Your Holiness( Dalai Lama ), what do you think of homosexuality?

krsna · November 7, 2005

Freaked Out In San Francisco

By simply upholding the moral dharma the Dalai Lama manages to shock California's "gay buddhists"

...

Q

Your Holiness, what do you think of homosexuality?

Dalai Lama:

"It's part of what we Buddhists call 'bad sexual conduct.'

Sexual organs were created for reproduction between the male element and

the female element and everything that deviates from that is not

acceptable from a Buddhist point of view. Between a man and [another] man,

a woman and another woman, in the mouth, the anus,

or even using a hand." (the DL mimes masturbation)...

Q

So you share this view with Christianity?

Dalai Lama:

"We share much more than that: the same philosophy of love of one's

neighbor, the aspiration to elevate a human being above his/her vices,

compassion and forgiveness..."

June 1997, San Francisco

COMMENT: The Dalai Lama was meeting with an odd bunch, San Francisco's "gay buddhists." A silly development of recent years is that of social radicals adopting Buddhism as a pet religion. I imagine it serves to mark their contempt for the religions of their forebears, as well as offering trendy glamour. In California it is much more important to appear to be something than to actually be anything. Maybe for decided homosexuals Buddhism is a good luck charm to clutch on that perilous flight from anscestral wisdom and natural order.

Unfortunately for them, all strains of Buddhism -- and the eastern religions in general -- are as morally rigorous as the Christianity they flee. Even arguably more so. After the Dalai Lama briefed them on the obvious, the "gay buddhists" expressed dismay. Formerly a darling of the liberal "new age," suddenly the Dalai Lama was a backward old monk needing an update; needing to get with the program.

Californians, sad to say, are expert at dumbing down the dharma (Buddhism), and mucking up the yoga (Hinduism). Tirelessly inventive as gays are, the "gay buddhists" of Saint Francisco promptly announced the need for a "new 21st century buddhism." I surmise they mean a "new" Buddhism that better comports with, um, old-fashioned carnal desire. It is a pity that before they got a fancy for this profound and venerable religion they didn't note Buddha's pivotal teaching: the killing out of lust and desire. Abundant verses in the literature go beyond hinting:

"From lust comes grief, from lust comes fear; he who is free from lust neither sorrows nor fears."

--The Dhammapada