Throughout the entire process of cultivating and realizing the Dharma, lay practitioners, apart from needing to go into retreat and abstain from sex for short periods, can maintain a normal, regular sex life at other times without it affecting our ultimate liberation. For practitioners cultivating at home, sexual disharmony is also a focus of family conflict. The true principle of ultimate reality is unstained by a single mote of dust, yet within the gate of myriad practices not a single dharma is set aside. In fact, a healthy sex life filled with love is likewise a Dharma door for entering the Way. Some practitioners grow weary of a sex life; in truth, they are so devoted to cultivation that their minds are not on lovemaking, and they believe their minds are on the Way. But where is the Way? The Way is right in this present instant! If you can throw yourself completely into love, then lovemaking becomes a Dharma door. Loving with complete single-mindedness can purify and sublimate your sensual desire. Through the sublimation of sensual desire, sex becomes the interaction and exchange of the two energies of yin and yang. You and your beloved can become a unified body of love, without distinction, entering a state where there is no self and no other.
The reason we cannot treat lovemaking as a Dharma door of cultivation is simply that we cannot love the other person with complete single-mindedness. We only take possession of and enjoy the pleasure and excitement the other person brings us. Such a sex life is not only unhelpful to cultivation but does more harm than good to the body. In fact, many of us cannot meet this standard in lovemaking. But if you cultivate at home, sometimes you cannot avoid a sex life. In that case, during intercourse you can only strive to focus on love. If you cannot muster passion, then think more about your husband’s or wife’s good qualities at ordinary times, think of the moments when he or she is most lovable. In this way you fill your heart with love and do not fix your attention on the sexual organs. Let your mind relax and be filled as much as possible with tenderness and love, rather than with aggression and the desire to possess. In this way you and your husband or wife become one in body, speech, and mind: your bodies merge into each other, and in your thoughts there is no concept of sex at all, only love. Then in an instant you will experience no-self and the joy of entering deeply into meditative concentration.
Once, for a long time, I rejected a sex life, subconsciously believing that it would consume my energy and drain my vital essence. But in the course of my later cultivation and realization, I came to understand that the true leakage is leakage of the mind. If there is still sexual misconduct in your mind—if seeing a beautiful woman still sets your thoughts wandering, if sensual desire remains, if you still enjoy pleasing the opposite sex around you, still long to possess the love of the opposite sex, still hope that all the women or men in the world like you, still enjoy creating ambiguous atmospheres, and so on—then even if you have no sex life (at such times your mind has long been stained by lust), your true yin or true yang is still leaking, and even more seriously than bodily leakage. Because mental leakage means that the eyes, ears, nose, tongue, body, and mind are all leaking—that is a great leakage; bodily leakage is only a small leakage. If you do not refrain from mental lust and value only outward behavior, you are abandoning the root and pursuing the branches; studying Buddhism would be like boiling sand to make porridge. Only when your mind has transcended sexual desire and sensual desire can you be said to have truly ended all outflows. And this transcendence is the sublimation of an ordinary person’s completely single-minded love into universal love. Completely single-minded love (free of stray thoughts) does not mean the attachment of infatuation, nor unrequited love; it means your mind is wholly here and now (that is, living in the present moment).
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