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by Paul Vallely
The Independent - 10.
February 1999
For years June
Campbell was the`consort`of a senior Tibetan Buddhist monk. She was
threatened with death if she broke her vow of secrecy. But then
enlightenment can be like that.
Feet of clay? No, it
was a different part of the anatomy - and of all too fleshly substance -
which caused the trouble. But, I suppose, you don`t expect Tantric sex to
be a straightforward activity. Then again, sex of any kind isn`t really
what you`re planning when you become a celibate nun.
It was, said June
Campbell as she began her lecture, only the second time she had been asked
to give a talk to a Buddhist group in this country since her book
Traveller in Space came out three years ago. Small wonder. The topic of
her talk was "Dissent in Spiritual Communities", and you don`t get much
more potent types of dissent than hers. For she not only revealed that she
had for years been the secret sexual consort of one of the most holy monks
in Tibetan Buddhism - the tulku (re-incarnated lama), Kalu Rinpoche. She
also insisted that the abuse of power at the heart of the relationship
exposed a flaw at the very heart of Tibetan Buddhism.
This was heresy ,
indeed. To outsiders, the Rinpoche was one of the most revered yogi-lamas
in exile outside Tibet. As abbot of his own monastery, he had taken vows
of celibacy and was celebrated for having spent 14 years in solitary
retreat. Among his students were the highest ranking lamas in Tibet. "His
own status, was unquestioned in the Tibetan community", said Ms. Campbell,
"and his holiness attested to by all".
The inner circles of
the world of Tibetan Buddhism - for all its spread in fashionable circles
in the West - is a closed and tight one. Her claims, though made in a
restrained way in the context of a deeply academic book subtitled - "In
Search of Female Identity in Tibetan Buddhism" - provoked what she
described as a primitive outpouring of rage and fury. "I was reviled as a
liar or a demon", she said during a public lecture last week at the
nonsectarian College for Buddhist Studies in Sharpham, Devon. "In that
world he was a saintly figure. It was like claiming that Mother Teresa was
involved in making porn movies".
But it was not fear of
the response which made her wait a full 18 years before publishing her
revelations in a volume entitled Traveller in Space - a translation of
dakini, the rather poetic Tibetan word for a woman used by a lama for sex.
It took her that long to get over the trauma of the experience. "I spent
11 years without talking about it and then, when I had decided to write
about it, another seven years researching. I wanted to weave together my
personal experience with a more theoretical understanding of the role of
women in Tibetan society to help me make sense of what had happened to
me."
What happened was that
, having become a Buddhist in her native Scotland in the hippie Sixties,
she travelled to India where she became a nun. She spent 10 years in a
Tibetan monastery and penetrated more deeply than any other Westerner into
the faith`s esoteric hierarchy. Eventually she became personal translator
to the guru as, during the Seventies, he travelled through Europe and
America. It was after that, she said, that "he requested that I become his
sexual consort and take part in secret activities with him".
Only one other person
knew of the relationship - a second monk - with whom she took part in what
she described as a polyandrous Tibetan style relationship. "It was some
years before I realised that the extent to which I had been taken
advantage of constituted a kind of abuse".
The practice of
Tantric sex is more ancient than Buddhism. The idea goes back to the
ancient Hindus who believed that the retention of semen during intercourse
increased sexual pleasure and made men live longer. The Tibetan Buddhists
developed the belief that enlightenment could be accelerated by the
decision "to enlist the passions in one`s religious practice, rather than
to avoid them". The strategy is considered extremely risky yet so
efficacious that it could lead to enlightenment in one lifetime.
Monks of a lower
status confined themselves to visualising an imaginary sexual relationship
during meditation. But, her book sets out, the "masters" reach a point
where they decide that they can engage in sex without being tainted by it.
The instructions in the so-called "secret" texts spell out the methods
which enable the man to control the flow of semen through yogic breath
control and other practices. The idea is to "drive the semen upwards,
along the spine, and into the head". The more semen in a man`s head, the
stronger intellectually and spiritually he is thought to be.
"The reverse of
ordinary sex expresses the relative status of the male and female within
the ritual."
More than that, he is
said to gain additional strength from absorbing the woman`s sexual fluids
at the same time as withholding his own. This "reverse of ordinary sex",
said June Campbell, "expresses the relative status of the male and female
within the ritual, for it signals the power flowing from the woman to the
man".
The imbalance is
underscored by the insistence by such guru-lamas that their sexual
consorts must remain secret, allowing the lamas to maintain control over
the women. "Since the book was published, I`ve had letters from women all
over the world with similar and worse experiences".
So why did she stay
for almost three years? "Personal prestige. The women believe that they
too are special and holy. They are entering sacred space. It produces good
karma for future lives, an is a test of faith". The combination of
religion, sex, power and secrecy can have a potent effect. It creates the
Catch 22 of psychological blackmail set out in the words of another lama,
Beru Kyhentze Rinpoche: "If your guru acts in a seemingly unenlightened
manner and you feel it would be hypocritical to think him a Buddha, you
should remember that your own opinions are unreliable and the apparent
faults you see may only be a reflection of your own deluded state of
mind...If your guru acted in a completely perfect manner he would be
inaccessible and you would be able to relate to him. It is therefore out
of your Guru`s great compassion that he may show apparent flaws... He is
mirroring your own faults".
The psychological
pressure is often increased by making the woman swear vows of secrecy. In
addition June Campbell was told that "madness, trouble or even death"
could follow if she did not keep silent. "I was told that in a previous
life the lama I was involved with had had a mistress who caused him some
trouble, and in order to get rid of her he cast a spell which caused her
illness later resulting in her death.
There are those
Buddhists, like Martine Batchelor - who spent 10 years as a Zen Buddhist
nun in a Korean monastery and who now teaches at Scharpham College - who
insist the religious techniques the Buddha taught can be separated from
the sexist, patriarchal and oppressive culture of many Buddhist countries.
But June Campbell is not convinced. "You have to ask what is the
relationship between belief and how a society structures itself," she
said. In Tibetanism, power lies in the hands of men who had often been
traumatised by being removed from their mother at the age of two and taken
to an all male monastery. "Some were allowed visits from their mothers and
sisters but always in secrecy - so that they came to associate women with
what must be hidden".
But there is more to
it, she believes than that. Teaching at Sharpham last week she gave the
students a whole range of material about different kind of feminism - from
the political to the psychotherapeutic. She then asked them how it relates
to the fact that there are no female Buddha images or to why in Tantric
sex images the woman always has her back to the viewer, or to why Buddhist
women are told to pray that they will be reborn into a male body in their
next life -for only in a man`s body can they attain full enlightenment.
"Once I started
unravelling my experiences, I began to question everything," she said.
That meant not just the actions of a particular guru but the very idea of
the guru. She began to wonder whether the Tantra was just a fantasy, and
whether there is really any difference between Tantric sex and ordinary
sex. She questioned the very concept of enlightenment itself and the
practice of meditation. "I realised that in order to be myself I had to
leave it all - completely and utterly."
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