Prince Nanda was young. He was the Buddha's brother [of the same father, King Suddhodana, but with different mothers, who were biological sisters, and Nanda's mother, Maha Pajapati Gotami (who later became the world's first Buddhist nun), adopted Siddhartha seven days after his birth, after his mother, her older sister, Maha Maya, passed away, which is when the younger sister took over her duties and raised Prince Siddhartha to be king of the Scythians/Shakyians].
One source says Nada was 16, which was the marriable age among the Scythians/Shakyians, who were later thought of as kshatriya warrior/noble caste members, the administrators at the time. Sixteen was the age Siddhartha, who at age 35 had a great enlightenment (maha-bodhi) to become the Buddha, "the Enlightened One," was married off to his 16-year-old cousin, Bimba Devi (Princess Yasodhara).
Brahmins (priestly caste members, who underwent a rigorous period of study as brahmacaryas under a guru to learn Sanskrit and the Vedas, the ancient "Knowledge Books" of the Indus Valley Civilization and proto-India) were expected to be celibate students, unlike modern Brahmins.
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| Don't think about, no, don't think about it. Don't name it. Breathing in, breathing out... |
The best teen "sex" comedy ever made. It's The Scarlet Letter that shows us ourselves!
Because Nanda was young and not enjoined to be celibate, Scythia prudently prescribed marriage. He, as well as Prince Siddhartha, were not restricted to monogamy, however, not even our modern serial-monogamy.
The brothers and their royal cousins had "dancing girls" and female musicians and what seem to have been harems (ensuring palace pleasures for polygamist royals). Lust and warriorship were ways of life for Scythians/Shakyians and later Indian rulers.
This was Central Asia after all (not Nepal but ancient Gandhara, now Afghanistan, as Dr. Ranajit Pal realized), which continues these traditions. It's the same in the American "caste" system, not only the ubiquitous middle class.
Goodness knows. Perhaps Shakyian princesses had dancing boys (or girls) of their own. It is certain that all six of their senses were indulged with banquets (tastes), perfumes (smells), art (sights), music (sounds), baths and foot massages (tactile sensations), elaborate clothes and conquests (mind). Princes certainly had concubines when they ruled.
The point is, lust for sensual desires was the name of the game. So we say: Do it when you are doing it, and abandon it internally when you have given it up externally. To do otherwise is a sure way to misery.
Our Judeo-Christian mores, transplanted from the Near and Middle East, have been heavily influenced for millennia by contact with Buddhism. Ancient Jews were in Kashmir, India, and in places along the Silk Road from at least the time of the Buddha. So what happened in the Greater Indian Empire ("Maha Bharat") influenced what went on in Egypt, Jerusalem, Nazareth, and later Greece, Rome, Britain, Israel, and America, from East to West.
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| Chanda, what are these strange visions I'm seeing? - Real life, Prince. |
But the message has been corrupted. We Americans are averse to discussing lust. We cringe. We blush. We're humiliated to talk about sex, sexuality, or even nudity.
We overcompensate in certain parts of the country, flaunting our pornography and "liberalized" attitudes toward free love, sex, and pleasure. But just under the surface, we exhibit as many hang ups as most of the rest of the world, which looks to the Great Western Empire (America) for how to act and think.
Wisdom Quarterly says, enjoy pleasures when indulging them, AND temporarily abandon lust if serenity and insight are a meditative aim.
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| What are those two up to? - I don't know, but it looks like they're having fun. Shall we? - Let's. |
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Why only temporarily? Wisdom Quarterly is different from other Buddhist websites for one thing: We taught a young American the Dharma and saw it eventually result in literal enlightenment.
This took place in this decade. (Many people say there's no chance for enlightenment nowadays. Yet, we have seen it and have come to know of at least 21 other people to attain one or more stages of enlightenment). The person we personally helped was nice, neither angry nor dumb, yet lusty. Shockingly, this person continued to have and enjoy lust AFTER attaining.
That's not the popular conception of what the tradition teaches, but it is in the texts. In the Buddha's time, most of the people who attained were ordinary householders. Monastics were intensive practitioners and some of them became teachers if they were able. Whenever the Buddha taught, which was just about daily for 45 years, someone in the audience would come to realization. Most of them were invisible devas (the majority of the audience).
Monastics had a better chance than ordinary humans, but since ordinary humans outnumbered monastics, more ordinary humans reached one or more of the stages of awakening. This, of course, led many of them to seek ordination but not all of them. Many more stayed householders, with homes, spouses, chidren, and ordinary responsibilities.
We are not surprised, at least we shouldn't be (but still are sometimes), because there are a lot of examples of this in the ancient texts. Lust is set aside to attain, but it comes back unless one advances to the point of outgrowing the Sense Sphere (kama loka).
The many kinds of stream enterers (enumerated and explained in the Path of Freedom or Vimuttimagga and the once returners can carry on as before; only the nonreturners and arhats have internally changed so much as to not be able to carry on like ordinary Sense Sphere inhabitants. That is why nonreturners do not return to this world of the ordinary senses in the human world or lower Sense Sphere heavens. They are reborn in the Pure Abodes, Fine-Material, or Immaterial Sphere planes.
Not everyone who gains liberating knowledge-and-vision becomes a monastic. This leads to the paradoxical situation wherein worldly monastics have abandoned lust, but not noble (enlightened) lay practitioners.
It was this way at the time of the Buddha. Most people did not become monastics even after attaining one of the stages of enlightenment.
Even the deva-ruler Sakka (King of the Devas), is a stream enterer. He is the leader of two worlds in space, the World of the Thirty-Three and the Realm of the Four Great Kings (Tavatimsa and Catumaharajika deva loka, literal extraterrestrial worlds we do a disservice to if we dismiss them as "heavenly fantasies" in Buddhist cosmology).
Sakka has not completely given up lust. He is concerned and involved in human and non-human affairs on Earth and the longevity and success of the Buddha's dispensation.
Maha Moggallana, the Buddha's second chief male disciple, had to shake Sakka and the partying devas (always finding diversion up there the way the rich seem to do down here) in their aerial spacecraft/heavenly mansions (vimanas).
Lust is that way; it is not fully abandoned until the the third stage of enlightenment.
Wisdom Quarterly's own earthly friend, advisor, and newest teacher attained not the first but the second of the four stages of enlightenment.
- The idea of only four stages is, however, a simplification; there are in fact finer distinctions that can be made: The Path of Freedom (pp. 308-309) explains that there are TEN STAGES: three kinds of stream enterers, the once-returner, five kinds of non-returners, and the arhat.
Without setting aside lust (as well as ill-will and delusion) during meditation, there is no chance of staying serene (accessing the meditative absorptions or jhanas), developing the Four Foundations of Mindfulness (practicing "right mindfulness"), and gaining liberating-insight. Our friend accomplished this in just four intensive months on retreat.
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Is there any better, more permanent happiness than sensual lust? |
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This meant temporarily leaving behind the home life and its all-consuming concerns. It was the same in the past: Many if not most of the people who attained a stage lower than full enlightenment at the time of the Buddha were living and continued to live at home.
The need to set aside lust and other distractions is emphasized in the Buddha's teaching on the Five Hindrances to meditation, which cloud the mind and obstruct any possibility of insight.
Jhana ("right concentration," samma samadhi, defined as the first four absorptions, in the Noble Eightfold Path) is the way to suppress the Five Hindrances, the first of which is lust, and other more subtle mental defilements (asavas and samyojanas). But vipassana ("liberating insight," wisdom, direct knowledge) is the way to uproot them.
One would be considered a literal "saint" in most religions by simply suppressing the defilements in this way, even gaining the psychic powers (abhinna, iddhi) that "prove" one's saintliness by doing so.
But uprooting these defilements, which often does not involve the development of psychic powers, is what makes one a Buddhist "saint" (an arya, a "noble one"). By achieving even the first stage of Buddhist enlightenment, one finally puts a limit on suffering (to no more than seven more lives). One has known-and-seen nirvana directly. One is destined to become fully enlightened and liberated from rebirth and every form of suffering within at most seven more rebirths.
(That may amount to a much longer period of time than it first appears: If one is reborn in any of the many celestial deva-worlds, where lifespans are measured in aeons (kalpas), the number of years to enjoy the senses is difficult to calculate in human years. Even the lowest celestial world has more and better pleasure to inspire lust and clinging, with access that lasts much longer).
What stands in the way of that? Lust. To be successful one needs to set aside a pleasurable thing for a much more pleasurable thing, which may sound like a paradox. This is generally only possible to do in the human world and the lower deva planes (sensual heavens), because otherwise the superior heavenly pleasures are too great in those worlds and the danger in them too hard to see.
How can we set lust aside even for a moment? Force, willpower, guilt, shame, submitting to someone else's control? No, these won't hold. The only way to set aside, abandon, let go, and detach from our innate lust (and the other hindrances that obstruct serenity and insight) is contemplating the disadvantages of lust or contemplating the many advantages of letting go.
If we "contemplate" (anussati, prolonged and well-rounded mindfulness, sati -- recollection, consideration, reflection), the heart/mind effortlessly lets go of what we cannot let go of using mere willpower.
Temporarily abandon lust. (Normally, we do not even dream of doing this even temporarily because it's the only happiness we know). Any kind of "permanent" abandoning will come by itself. There is no need to do it permanently. Do this:
- Just for this moment, consider the repugnant aspects of sensuality: Lust shrivels up.
- Just for right now, love (forgive and accept) someone who's done something to offend, hurt, or harm you: Anger wilts.
- Right in this present moment, be mindful (bare, unembroidered awareness) of whatever is given attention (with no discursive thinking, evaluating, or judging): Delusion is dispelled.
The Dharma is immediate, unaffected by time. The relief happens right away. It invites one to come and see, to test, to experiment with and experience. The Kalama Sutta is the most popular original Buddhist discourse in America (according to Wisdom Quarterly). But it is often misunderstood to mean, "Do whatever, use common sense." It's not "common" sense. It's something one can see without blind faith, belief, or trust in a foreign authority, yet that's just the beginning: There is still truth to discover and preserve.
The Buddha's son, Ven. Rahula, also suffered from intense lust at 16 (according to Ven. Dhammadipa, 2008 BAUS lectures), which is when his father had him apply himself to meditation to break through by temporarily laying that burden down. (It's there to pick up again later if one wishes).
Rahula saw that he, his father, and Ananda all had the "marks of great men" (lakkhana) and were therefore destined to be world-monarchs over the entire subcontinent or this world (this cakkavala as cakkravartin kings) or to become buddhas, depending on whether or not they renounced the world.
His son Rahula had renounced it (at age 7), under his father's prompting (his father being the Buddha, returning after seven years absence to become enlightened himself), but his brother Nanda had not. Both gained the unsurpassable bliss and safety of personal enlightenment. Both did it by sidestepping the lust that was arising as humans in the Sense Sphere.
Maha Pajapati (the Buddha's adoptive mother) and Janapada Kalyani (his half-brother's fiance) also contemplated. And their minds became calm, dispassionate, detached from craving, grasping, and clinging. This temporary freedom allowed them to win enduring freedom.
Even the Buddha's father, King Suddhodana, became fully enlightened -- in spite of the fact that he had lived sunk in sensual pleasures and administrative responsibilities, overseeing and defending Shakyian land holdings other clans wanted to overtake.
How did the Buddha's brother, sister, son, wife, adoptive mother, biological mother, father, and cousins become enlightened whether they had joined the Sangha or not? They did it the way everyone does, by settling and unifying the mind (with the first four jhanas or levels of Zen) then contemplating the Four Foundations of Mindfulness with that concentrated mind. It all starts with temporarily setting aside the craving called lust.
- Wisdom Quarterly tells the story of each family member
- Lust during the Renaissance (Pagan Sphinx)
Nathaniel Hawthorne would be proud his Puritan American message was understood.
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