Page Text
________________
THE GREAT DELIGHT
the slightest pause to the usual modern Christian gentleman or lady. They consisted in partaking of such forbidden foods as fish, mcat, spicy dishes, and wine, and engaging in sexual intercourse. The sole novelly was that these acts were to be underlaken not in sensual eagerness or sated boredom, but without cgoity and under the direction of a religious tcacher, being regarded as concomitants of a difficult and dangerous yet absolutely indispensable spiritual exercise. The Bodhisattva is bcyond desire and fear; moreover, all things are Buddha-things and void.
In the sexual act it is possible to recognize a pre-eminent rendition and profound human experience of the metaphysical mystery of the nondual entity which is made manifest as two. The embrace of the male and female principles, and their delight thereby, denote their intrinsic unity, their metaphysical identity. Regarded from the standpoint of logic in the world of space and time, the male and female are two. But in their intuition of their identity (which is the seed of love) the thought of twoness is transcended, while from the mystery of their physical union (their enactment and experience in time of their real and secret nonduality) a new being is produced-as though the corporeal imitation of the trauscorporcal, nondual truth had magically touched the incxhaustible spring from which the phenomena of the cosmos arise. Tluough the sexual act, that is to say, crcatures of the visible world actually come into touch, in experience, with the metaphysical sphere of the nondual source. The latter is not absolutely apart and unrelated. It is, rather, their own very essence, which they experience in every impulse of compassion-but supremely in that supreme human realization of compassion which is known in the enactment of the mystery play of the sexes.
sunyatābodhito bijam bijāt bimbam prajāyate bimbe ca nyāsavinyasa tasmåt sarvam pratityajam
555
| SR No. | 007309 |
| Book Title | Philosophies of India |
| Original Sutra Author | N/A |
| Author | Heinrich Zimmer, Joseph Campbell |
| Publisher | Routledge and Kegan Paul Ltd |
| Publication Year | 1953 |
| Total Pages | 709 |
| Language | English |
| Classification | Book_English |
| File Size | 34 MB |