Sensuality and Culture

Sensuality and Culture

According to the Aggañña Sutta, which gives an account of the evolution of the world and society, the earliest inhabitants of the earth were mind-made and self-luminous beings who subsisted on joy and moved about in the sky. After a long time they tasted something extremely flavorsome and were delighted with this new gustatory sense experience. Craving entered into them and they went on tasting food in this manner. Consequently their bodies became coarser and coarser; they lost their radiance and the ability to subsist on joy and to traverse in the sky. (D. III, 84-86).

Now what is important for us here is not the authenticity of this evolutionary process, but the point that sensual desire has caused the loss of higher mental and physical capacities which man is supposed to have once possessed.

The Cakkavattsihanada Sutta (D. III, 69-74) deals with the problem of social change. As a result of the unequal distribution of wealth, poverty becomes widespread and moral standards deteriorate rapidly. With moral degeneration there is a corresponding decrease in physical beauty and length of life. As time goes on and immorality settles down, society comes under the grip of three derogatory phenomena, namely, perverted lust (adhammaraga), wanton greed (visamalobha) and a wrong sense of values (micchadhamma). Disrespect for family, religious and cultural traditions becomes an accepted social phenomenon. When moral degradation continues thus a time will come when the life- span is reduced to ten years and the marriageable age goes down to five. By that time food will undergo so much change that delicacies such as ghee, butter, honey, etc. will vanish, and what is considered coarse today will be a delicacy of that time. All concepts of morality will disappear and language will have no word to denote morality. Immorality will reign supreme with social sanction. There will be no marriage laws nor kinship, and society will fall into a state of utter promiscuity, as among animals. Among such humans keen mutual enmity will become the rule, and they will be overcome by passionate thoughts of killing one another. A world war will break out and large-scale massacre would be the result. After this mass blood bath, the few destitutes who are left behind will find solace in each other's company and they will begin to regard one another with kindly thoughts. With this change of heart there will be a gradual re-evolution of moral values. 

Step by step the good life will be restored, physical beauty will reappear and the life-span will increase. Mental potentialities too will gradually develop.

Such are the Buddhist ideas of social change. Society stands or falls with the rise or fall of moral values.

It is noteworthy that some present-day sociological studies too have revealed that morality and culture are causally connected. William Stephens observes that primitive tribes have great sexual freedom, premarital as well as extramarital, when compared with civilized communities which have tight sex restrictions.[6] Dean Robert Fitch has connected the decline of the Roman civilization with the deterioration of their sexual morality.[7] The most important contribution in this respect is made by J.D. Unwin in a study called Sex and Culture.[8] He has conducted a survey of the sexual behavior and the level of culture of eighty uncivilized tribes and also those of six known civilizations. He concludes that there is a definite relationship between permissiveness and primitiveness, and sex restrictions and civilization. Sexual freedom gives rise to what he calls a zoistic (dead level of conception) culture where people are born, they satisfy their desire, they die and are forgotten after the remains are disposed of. They are not able to rationally find out the causal connection between events. When afflicted by illness, for instance, they resort to witchcraft and nothing more. When a certain degree of sex restriction, occasional, premarital, or post-nuptial, is present, the result is a manistic culture where ancestors are worshipped at times of crisis, but without a definite place of worship. Strict sex regulations as in monogamy produce a deistic culture with definite places of worship. Culture in the sense of the external expression of internal human energy resulting from the use of human powers of reason, creation and self knowledge becomes possible only with strictly enforced monogamous sex mores. The mechanism of this operation is not known, just as it is not known how carbon placed under different settings turns to coal or diamond.[9] All that can be said is that there is a definite causal link between sexual behavior and the culture pattern. As Unwin comes to this conclusion after conducting exhaustive methodical investigations, it is possible to maintain that scientific inquiries too have confirmed the Buddhist point of view regarding the relationship between morality and culture.

From: One Foot in the World

Buddhist Approaches to Present-day Problems

by Lily de Silva

https://www.accesstoinsight.org/lib/authors/desilva/wheel337.html

The Wheel Publication No. 337/338 

(Kandy: Buddhist Publication Society, 1986). 

https://www.bps.lk/olib/wh/wh337_deSilva_One-Foot-In-The-World.pdf

For free distribution