interview

WIE: What is your definition of spiritual liberation?

Jose Cabezon: According to Mahayana Buddhism, spiritual liberation is a state of complete, total and irreversible personal transformation, where a person goes from living in suffering to living without suffering. And once you reach this state, you never fall back to suffering again. Another essential aspect of liberation or, more accurately, of enlightenment, is a dedication to helping others achieve that same state. Even though I think that this kind of radical, uncompromising view is important, to set one's sights on that, at the beginning anyway, can be unrealistic. So I prefer to view liberation in a less radical fashion and to stress an incremental view, which is simply that we make progress, we become better people—more insightful, more compassionate, more loving—and we help others become better people. And this occurs one step at a time by following a spiritual path.

WIE: How would you define gay liberation?

JC: Spiritual liberation is principally an internal shift in the way one perceives oneself, the world and others. Gay liberation has a more external focus in that it usually refers to the liberation of gay people in a society that tends to oppress them. This doesn't mean that the two spheres are completely divorced from each other. For example, spiritual liberation has social implications and gay liberation has internal implications. It has been argued, and I think rightfully, that it's impossible for gay people to achieve external social liberation without first achieving some kind of internal liberation as a gay person, for example, acceptance of one's sexual orientation.

WIE: Can you say more about the ways gay liberation and spiritual liberation relate to each other?

JC: Someone who is committed to the Mahayana Buddhist path is committed to ending the suffering of others. One aspect of that is ending oppression and inequality wherever they exist. It seems to me that anyone who is seriously following the Mahayana Buddhist path would have to be committed to various forms of social liberation, including gay liberation, as a natural corollary of the Mahayana path, whether or not one is gay. I think following a spiritual path naturally commits one to things like gay liberation, women's liberation and men's liberation.

WIE: Our identification with being a man or woman seems to be our most primary identification. Freud went so far as to assert that the core of our personality rests on these gender distinctions. In your anthology Buddhism, Sexuality and Gender, you yourself wrote, "Our nature as sexual and gendered beings is a crucial factor that must be taken into account in the analysis of all areas of human concern." On the other hand, the Buddhist teachings of liberation seem to point to a condition in which we are not referring to any fixed ideas about who we are, where we are living in what could be described as a state of nonduality. How does the seemingly inescapable fact of our gender identity go together with the Buddhist goal of freedom from all fixed and limited views?

JC: It's one thing to say that the Buddhist path ultimately requires a transcendence of gender distinctions and another to say that it requires ignoring gender distinctions. There's a difference between those two things, and I think that the latter is not the case. Buddhism makes a distinction between two levels of reality: the conventional level and the ultimate level. At the conventional level, the distinctions that we normally encounter in the world—male/female, Buddhist/non-Buddhist, self/other—are operative. They are valid and useful distinctions at the conventional level. But, like all distinctions, they tend to limit our way of understanding the world. They can become reified and breed ignorance. In the traditional Mahayana texts, there are arguments put forward for breaking up these dualisms and thereby achieving greater levels of insight. But even when one engages in these types of analyses that eventually give rise to what's known as nondual awareness, it does not imply that the dualities themselves are invalid at the conventional level. The conventional world is never annihilated.

WIE: How important is our gender identity in the pursuit of absolute realization?

JC: Let's take the example of tantric Buddhism. At the highest levels of the path, the practice of sexual yoga is considered indispensable to achieving enlightenment. So, one's sexual identity as male or female and the internal physiology of the body are extremely important and intimately linked to spiritual practice. Apart from the actual practice of sexual yoga, in tantra, even in what's called the stage of generation, which involves the visualization of deities, one nonetheless visualizes oneself as a being with a sexual identity that is either male or female. But there is a fluidity of gender—people who are biologically male can visualize themselves as female deities and vice versa. So in tantric Buddhism, sexual identity—maleness and femaleness as biological givens—is quite central to the path. Whether this applies to gender identity—that is, to maleness or femaleness as human social constructs—is perhaps less clear.

WIE: There are many men and women who view their experience of gender and sexual orientation as the basis of their spiritual identity. John Giorno, for example, who has been a practicing Buddhist for over three decades, says his deepest wish is that there would be a Buddhist teaching that specifically addresses the needs of gay people. How do gay Buddhists reconcile the seeming paradox between, on one hand, a belief in and focus on the significance of difference based on our gender and sexual orientation and, on the other, the Buddhist teaching of nonduality, or the essential sameness of our experience of ignorance and suffering?

JC: In the West, in large part as a result of Freud's influence, we tend to see the development of our identity as intimately linked to sexuality and to sexual desire. Buddhism would question that. From a Buddhist point of view, our conventional sense of self, our ordinary notion of who we are, does not depend upon gender or sexual differentiation. Our sense of self is more basic than, and arises prior to, our identification as male or female, straight or gay. It arises as a result of the distinction between self and other.

WIE: But many modern Buddhists, men and women, seem to view their experience of gender and sexual orientation as fundamentally relevant to their spirituality, even as being the factor that defines the spiritual path appropriate for them. It seems that in some gay Buddhist writings there is a paradox between this belief in the significance of difference and the goal of the realization of nondifference.

JC: Yes, that's right.

WIE: How is that paradox addressed?

JC: As I mentioned, I think that many Westerners tend to overidentify with their gender and sexual orientation. We tend to think that our true self is intimately linked to who we are as gendered and sexual beings, and so we tend to think that the answer to our spiritual quest must be grounded in our gender and our sexuality. I don't hold this view.

WIE: Would you go so far as to say that this would be a limited or erroneous point of view from the perspective of ultimate awakening?

JC: Yes. I would go so far as to say that. Whatever the case at the conventional level, ultimately one's identity as male or female and one's sexual orientation are irrelevant to the spiritual path, in part because at the ultimate level, those distinctions have to be left behind. They have to be transcended. Now, as I mentioned before, that doesn't mean that there isn't a place for these distinctions at the conventional level. For example, sexual orientation can act as a catalyst for bringing people together in mutually supportive spiritual communities.

WIE: In some of the writings in the gay liberation movement, it is implicitly and even at times explicitly stated that gay men enjoy particular advantages on the spiritual path. Some say that it is because of their familiarity with suffering due to the discrimination and rejection they experience in heterosexual culture, or as a result of their intimate contact with death through the devastation of the AIDS epidemic, or because of their willingness to break out of stereotypical roles. Andrew Harvey writes that in many traditions, homosexuals have been especially revered as shamans, priests, oracles, healers and diviners. "Homosexuals," he states, "were seen as sacred—people who, by virtue of a mysterious fusion of feminine and masculine traits, participated with particular intensity in the life of the Source." Do you believe that gay men are more spiritual?

JC: I don't think that one can generalize. So I suppose my answer is no. Certain cultures have tended to revere gay men and women, especially gay men, in this way. But ultimately, I don't think there is any real reason for doing so. I don't believe that there's anything intrinsically spiritual or antispiritual where sexual identity is concerned. So I don't think that gay people are in a privileged position with regard to their spirituality. That doesn't mean that in particular situations at particular historical moments the experiences of gay men and gay women may not make them perhaps more prone to entering a spiritual path or more insightful with regard to certain aspects of the spiritual path, like suffering. For example, some Native American cultures have created the conditions whereby gay men, in particular, are thrown into positions of spiritual leadership in which they thrive.

WIE: Why especially gay men as opposed to gay women?

JC: On the one hand, one could attribute it to misogyny—yet another instance of privileging men over women. But I think it's more complex than that, and I don't think that it's anything intrinsic to gay men. In some Native American cultures and also in certain Afro-Brazilian religions, it's mostly gay men who have been sought out as shamans and as having special spiritual power. If we wanted to speculate, we could say that maybe the kinds of sexual acts that gay men engage in are considered more transgressive. For example, anal penetration of a man in most cultures is considered an extremely transgressive act. It goes against the ultimate social taboos regarding sexuality. So if a community is looking for a kind of locus of radical difference, it makes sense to look to someone who engages in these extremely transgressive practices.

WIE: The Buddha prescribed celibacy as one of the essential practices for both monks and nuns in his ordained community. Some modern scholars seem to imply that many Buddhist monks, both historically and in present times, in fact actively engage in homosexuality. John Giorno describes his experience of Buddhist monasteries in contemporary Asia by saying that "homosexuality in Tibetan monasteries is rampant." He says, "Almost every one of the monasteries in all the four traditions, Gelugpa, Kargyupa, Sakya and Nyingma, are totally gay in heart, if not sexually active," and then goes on to describe that the monks actually do engage in sexual acts. He comments that one of his Tibetan teachers told him that this behavior is condoned. You were a Buddhist monk in one of the most respected Tibetan monasteries in the Gelugpa tradition. Would you say that Giorno's depiction of the monastic environment is accurate?

JC: In most forms of Buddhism, monks take a vow of celibacy. Does that mean that there is no homosexual activity in Buddhist monasteries? No. These are communities of human beings, and I think that especially among younger monks it's not an infrequent occurrence. At the same time, even when monks engage in sexual acts with each other, they take care not to violate the letter of the law. They take their vow of celibacy seriously, or somewhat seriously. For example, the Vinaya—the rules that monks and nuns must follow—prohibits oral intercourse and anal intercourse. So at least in the Tibetan tradition, even when monks, and it's usually younger monks, engage in homosexual activities, they take care not to violate the letter of the vow of celibacy by refraining from oral and anal intercourse. There's a real ambivalence there. It's clear that homosexual activity does take place, but even when it does, celibacy is still held as an ideal.