Bodhisattva Sexuality: When Sex Becomes Sacred Service
Forbidden Yoga invites you to explore where pleasure and dharma become indistinguishable
Book excerpt The compass of Zen
AI Podcast by google LM
There is a very famous story about a woman who actually used sex only to save other people. The Avatamsaka-sutra teaches about fifty-three great masters of skillful means. The thirty-sixth master was called Pass-a-Million. She was a prostitute who lived during the Buddha’s lifetime. She was very, very beautiful, and many people believed that she had gotten enlightenment. Every day, many men came to her for sex. Sometimes she asked for money, and sometimes she didn’t. But every man who had sex with her didn’t have any desire for sex when he left. Many, many of her lovers eventually became monks, got enlightenment, and became great teachers of others. Pass-a-Million never used sex for her own pleasure. Rather, she only used her earthly body to serve others. She kept a clear mind, and was simply using sex to take away these men’s desire for sex and the destructive habits or hindrances around that follows. This story is a testament to the transformative nature is sex. It shows that if the direction and intentions are clear, sex can be a vehicle of transcendence. There are many stories about the use of such skillful means. In itself, sex is not good or bad: the most important question around action is why act? Is it only for yourself or for all beings? Pass-a-Million was a great bodhisattva who acted without hindrance, so her sex was not for her, for her pleasure alone. Her sex was save-all-beings sex. This story can be found in the Avatamsaka-sutra. After telling this story to my student from New York, I asked her, “Why do you have sex? For whom?” “I have it for him and for me.” “You still have ‘I,’ so that is no good. You must completely take away ‘I,’ then your sex is bodhisattva sex.” Then I said, “Your life is already half over. From now on, you should not live for yourself we received a letter from her. She had married, after the seventy-seventh partner, and eventually became a good wife and mother. Men and women should be partners in life, not merely instruments of each other’s physical enjoyment. They should be good dharma friends. If they are helping each other understand their true selves, and are deeply committed to this in every way, having no thought for themselves, then having sex is no problem. It can also be a Dharma. The name for this is do ban, a “companion on the Path.” But this is extremely difficult practice for most people, who just have sex with others for their own enjoyment: this is dirty. This is why we call someone “filthy” if they only have sex mindlessly, like an animal. The most important thing is, how do you consider sexual relations? The way you think about sex makes it either pure or impure. “Desire for fame” is very interesting. Even more than the desire for sex, it represents the greatest potential to make the mind impure. Most people are attached to name and form. Everybody also believes “I am.” This is a basic delusion. Name and form have no self-nature, and this “I” does not exist. They are both created entirely by thinking. But human beings are not just content with that. They also want this illusion of “I am” to get bigger and bigger and bigger, all the time. “I am this.” “I am that.” “I am a brilliant professor.” “I am a famous actor.” “I am friends with so-and-so.” And they are not happy until other people recognize this “I am” and are somehow controlled by it. In North Korea, one man’s strong belief in “I am” completely controls the minds of many millions of people—even several years after his death! If you don’t believe in his “I am,” maybe you will go to prison or die. That’s crazy. Every single day, people in this world kill other people simply to protect their names and their reputations. And the suffering that is created from this impulse is not limited to dictators and criminals alone: in most cases, we all ruthlessly compete with one another in our everyday lives just to promote our “I am” over someone else. We lie and deceive. We argue and make bad speech about one another not just to become famous, but to show one another that my “I am” is somehow better than yours and hers. And all this suffering and pain comes from just one delusive thought that everyone is attached to: “I am.” People put themselves through horrible hardships to get and maintain high social position. They will do shameful things because of their attachment to this completely empty thought. There was once a Korean woman of high social rank who had a vary famous romantic affair. Her husband was a high-class government minister. She had an affair with a man who had a reputation as a kind of Don Juan. In the beginning, she was interested only in spending time with this man. Eventually, the man began to request her money and cars and jewels. He threatened that if she didn’t hand this over, he would go public with their affair. Because she was so afraid of losing her high social standing, she gave in to him. She let him completely control her because he controlled her greatest fear. Eventually, she went bankrupt, and the scandalous behavior came out as a result. Her reputation was ruined, and because of this, she felt as if her life was completely finished. She thought of suicide many times. All this was the result of her attachment to the temporary and completely empty pleasure gained from having others’ approval. When we say “desire for fame,” we are not only talking about the desire to become well known by many people. Most people, when they hear about the “desire for fame,” think it is just an impurity of “famous” people’s minds. But actually this also means the desire for some kind of social approval, some respectability or popularity with people. This desire causes constant suffering in our everyday.
Are You Called to This Path?
Perhaps reading about Pass-a-Million has awakened something in you. Perhaps you recognize that pull toward using your sexuality not merely for personal pleasure or pair-bonding, but as genuine spiritual service. Perhaps you wonder if you could become a modern embodiment of this ancient archetype, a bodhisattva of the erotic realm who transmutes desire into liberation.
This is dangerous territory, and anyone offering you easy answers or quick initiations is selling delusion. But if the calling persists, if it emerges from something deeper than fantasy or the desire to spiritualize your sexual impulses, then there are genuine questions worth exploring.
For the woman in a committed relationship, the path forward requires brutal honesty about motivation. The impulse to expand sexually beyond partnership almost always contains mixed ingredients. Some part may genuinely arise from bodhisattva aspiration. Other parts inevitably carry unexamined needs for validation, unresolved attachment wounds, or simple biological desire for variety dressed in spiritual language. Your primary relationship needs such profound depth of trust and communication that jealousy, when it arises, can be witnessed and metabolized together rather than suppressed or acted out destructively. And you need rigorous practices for energetic hygiene. Sexual contact creates energetic entanglement. Without highly developed practices for clearing and sealing your field, you’ll bring home contamination that poisons your primary bond.
For the single woman who feels called to serve humanity through sexual availability, the romantic notion of the temple priestess obscures the actual demands. You’re working directly with the most primitive, unintegrated aspects of masculine consciousness. You’re meeting rage, neediness, entitlement, profound wounding, and spiritual hunger all wrapped in sexual desire. Can you maintain perfect boundaries while appearing completely open? Can you return to emptiness after each encounter rather than carrying the psychic weight of what you’ve touched?
The training required is somehow extensive. You need to develop shadow-piercing perception, the capacity to feel exactly where energy moves freely in another person’s body and where it’s blocked. You need mastery of energetic sealing practices to clear your field after each encounter. And perhaps most challenging, you need genuine freedom from outcome. If you feel proud when someone experiences breakthrough or hurt when your offering isn’t appreciated, the practice has already failed. You need genuine transmission from someone who has walked this path. Most importantly, you need discernment about whether this calling is genuine or whether it represents unhealed patterns seeking spiritual validation.
At Forbidden Yoga, we work with women exploring these questions. Not because we believe this path is right for many people. But for the rare woman in whom this calling persists through years of questioning, who has done sufficient foundational work, who approaches the path with appropriate sobriety rather than romantic fantasy, genuine guidance becomes possible. We can teach the specific practices that develop these capacities. We can help distinguish authentic vocation from spiritual bypass.
If this speaks to something genuine in you, reach out.
love@forbidden-yogs.com
