Sikh Theology

Sex and Sikhism
by Sirdar Kapur Singh

1. Victorian prudery had banned public reference to sex even through innuendo or oblique suggestion. Sex was ungenteel and highly inelegant. Even an inevitable indulgence in it had to be heavily veneered with patriotic respectability: young ladies were taught to mutter to themselves “God save the Queen”, or “Rule Britannia, Britannia rule the waves", to remain clean and unpolluted by a direct experience of orgasm. During the thirties when this writer was a young student at Cambridge, he was obliged to cross the English Channel to procure and read a copy of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, by D.H. Lawrence. In India, where the imperial shadows of Queen Victoria have been rather lengthy and deep, an urbanite Hindu sect that arose in the Punjab, in the seventies of the nineteenth century and which tailored the Veda to their personal requirements, has inserted in their ‘scripture’ the directive that, throughout, during sexual congress, the parties must keep their minds off all thoughts of sex and continue muttering, "Om, Om," The purifying name of God.

2. Now, in the seventies of this century, pre-marital sex experience, teen-age sex involvement, group sex, wife-swapping, promiscuity, homo-sex, oral sex, and public propagation of all kinds of sexual behavior and deviations, through cinema and television, through journalism and fictional literature is a tolerated part of the European social scene.

3. In India, less than a thousand years ago, magnificent temples in utter devotion and absolute veneration to the greatest and the holiest of the holy gods were raised, such as at Khajuraho (10th & 11th C) and Konark (13 C), whose grandeur and cost in gold and labor, whose high artistic skill and architectural scale and aesthetic form are amazing and breath taking for the modern viewer. The exterior embellishments of these grand and holy structures depict and portray, sex unions between men and women, in frieze after frieze, in infinitely varied postures, of skillfully chiseled stone entablatures that show not only the highly matured artistic sensitivity of the sculptor but also display a masterly knowledge of Hindu Erotica. It would appear that, in the mental climate of the times in which these sacred edifices were created, some deep and fundamental relationship between the erotic and the numinous experience was perceived and commonly accepted.

4. Early Vedic culture aimed at kindling sex passions of male and female, purshagni and yoshagni, as highly desirable and legitimate human pursuits. [1]   Rigveda teaches Aryans to pray to the Fire-god for immortality, that is birth of children through sexual activity. [2]   The Rigveda, does not merely suggest a nexus between the sex activity of man and his deepest desire and yearning for a final escape from death but it also seems to lay down the doctrine of equating his sexual virility with the summum bonum, the highest goal, the highest achievement and the ultimate success: “He achieves not, he, whose penis hangs limp between the thighs; achieves he, whose hairy thing swells up when he lies” (X 86. 16). [3] This Vedic libidinal insight seems a remarkable precursor of the insights of certain modern utopians who see liberation of man through liberation of his instincts. Herbert Marcuse argues that modern man has been paralyzed by the “surplus repression” imposed by political and economic monopolies of our technological society, which bondage and predicament can be removed only by “eroticising the entire personality” of man, so that, he may “once again learn to love and create.” [4]

5. Manu, the great custodian of the Vedic tradition, considers sex as one of the two pre-eminent elements in the dynamism of the psyche of man, the other being "hunger"and declares that the basic occupational lifestyle of man alternates between "sex" and "hunger". [5]

6. The Great-god, Mahadeva, of Hindu trinity, Siva, bears one of his ontological names as, Erect Phallus, Urdhavamedhar, and also, as Penis Holder, shulpani, indicative of auto-sexuality. This underlines the Hindu Vedic insight into the sex-dynamics being at the core, not only of the human psyche but also as the central element in the structure of God-head. Sigmund Freud may have revolutionized European understanding of the human nature in the 20th century by showing the ‘libido’ as relentlessly controlling the centrality of human psyche, and by making the ‘Oedipus complex’ and ‘penis envy’ as household words, but the ancient subtle Hindu mind has nothing to learn from this Vienna savant.

7. Whereas in centuries’ old pious Hindu sculpture and representation, god Siva, is depicted as holding his penis in hand or otherwise bearing an erect phallus, the heterodox and equally ancient and venerable, the non Vedic Jaina tradition, by taking due notice of the centrality of sex in the structure of the divine psyche, invariably depicts and portrays its divinised men, tirthankars, as ‘down-penis’, pralamb linga such as is shown in the gometeshvar, giant statue at Mysore. This is to proclaim the Jaina doctrine that subjugation and subdual of sex is a pre-requisite and high watermark of the spiritually evolved and evolving man. This shows that the ancient as well as the modern scientific thought unanimously concede to ‘sex’ a primary ontological status in the structure of human psyche, and there is apparent and clear consensus that the role it plays is central and significant.

8. There are two basic questions involved in the problem of sex:

(1) what is the status of ‘sex’, as an element in the basic structure of human psyche, and
(2)  whether structurally fundamental or an emergent element during the history and development of human psyche, what is its role in the personal and social life of man?

9. Generally, the sex is assigned a triple function in human life:

(1) sex as an intrinsic pleasure and an anodyne to psychological discomforts, disharmonies and complexes,
(2) sex as tool of procreation and subservient to continuity of life,
(3) sex in relation to man’s spiritual evolution and progress towards perfection.

Reference has already been made to certain recent developments in the West towards freeing sex from restrictions and inhibitions and the new outlook on the subject represented by D. H. Lawrence, Freud, and Marcuse culminating in the sexual revolution of the sixties in the western societies that upholds the primacy of the pleasure-principle. The primacy of its procreative function is accepted in the Rig Vedic exhortation to man, to achieve the only available immortality, that is, through progeny. The soteriological function of sex as per se bearer of the numinous experience or as a catalyst towards it, is clearly and forcefully taken up in the ancient Hindu tradition, that of Tantra, greatly developed in Shakta cults and Buddhist mystic cults of Vajarayana. Agam, in the Tantra, is the opposite number of Shruti, the revelation, in the Vedic tradition. An Agam verse declares that, "Sexual coitus is the highest watermark of Yoga leading to transmutation into the First Master of Yoga." [6]

In the ancient Hindu thought, deposited in Upanisadic texts, the highest consciousness, realization of the Absolute Reality, is referred to as constituted by three distinct characteristics, sat, cit, anand, ‘Being’, ‘Consciousness’ and ‘Bliss’. Chhandogya text tells us that while sat is independent of cit, the third element, anand is indissolubly tied to it, for, anand must be experienced, vijnani so that it is what it is. The modern British philosopher, F.H. Bradley (1846-1924) in his famous book, Appearance and Reality, holds the same view, by saying that,”the Perfect means the identity of idea and existence, accompanied by pleasure.” From the earliest times up to the modern Hindu savant, Aurobindo Ghosh, (d. 1950) there has been profound and persistent speculation in India, with regard to the true nature and content of anand.

Further on, it will be pointed out that in Sikhism these previous notions of anand have been rejected in favour of new connotation thereof, to show how this new connotation has a bearing on the status and significance of ‘sex’ in the Sikh scheme of things. In the Vajrayana, anand is equated with sukha, felicity, or mahasukha, the highest felicity. This mahasukh, according to the identical experience and consciousness that results at the moment of a successful sexual intercourse commenced after a hearty meal of meat and wine. [7]

A Tantra text is unambiguously clear on this point. “Good wine and well-cooked meat, and also a fish preparation for a hearty meal, and then sexual intercourse along with prescribed postures, verily, these are the five pre-requisites of the Mystic Technology of Tantra that constitute a sure guarantee of spiritual Liberation for man, here and now, in all ages and to the end of Time.” [8]

10. This curve of change, from prudery to free, uncensored sex in the western society during the twentieth century, is the result of certain scientific insights gained and popularized by two great modern psychologists: Sigmund Freud and Karl Jung. Freud tended to interpret all numinous and emotionally significant experience as derived from, or substitutes for, sex, physical and romantic sex, whereas Jung tended to interpret even sexuality itself as symbolic, numinous experience in that it represented an irrational union of opposites, and was thus a symbol of wholeness. Thus, sex in Freud is exclusively a biological function, while Jung views it as a vital force capable of being directed through creative channels through sublimation.

This latter strain of thought it is that is embedded in the Vajrayana of mystic Buddhism and the yab yum techniques of Tibetan Buddhism.

11. In Islam, Muhyiud-Din Ibn ‘Arabi (1165-1240), the great Spaniard mystic, exegetises over the trilogical hadith of Mohammad, wherein the Prophet declares that “three things of the world have been made worthy of love for me” wherein he found ‘freshness of his eyes,’ that is, consolation. These "three things” thalathun, are ‘woman,’ ‘scent’ and ‘prayer,’ `aurat’, `itar’, `abadat’. Ibn ‘Arabi explains that “when man loves woman he desires union, that is to say, the most complete union that can be possible in love; and in the form composed of elements, there exists no union more intense than conjugal act.” [9] He explains further that “man’s contemplation of God in woman is the most perfect” and not so “purely interior contemplation.” “One would never be able to contemplate God directly, in absence of all support, for God, in his Absolute Essence, is independent of worlds.” [10] Man is “placed as an intermediary between the Essence, dhat (God) from which he emanates and woman who emanates from him, [11] and he who loves woman “only for voluptuousness remains unconscious of that which is really in question”, [12] the contemplation, mushahadah, of God in woman, of the numinous essence in the orgastic experience of the conjugal sex. This is the apex of anabasis of sexual mysticism of Islam in which is grounded its fundamental social structure, ash-shara, that strictly forbids celibacy, monasticism and sex-maceration, but the real efflorescence of Islamic mysticism, the phenomenon of ‘Sufism’, has achieved its true dimensions independent of and outside this frame-work of sexual mysticism of the triad of the Prophet Mohammed consisting of ‘woman, scents and prayer’.

“Nanak approves of that union of polarities only wherein one term of this union is the Sovereign Transcendent Enlightenment, [13] which is sattava in character.”

Likewise, Sikhism refutes and rejects another postulate of Tantric sexualism that upholds the technology of exhausting and destroying passions through passions. A verse in the prestigious Kularanavatantra states that, passions can be surmounted and contained through indulging in them exhaustively. [14]

Sikhism refutes and rejects this postulate as grossly misconceived and demonstrably false, by declaring that,

“No one has ever achieved passional calmness through unbridled indulgence in passions. Can a blazing fire ever be quenched and put off by adding more and more fuel to it? The abiding peace that knoweth no ending, is nearness to and communion with God.” [15]

"All unregulated human passions, eventually are generative of sorrow and disease". [16]

“Uncontrolled passions are the gateway to sorrow and disease, and the end product of servility to senses is invariably sickness and trouble. [17]

“Turning his back on God, man seeks fulfillment in sensuality and passions and reaps the harvest of distemper and disease. [18]

Did not the incomparable Bhartri Hari the Sanskrit literateur, the Hindu savant, the enlightened king, a sensitive aesthete and analyst of human emotions, and the master Yogi who defied death and instead entered into a deep seedless trance, so as to stage a physical resurrection at the appropriate moment in future, record in his: Vaira gyashat kam that after a life long controlled and regulated indulgence in pleasures of the senses, he had woefully realized that he was mistaken in believing that it was himself, who was enjoying sense pleasures, particularly the erotic, while in fact, these sense-pleasures were, all the time eating up and corroding into his own personality and mind? [19]

13.  This sex, about which such extreme and polarized opinions and attitudes, firm and fanatical, have been held by man in different cultural structures, societies and ages, must be something profound and mysterious, fundamental, compulsive and pervasive, to move and condition man in this manner.

14.  Ancient Greek wisdom, the Judaic mature thought and ripe understanding of man almost everywhere and in all societies have realized and agreed upon two things:

(1)     that life of man is too short, evanescent and fleeting to justify his conceiving and achieving any serious and enduring purpose or project, and

(2) all earthly achievements of man are perishable and vain:

 “It is alas, too true that human life is perishable and a passing show like the stuff of a dream. And man’s all earthly achievements are exposed to decay and death having no make substance than the shade of a cirrus cloud.” [20]

The human life as it appears, has no in-built aim and therefore, it cannot be explained by itself and as such, it has no meaning, no value, no point,it is too short, too unreal, too ephemeral, too illusory, and mayaic for anything to be demanded of it to be built upon it, to be created out of it. Its whole meaning lies outside it, elsewhere and on another plane. It is an exanthem of the point earlier made in this book (Sikhism For Modern Man) that, all that is visible is rooted in the invisible.

15. Our physical birth is intimately connected with ‘sex’, with the division of the sexes and with their attraction to one another with love and the artistic creativity which this love generates and sustains. This attraction of the sexes to one another constitutes one of the chief motive forces and its intensity and its formal proliferation determine all other qualities and characteristics in man. A serious thought on sex makes it clear and obvious that the first and foremost aim of sex is the continuation of life and the securing of this continuation. This orgastic thrill of sex is the most elemental and intense experience available to an ordinary man.

16. Here in lies the mystery and the secret of sex, the pitfalls and dangers of sex, the morphinism of its clash and clamour,its flash and sparkle, and confusion and nescience born out of its profusion and promenade. Its original aim, that of procreation and continuation of life, recedes and is lost and no understanding of its, possibly, other and higher aims arises. Man vainly seeks significance and meaning of sex in the orgastic experience itself and thus ends in endless degeneration and down-fall, self-destroying, sorrow and suffering, suicidal ennui and emptiness. It is towards this tragedy of man that the Guru Granth Sahib makes a poignant, picturesque reference:

“O, my foolish mind, have you ever carefully witnessed as to how they capture and enslave a free elephant in the forest. They manipulate the great mystery of sex created by God. A life-like paper-she-elephant is placed on a concealed pit from which there is no escape or exit. Thus it is enslaved for life, to obey and to labour for his master and to suffer cruel wounds of the iron goad. [21]

This mysterious and terrible hold of sex to lure the unsuspecting beast from all life forms has been manipulated, in our time for the purpose of gaining victory in the titanic current struggle for shaping the nature of man and programming and computerizing his destiny, through equating man with God. The struggle is for achieving mind-control, a Pavlovian mastery through planned conditioning. Sex and hypnosis is the single, most vital component of mind-control. Drugs and sex combined to remove conscious resistance as a prelude to hypno-programming is capable of making man into an unwitting robot thus making the question of sex almost irrelevant for the individual and rendering, whatever ultimate purpose God might have had in creating the Universe, as infructuous.

17. A rationalization of orgastic thrill in itself being a goal of nature, is, sometimes, made out in the immense surplus of sex energy created by nature, far in excess of that understandably required for procreation of species. It is argued that if procreation and maintenance of its levels through sex were the main and exclusive aim of nature the excessiveness of the surplus of individual’s sex energy would not have been so much out of proportion, as it is, to this main and exclusive aim. It is, therefore, obvious, this argument proceeds, that, the nature intends sex-indulgence as desirable in itself as a necessary element in and pre-condition of human physical and mental normalcy.

18. This is the basic argument out of which the current sex behaviours legitimatising free libido, unshackled and un-censored eroticism originate and take their cue.

19. That this argument is by no means conclusive and misses a point or two can be demonstrated.

20. The obvious excessive surplus endowment of sex-energy does not necessarily prove that the excess is for sheer enjoyment and for no other purpose. Other plausible purposes and acceptable aims can be seen and shown.

21. By considering how small a proportion of sex-energy is actually used for the continuation of life, we can understand the hidden principles of many aspects of nature. Nature creates an immense pressure, and immense tension to attain an aim so that although an infinitesimal fraction of the created energy is used for the actual attainment of the aim, and yet this original aim would not be attained without this immense upsurge of energy that can enslave and blind man to serve nature, without which surplus energy a conscious throttling and thwartment of the aim of nature can not be eliminated and frustrated. It is the immensity of this surplus energy that forces man to serve the aim of nature in the belief that he is serving himself, his own passions and his own desires. This is the point made out in the Guru Granth Sahib, when the maya is spoken of as “deceitful stratagem” [22] of nature that appears to be, what it is not and which approaches and achieves a fixed goal deviously, diplomatically, and not directly, so as to eliminate anticipatory opposition, through incapacitation, as a “boa constrictor immobilises its prey by compression in its coils.” [23]

22.  The dis-easement, mental tensions and psychological distortions that ensue from an unsatisfying unduly suppressed and blocked sex life, a perceptive investigation of which syndrome, during the early decades of this century in Europe, has created the pseudoscience of psycho-analysis and the voodoo of ‘psychiatry’, are, in fact, secondary developments, of mishandled sex and their resolvement and cure is not necessarily or mainly through unshackling the libidinous reservoir, as has been misunderstood by the modern western man.

23.  There is another way out merging into the highway leading to a high destiny for man that Sikhism points out and teaches.

(i) Nature has endowed man with excessively surplus reservoir of libidinous energy, enormously disproportionate to minimal requirements for purposes of procreation and maintenance of its proper levels.

(ii) Normally, a blockage or coercive control of this energy results in distortion and disfigurement of psychological harmony and easement of man.

(iii) But blasting off its embankments and dismantling of all reasonable barriers and censorious controls built to regulate its free flow, in the form of instinctual imperatives and abundant precautions, is even worse, as are the current diagnosis and cures conceived by some pseudo-sciences or plausible voodoos in the West, in particular, and accepted and approved by the modern man in general.

(iv) Sex-energy is central to human psyche and all other energies, intellect, with feelings and emotional efflorescence feed on the surplus of sex-energy and there is no other energy, endowed to man by nature, that can replace sex-energy.

(v) Sex desires and sex sensations, in themselves, are neither a necessary or basic ingredient in the purest and highest level of human consciousness, not do they provide an unerring cue to such a level of human consciousness. Nevertheless, there are, in the emotional experience connected with genuine love, even infatuation as it lasts, strange sensations inexplicable from an ordinary point of view, and such strange sensations are also integral to sex experience, or orgastic thrills, that carry a taste of melancholy and sadness, vividly hinted at and portrayed in almost all romantic poetry in all ages, akin to the sensations of farewell at parting and of an imminent journey towards a strange and foreign, unfamiliar land. [24] The fact of the matter is that, in all such experiences new levels of consciousness arise wherein new emotions that are born cause previous intense emotions of love and sex to fade and disappear. This is the mysterious junctional point of the sex-based emotions and the mystical experience, not yet the numinous experience. This junction is no proof of the identity or sameness of these two categories of experiences and that explains why a contact with this junctional point merely leaves an autumnal taste behind, [25] a taste of something that must cede its place to something else but provides no positive taste of this something else. But in the light of the genuine mystical experience this junctional experience of amorphous melancholy disappears [26] and when the effulgence of true numinous experience shines, the first experience completely disappears and the second is submerged and consumed by the numinous effulgence. [27]

(vi) Undoubtedly and demonstrably, there is some strange and elusive relationship between mystical experiences and experiences of sex; and of all ordinary human experiences only sex experience and sensations approach those which we call, the mystical and the numinous. This is the relationship and the fact apparently accorded public recognition in the external erotic representations on the Khajuraho and Konark temples and it is precisely this similitude that has lured and misguided the Tantric Hindu systems and Buddhist varieties of sexual mysticism. This explains why, in the Guru Granth Sahib, the Shaktic ways of life [28] are bracketed with the other two: (1) deviation from truth [29] and (2) non-authentic living [30] as the most dangerous pitfalls to be avoided by a man of religion.

(vii) ‘Normal’ sex-life, ‘natural’ sex-life ‘proper’ sex-life, or whatever the normative adjective applicable here might be, is neither, in exaggerated development of sex energy, through pathological, mental and physical preoccupation and indulgence, which is degenerative and “the straight road to hell,” [31] the only “exit out of which is transmigration, birth and death, again and again, endlessly,” nor, in complete abstinence from sex and asceticism, whether in the mistaken belief that, “sex-ejaculation is death and complete sex-continence is conquest over death,” [32] or in the erroneous postulate that “ascetic abstinence is the first pre-requisite of and step in a life or religion.” [33] Sikhism pertinently asks that “if complete sex abstinence is, in itself, a guarantee of summum bonum, then why do not all born eunuchoids go straight to heaven ?” [34]

(vii) Sikhism teaches that a normal and proper sex-life is a regulated and duly controlled life in which sex functions are coordinated to the entire psyche of man, his instinctual, emotional and intellectual functions, so that he lives and develops as nature has intended that he should and God has designed that he ought to. A man’s thoughts, emotions, instincts, aspirations and intuitions, nothing contradicts sex, nor does sex contradict any normal element in human psyche. Sex, therefore, is completely justified in the inwardness of man. Any contradiction arises only when such a harmony and coordination is not achieved. “Such is the marked distinction of Sikhism that it points out a high road to man for the achievement of summum bonum through a harmonious, well-disciplined worldly life in which the emotions, desires and hopes of man are in mutual coordination and harmony.” [35]

24. Within this frame-work of Sikh understanding of the status and significance of sex in human life, the Sikh Prophets teach mankind

(1) to accept and adopt a practically monogamous and permanent marriage-based family as the inerodible foundation of all social organisation [36] and
(2) to endeavor to employ this monogamous family, based on mutual love and purity of marital faithfulness [37] for transmutation of the excessive surplus of human libidinous human libidinous reservoir for his highest spiritual evolution, through the specific Sikh discipline of Namayoga. The Sikh marriage ceremony called, the Anandkaraj, meaning, “A blue-print for attainment of abiding Bliss,” is formed by ritual recitation of the Sikh scriptural text, the anandu, in which are detailed the four progressive steps designed to guide the married couple on to the discipline of orientation and coordination of the somatic marital relationship with the spiritual development and evolution of the couple, in unison, to reach the summum bonum.

25. Through acceptance and implementation of these two precepts, man will restore and regulate sex to its proper place in his psyche and life, he will avoid the dangerous pitfalls of pathological and degenerative sex, and he will be enabled to evolve, so as to realize his highest potentialities and thus to build up and sustain a sane, civilized, spiritually evolving society which is “the ultimate purpose of the Creation, epiphany of the Perfect Man.” [38]

The Sikh Review, October 1979

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