ok, so some of you know, and some of you don't, but recently i have started practicing buddhism. i will try my best not to get off into a tear on all the cool new perspectives on things i have been seeing. i haven't bitten off completely, but i am interested enough that i am willing to look into it a little further. anyway, i had my first interview with the teacher at the zen center. we talked about a whole lot of different stuff. one of the things we talked about was the precepts. now these are kind of the "rules" for buddhist, so to speak. they are incredibly broad, and sweeping. here is an example of a few of them:
1. Refraining from harming living beings/practising loving kindness
2. Refraining from taking the non-given/practising generosity
3. Refraining from committing sexual misconduct/practising contentment
4. Refraining from false speech/practising truthful communication
5. Refraining from intoxicants/practising mindfulness.
but in the very next breath, they will tell you that these are not hard and fast rules. there are exceptions to all of them, all the time. the really cool part about it is that they absolutely refuse to get into the legalistic tendency to try to define all of the exceptions. they do not define any exceptions actually. the responsibility is entire on each individual person to figure where the exceptions are and how they apply. we got to talking about what exactly "sexual misconduct" means. the way she explained it to me was that it simply means that you apply the other precepts to your sexuality. do not take things that are not given, kindness, truth and honesty, etc etc etc. i got to thinking about it, and i found this article on the intertubes.
http://www.buddhanet.net/winton_s.htmi love the shit out of this approach to ethics. mostly because i have spent a considerable amount of time looking at and studying different ethical systems proposed by different philosophers. and i have been able to deem most all of them as just plain fucking wrong. (see thread torture). they all seem to get off track somewhere. i dunno. this approach simply avoids all that. it gives you some ideas about the direction you ought to be headed, but doesn't tell you exactly what you should do in every situation.
anyway, the tl;dr version of this article is that western religions have a fucked up approach to sexuality that may have worked well for ancient bronze age era tribesmen, but simply do not apply today. BDSM subcultures have a very buddhist approach to sexuality.
let me put a little warning in here. most of this understanding is the soto zen buddhist sect understanding. there are other sects of buddhism that take a much more puritanical approach to sexuality, deeming all sexuality to be immoral, or a wrong pursuit.
also, being a very much so newbie at all this, i by no means speak officially for anyone.
