The Sex Talk Sutra: First day of spring

O, nun, Venerable Subha, your hair was so beautiful, yet you cut it all off!

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The Nun and the Libertine

Subha Jivakambavanika: The Venerable Lady Subha

Coming through, excuse me, please.

As the nun Ven. Subha was going through Jivaka's delightful mango grove, a randy libertine, a goldsmith's wealthy son with sex on his mind, blocked her path. So she said to him:

"What wrong have I done to you

That you obstruct my way?

It is improper, friend,

That a man should touch

A female who has gone forth.

I hold dear the Master's message, this

Training pointed out by the Well-Gone One.

I am pure, without blemish, so

Why do you stand in my way?

"You with your mind agitated,

I with my mind at ease,

You full of aggravating passions,

I dispassionate, untainted,

With a mind in every way released,

Why do you stand in my way?"

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[The man replied:]

"You're young and not ugly.

What need have you of going forth

[From a home to a left-home life]?

Cast off that [monastic] saffron robe.

Come, let's delight in the flowering forest!

They exude a sweetness all around,

Towering trees sending aloft their pollen.

The beginning of spring is a pleasant season.

Man, what do you see in this skin bag of bones?

Come, let's delight in the flowering forest!

The trees to their blossoming tips moan

As it were, in the warm breeze.

What delight will you have if you

Withdraw into the forest all alone?

Full of packs of wild beasts,

Disturbed by rutting elephants all aroused,

You want to venture unaccompanied

Into that big, lonely, frightening forest?

You're like a precious doll all of gold. Will you go

Whisking about a goddess in a heavenly garden?

With delicate, smooth Kasi fabrics,

You shine, O, beauty without compare!

You would have me under your spell

If we were to go into the woods together.

For there is no one dearer to me than you,

O nymph! I languish without you. If you

Do as I ask; come live happily in my house!

Dwell in the calm of a palace,

Have women wait on you,

Wear delicate Kasi cloth,

Adorn yourself with garlands and scents.

I will make for you ornaments

Of gold, jewel encrusted, with pearls.

Climb into my costly bed,

Perfumed with carved sandalwood,

With a clean coverlet, beautiful,

Overspread with a new woolen quilt.

You are a blue lotus rising from water

Where nature sprites dwell, yet you

Will come to old age limbs unseen

If you stay as you are living the pure life."

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Awakened Buddhist nuns: Therīgāthā: The Voice of Enlightened Nuns (Sutta Friends)

Inspiration: Verses of Enlightened Buddhist Nuns: Therīgāthā – Sutta Friends

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[She replied:]

The Therigatha (pariyatti.org)

"What essence do you see or assume

In this carcass that will swell the cemetery

Already overfilled with corpses,

This body that is destined to break up?

What do you see when you look at this,

You, man out of your mind?"

"Eyes like those of a deer,

Of a nymph in a mountain haunt,

Seeing your eyes delights my senses

And passion grows all the more.

They are like blue lotuses.

And your golden face is spotless.

Staring into your eyes delights my senses

And passion grows all the more.

Even if you run far, far away, I will

Always think your sweet long-lashed gaze,

For there is nothing dearer to me than your

Eyes, O nymph. I languish without you."

"You want to stray from the path.

You want the moon as your very own plaything.

You want to vault over Mount Meru.

You have designs on one born of the Buddha?

But there is nothing anywhere in all the world,

With its devas and men, that would for me

Any longer be an object of passion.

I do not even know what passion would be,

For it is slain, root and all, by the Path.

Like embers in a smoldering pit, scattered.

Like a cup of poison, evaporated.

I do not see what that passion would be

For it is slain, root and all, by the path.

Go seduce one who has not reflected on this,

One whom the Master has not yet instructed.

But try to seduce one who knows and

You do yourself violence.

For whether praised or insulted,

In pleasure or pain,

My mindfulness remains unbroken.

Knowing the unattractiveness

Of all formations, of all fabricated things,

My heart no longer clings to anything at all.

I am a student of the Well-Gone One,

Riding the vehicle of the Eightfold Way.

Passion's arrow removed, defilement-free,

I delight, having gone to a quiet dwelling.

For I have seen well-painted puppets

Yanked by sticks and strings,

Made to dance in foolish ways.

With sticks and strings removed,

Cast away, dispersed, shredded,

Smashed to pieces, nowhere to be found,

Within what will the mind make its home?

This body, which is just like that,

Devoid of necessities no longer functions.

Devoid of necessities, it no longer functions.

Within what will the mind make its home?

Like a mural smeared on a wall,

Painted with golden pigments,

Your vision is all distorted, perverted.

Your perception is meaningless, seeing

A human being, an evaporating mirage,

A tree of gold in a dream,

A magic show in the midst of a crowd —

You run blindly after what is unreal.

Resembling a ball of wax set in a hollow,

With a bubble in the middle

And bathed in tears, the filth of the eye

Secreted there, too; the parts of the eye

All rolled together in various ways."

Plucking out her eye with mind detached

She felt no regret.

"Here, it's yours, this eye. Keep it."

Then and there she handed it to him.

Then and there his passion was extinguished.

And he begged her forgiveness.

[He said:] "Be safe, pursuer of the pure life.

This sort of thing shall not happen again.

To harm a person like you would be to

Embracing a blazing fire. It is as if

I have seized a venomous snake.

So may you be safe and forgive me."

The drishti of your virtue restores me.

No longer detained, the nun Subha went in
Search of the Buddha's. When she beheld

The mark of his excellent merit, her

Eye became just as it was before. Source

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Who was the nun Subhā?

G.P. Malalasekera, Dictionary of Pali Proper Names edited by Wisdom Quarterly

Jain nuns existed before Buddhist nuns.

Subhā Jīvakambavanikā (an appellation that means "Beauty in the Mango Grove"): She belonged to an eminent Brahmin family of Rājagaha (modern Rajgir, India).

Seeing the danger and bane in sensual pleasures, she became a Buddhist nun under the Buddha's foster mother (sister of his biological mother who passed away seven days after his birth), the world's first Buddhist nun, Ven. Maha Pajāpatī Gotamī.

She was called "Subhā" because her body was beautiful (asubha being the familiar term for "repulsive, foul, unlovely." reflecting on the impure, unattractive, or repulsive aspects of bodies as a means of curing lust). One day, in Jīvakambavana, a libertine, a man in the prime of youth, seeing her going to meditate in seclusion, stopped her, inviting her to engage in sensual pleasures. She talked to him of the danger of such pleasures, but he persisted.

When's beauty a curse? When men won't shut up.

Seeing that he was particularly enamored of the beauty of her eyes, she pulled one of them out, saying: "Come, here is the offending eye [I've plucked it out]." The horny youth was appalled, chastened, and begged her forgiveness.

Ven. Subhā went to the Buddha and, at sight of him, her eye recovered. Filled with joy, she stood venerating him, and he taught her and gave her an exercise for meditation (kammatthana*). She developed insight (vipassana) and became an arahant (fully enlightened). Thig.vss.366-399 (PTS); ThigA.245f.

• *Kammatthāna: literally, "working-ground" for meditation, is the term in the Commentary for the 40 or more "subjects of meditation"; see cultivation (bhāvanā).

Where did this happen?

Modern mango groves are pruned orchards

Jīvakambavana: Jivaka's amba (mango) vana (grove) was a mango grove in ancient Rājagaha (Rajgir), belonging to the eminent physician Jīvaka (Komārabhacca). He was the Buddha and the king's personal physician. He donated the land to the Buddha and the Sangha (the community of monks and nuns). Jivaka then built a forest monastery in the grove, where the Buddha stayed several times.

Magadha, proto-India, where the Buddha stayed

On one occasion Ajātasattu (the prince who, allied with bad monk Ven. Devadatta, the brother of Prince Siddhartha's wife, killed his own father, Bimbisara (king of Magadha), to usurp the throne by force even though the good king was an enlightened disciple of the Buddha, a stream enterer reborn as a yakkha named Janavasabbha in the lowest of the heavens, the Realm of the Four Great Sky Rulers) visited the Buddha and heard the famous discourse called "The Fruits of Recluseship Sutra" (Sāmaññaphala Sutta, D.i.47ff).

The archeological remains of Jivakambavana Monastery, Rajgir, northern India (wiki)

Jīvaka, the Buddha's physician

The Jīvaka Suttas were also given there. The mango grove was near Maddakucchi (the park under Vulture's Peak, a hill where Ven. Devadatta tried to roll a boulder or throw a rock to kill the Buddha, but it missed and broke apart, sending a large splinter that cut his foot and drew blood), so this is where they carried the Buddha when his foot was injured (DhA.ii.164).

It was in this grove that Cūlapanthaka attained enlightenment. At that time, there were 500 (which just means "a large number of") monastics there (J.i.114f., etc.). Nuns also went there for their day's abiding (ThigA.245f.)

• Ven. Thanissaro (trans.), Thig 14.1; Amber Larson, Dhr. Seven (eds.), Wisdom Quarterly