach patients qigong techniques to quiet the mind and circulate the qi. But to me, sperm conservation has the ring of neurosis. I believe that sperm retention thinking is part of a broader cultural pattern prevalent in patriarchal Asia, a pattern that fears female sexual vampirism (and female sexuality generally, since women can have all the sex they want without losing jing) and reacts to this fear by hoarding sperm. This pattern appears in folk tales about fox-women preying on young scholars; it shows up in the large number of acupuncture points and herbal formulas designed to treat spermatorrhea (“sperm leakage”); one could even argue that China’s huge Three Gorges Dam is its national jing obsession writ large.

The main reason I object to the currently popular methods of sperm retention is that they exhibit an extremism that runs counter to the generally middle-of-the-road common sense of traditional Chinese medicine. Suppression of a natural outward energy just seems like it would lead to qi stagnation and possibly even medical problems (in fact, I know of several cases of “blue balls” and benign prostate hyperplasia among would-be internal alchemists; one needed a year of acupuncture with a senior Chinese acupuncturist to undo the energy blockage created after attending one workshop). There is a popular saying in Chinese, “xing ming shuang xiu,” which is commonly translated as something like “A sound mind in a sound body.” What it literally means is the dual cultivation (shuang xiu) of self-nature (xing) and life energies (ming). This saying, which lies at the root of all Chinese methods of health improvement and self-cultivation, reminds us that personal conduct and moral bearing, which have to do with xing, are just as important as the development of the life energies that comprise ming. I believe that the commercialization of qigong and related practices in this country has led to an unhealthy overemphasis on the latter, with a concomitant surge in the popularity of the more unusual, and especially sexual, aspects of Asian health culture.

My goal is not to malign practitioners or instructors of qigong and other Chinese health disciplines. Instead, I caution against dangerous literalism of any sort. I resist the idea that the dew of immortality is any one thing. Our jing, the innermost and deepest source of our creativity, is the energy of the universe transforming matter, spreading over the surface of our planet as desire, as streams of lovers, children, descendants, nucleotides, alkaloids, neurotransmitters, brainwaves, photons, memories, music, stories, words, artifacts coarse and fine, a mystery spreading like a plague through these strange, pulsing, living, mortal things that we are. The elixir bubbles forth through all of creation, shimmering and radiant, if only we are present enough to appreciate it.

Animal Koan

Q: Does a cow have the Buddha-nature?

A: Moo.

Love Is The Answer

Love is the answer.
But what is the question?
The question is, "What is the meaning of life?"
Seems to me the meaning of life is whatever meaning you give it.
So why not give love?
Or consider yourself lucky if you get it?

The Heart Sutra

When I was a child growing up in Japan, I would often help my mother in the kitchen, drying the dishes as she washed them. Occasionally, my concentration would lapse and I would drop a dish and break it. I always felt bad about breaking dishes, but my mother never berated or punished me. Instead, she quoted a line from the Heart Sutra: “All that is form is emptiness; all that is emptiness is form.” I didn’t quite understand what she was talking about, but I was glad to escape punishment.

Many years later, as I prepared to take the acupuncture licensing exam in California, my mother embarked on a 1,400 kilometer walking pilgrimage on the Japanese island of Shikoku. At each of the eighty-eight temples on this most famous of Japan’s Buddhist pilgrimages, she prayed for (among other things) my success on this exam and in my chosen profession. I think it was at around this point in her life that my mother started to take a great interest in the Heart Sutra. She chanted it daily on her pilgrimage, and wrote it down in black Chinese ink for shakyo – the religious practice of copying sacred texts. She sent me several versions of these handwritten sutras, including one with furigana (phonetic Japanese transliterations of each Chinese character), and even one with romaji (English transliteration) just in case my Japanese had deteriorated to the point that I couldn’t read the furigana. It was obvious she wanted me to chant the Heart Sutra.

I wasn’t raised in a religious household, and, being an atheist since childhood, I rejected most religion. But I reserved a special place in my heart for Buddhism and the native Japanese religion Shinto, perhaps because they had always been for me religions of place rather than of belief, religions that I inherited by virtue of ethnicity and which I always associated with local temples and shrines and seasonal celebrations like New Year’s Day. And, as I got older and read more about Buddhism, I was impressed with what seemed more like a razor-sharp assessment of the human condition than a religion per se. This “religion” that prescribed meditation for its practitioners so that they could see more clearly into their self-nature seemed so different from most religions. But I held a negative bias towards those sects of Buddhism whose central practice was chanting. Observing my grandmother and other relatives chanting, it seemed to me they were essentially praying – for the souls of the dead, for my cousin’s acceptance into the college of her choice, etc. For an atheist like me, prayer – even Buddhist prayer – didn’t make any sense. Also, there was in Japan at that time a strong association between chanting and certain sects of Buddhism that were rather militant and political, which I found distasteful. So, as you can imagine, I was reluctant to chant. But I love my mother and want to make her happy, so I thought heck, it wouldn’t hurt to read the sutra out loud. It would be my way of thanking her (I passed my acupuncture exam).

I unfolded one of her hand-written copies, and started reading in a loud voice:
“MA KA HAN NYA HA RA MITTA SHIN GYO”

I was surprised. Just reading the title out loud, I felt each syllable resonate in my skull, my chest, my throat. I chanted slowly, and felt the sounds massage my insides. It was actually quite pleasant. I read through the entire text, and then did it again. Much to my embarrassment, I became a semi-regular chanter. In the act of chanting, my intellect would disengage, I would lose the educated human being persona that I usually identify with, and I would feel happy – happy and alive as I imagine a singing bird must feel on a sunny morning. I have come to believe that chanting is a skillful means, a way to use speech – almost always used in the service of the ego – to temporarily bypass the ego and experience one’s existence as part of the vast unfolding moment rather than as the isolated self that we usually take so seriously.

I no longer think of the chanting-centered Buddhist groups as deluded or necessarily unsavory (although I’m still against aggressive proselytizing by anyone, religious or otherwise). I have come to see that chanting has been for centuries the mechanism by which the Dharma has been transmitted from one generation to the next, in all sects of Buddhism. It is no wonder that its value as a practice in and of itself was recognized early on and embraced by large numbers of people. I am convinced that human beings, regardless of their religious beliefs or lack of them, are designed by evolution to have religious experiences. Chanting is one way of eliciting such experiences, which are almost always perceived as positive. I believe that my original disdain for chanting is shared by many non-Asian Buddhists, who have placed a much greater emphasis on meditation than on chanting and other traditional Buddhist practices. This attitude, which may stem historically from a perception that the meditation practices of the Buddhist “pros” (monks/nuns) were superior to the devotional practices of the laity, is in my opinion a big mistake. If a practice brings you to a place of non-duality, it shouldn’t matter so much how it got you there.

I sometimes chant in my clinic, while driving, when alone outdoors. Most of all, I enjoy chanting on mountains. There’s something special about walking the ridge of a mountain range, your voice chanting syllables in cadence with your steps. Chanting in the beauty of nature, I feel a connection to the gyoja mountain ascetics of old Japan, and even further back to the yogis and shamans who’ve been singing and chanting in the wild ever since human beings figured out they could string sounds together for dramatic, magical, and practical effect.

One evening a couple of summers ago, I read the Heart Sutra while backpacking in Big Sur. As the sun went down and Venus got brighter and brighter and the sky turned shades of red, orange, and purple, I developed a new appreciation for these wise and ancient words. The central phrase of the sutra, “SHIKI SOKU ZE KU, KU SOKU ZE SHIKI” is usually translated as something like, “Form is emptiness; emptiness is form.” But the character for “form,” SHIKI, also means “color.” And the character for “emptiness,” KU, also means “sky.” Standing there under the brilliant and ever-changing sky, I got a sense of the ancient Buddhists as astronomers and naturalists, contemplating our ephemeral existence on this earth ball. Colors in the sky: that’s what this – us, life, existence – is.

The Heart Sutra functions as a summary of a much larger body of literature: the Prajnaparamita or “Perfection of Wisdom” texts of Mahayana Buddhism. As a summary, it essentially consists of lists of various sorts, all designed to show that when the things on the list are logically broken down (e.g., the five skandhas or “aggregates” that describe human experience – material form, feeling, perception, impulse, and consciousness), there is only emptiness – no Self is hidden in there somewhere. This radical notion, so contrary to our self-important nature, is the “heart” of Buddhist teaching. I believe that it is also what sets Buddhism apart from the other world religions, in that it does not ask us to add anything (God, Heaven, etc.) to what we see, hear, experience; it invites us instead to strip away what we take for granted, and see what is left.

Yet, the emptiness of Buddhism is not nihilistic or purely intellectual and philosophical. Buddhism is rooted in a tradition of practices that are designed to bring the practitioner beyond the non-existent self to a religious experience, a transcendent non-duality, the realm “beyond the beyond.” In the words of Buddhist scholar and historian Edward Conze, the Prajnaparamita is “nothing but the Absolute, over and over again.” Because of the luminous clarity and power of the unconditioned world that it describes, or perhaps because it mimicked for early converts the magical chants of the religions they were already familiar with, the Heart Sutra has been considered from the earliest times to be a magical text, a spell or dharani that protects against all manner of bad luck and encourages the chanter’s (and audience’s) entry into the Buddha-realms. The fact that it is simultaneously rational, religious, and magical attests to the Buddhist understanding of human nature, which is surely a combination of all these elements.

The Heart Sutra is structured as a kind of sermon by the bodhisattva Avalokitesvara, who at the beginning of the text sits in deep meditation and has the insight that emptiness is the true nature of our existence. The bulk of the sutra is an explanation of this insight to the disciple Sariputra. Towards the end, Avalokitesvara reveals that the way to the Perfection of Wisdom is to chant. And he gives us a mantra, meticulously preserved in a close approximation of the Sanskrit in which it was originally chanted some two thousand years ago. Millions of Buddhists around the world take Avalokitesvara’s teaching to heart, and they chant. Whether they are highly educated Buddhist priests or regular folks with little knowledge of the Buddha’s teachings, they chant the Heart Sutra as an expression and embodiment of the Dharma. Whether you chant with faith, with understanding, with curiosity or with skepticism, the Heart Sutra will have you thrumming along as part of a vast chord of humanity, one node in a vibrant wisdom-tradition that endures and spreads by voice, by breath, and ringing bone.

The word sutra means literally, “thread” (interestingly, the early Chinese translators rendered it as "jing," the same word that is used in medicine to mean "channel" or "meridian," the threads that run through our bodies). As you chant with singlemindedness, you are absorbed by the sounds emanating from you, and eventually there is no more subject or object, no chanter or chant, just the universe expressing itself as sound. Freed of the illusion that there is a “you” running the show, you sit as the paradox that is simultaneously form and emptiness. From this timeless place of simple existence, you hear the words reminding you that this is just how it is, and you appreciate the sutra, an ongoing pulse in a pulsing universe, a living thread that connects you to the past, holds you in the present, and guides you into the future.