Back

Medieval Texts

-The Manusmriti exhorts a man who has sex with a man or a woman in a cart pulled by a cow, or in water or by day to bathe with his clothes on.

-Hindu scriptures contain many surprising examples of diversity in both sex and gender. Medieval texts narrate how the God Ayyappa was born of intercourse between the God Shiva and Vishnu when the latter temporarily took a female form.

-A number of fourteenth-century texts in Sanskrit and Bengali (including the Krittivasa Ramayana, a devotional text still extremely popular today) narrate how hero-king Bhagiratha, who brought the sacred river Ganga from heaven to earth, was miraculously born to and raised by two co-widows, who made love together with divine blessing. These texts explain his name Bhagiratha from the word bhaga (vulva) because he was born of two vulvas.

-Indra, chief of the Vedic Gods, is often depicted with a thousand marks on his body that look like eyes. These are actually yonis, symbols of the female sex organ. Hindu tradition states that this abnormal appearance resulted from a curse pronounced upon this god by a sage, whose wife Indra seduced.

-Most modern Hindus believe the popular myth that homosexuality was imported into India either from medieval West Asia or from modern Euro-America. Sacred texts state otherwise:

·Hindu medical texts dating from the first century A.D. provide taxonomies of gender and sexual variations, including same-sex desire.

·The fourth-century sacred text, Kamasutra, categorizes men who desire other men as a “third nature,” further subdivides them into masculine and feminine types. It provides a detailed description of oral sex between men, and also refers to long-term unions between men.

Kama Sutra

Maharishi Vatsayana regards three objects as the basic reason of human existence. These are Dharma (religion), Arth (luxuries), Kama (carnal pleasures).

He dictates that a man of sound mind must divide his life-time judiciously in order to practice religion, wealth and carnal pleasures. He should also take care that one does not infringe with or encroach upon the other.

Vatsyayana believed that sex itself was not wrong, but doing it badly was sinful. “Joy is the first objective of physical intimacy. If a couple fails to enjoy this intimacy, there is no meaning of sex then.”
“Enjoyment of nature while appreciating sound, sight, beauty taste and smell through all the five sense organs and thus having a union of mind and soul is termed as Kama.”

Tantra

The Tantra vision is one of wholeness, of embracing everything. Everything that a person experiences, regardless of whether it is usually judged as good or bad, is an opportunity for learning. For instance, the situation in which you feel sexual frustration is not viewed negatively in Tantra, but as an opportunity for learning. It provides an opportunity to understand the motivations about going into sex. What does it mean to you? When have you repeated this pattern of behavior in the past? Why you are tolerating the situation? What opportunities for change are available to you? Through this questioning, a sense of how to make sex better can be developed.


Tantra and Gender Equality

In Tantra, the Divine is seen as Shiva-Shakti, or the union of the Divine feminine and masculine. It’s the masculine, ever-still, presence of consciousness fusing with the feminine, in-motion, energy of life and love. Sexuality is a unique and powerful vehicle for experiencing this embrace of consciousness and energy towards unity and oneness.

In the Tantric view, sex and orgasm equal spiritual awareness at its peak. When Shiva, male energy, and Shakti, female energy, come into a sexual union, it is believed to be the highest point of enlightenment.

Because Tantra believes in wholeness, it embraces opposites, seeing them as complements instead of contradictions. The concepts of male and female therefore are not set apart, forever divided by a gender gap, but are viewed as two polarities that meet and merge in every human being. Tantra recognizes that each human being, whether man or woman, has both masculine and feminine qualities. This means that, by discarding our gender stereotypes, we can expand our sexual identities tremendously, honoring a polarity within ourselves that has been largely ignored.

In Tantra, the male can be encouraged to explore his soft, receptive, vulnerable, feminine aspects. For her part, the female can explore her masculine dimensions, recognizing that she is capable of dynamic leadership, taking the initiative, creating new ways of guiding, teaching, and giving herself and her partner pleasure. The male does not give up his masculinity, nor does the woman abandon her femininity. They simply expand their potential to include the other polarity.