Sex, Family and Buddhism

In middle age, I reflect a lot on family now. As someone who went East in spiritual matters, I've been a little perplexed over the role of family in Buddhism. My views on family were shaped by Western civilization and the Christian tradition. These do not map neatly onto familiar analogs in Buddhism.

Buddhism, unlike the Christianity I grew up in, is not especially keen on developing a detailed soteriology rooted in marriage and the family. Monks don't officiate weddings (they do chant blessings in some cases); there are no grand religious wedding ceremonies wrapped in liturgical symbolism, and ethically, the laity are asked to avoid sexual misconduct and to use sex in the confines of a committed relationship built on mutual respect. Buddhism doesn't have marriage tribunals for the adjudication of annulments or get itself involved in marriage counseling like Christian pastors. Laity are advised to practice sense restraint and compassion. Compassion towards one's spouse or family is sometimes the hardest thing to pull off.

In Christianity, particularly Catholicism, the making of more humans is a divine commandment given to the whole human race in the opening pages of Genesis. Yahweh looks at his creation, sees that it is good, and orders the First Parents to be fruitful and multiply, to fill his earthly garden with more rational beings who will serve as a pool of potential saints in the heavenly court later on. The truth is that most humans end up in hell forever according to the founder of the Christian religion: "Enter ye in at the strait gate: for wide is the gate, and broad is the way, that leadeth to destruction, and many there be which go in thereat" (Mt 7:13 KJV).

The threat of destruction held over the heads of most humans is eternal in scope. Some scholars like Bart Ehrman believe the original early gospels indicate annihilation at death for the unrepentant, with later Christian writers turning it into a permanent existential condition. Sexual reproduction in this light means, in most cases, the creation of humans who will spend all eternity in hell. Their mortal lives will be as nothing weighed against eternity, but humankind was made for this, good or bad. A few microseconds of sin and rebellion for most, then on to hell.

In Buddhism, sex and family are intrinsic to the cycle of becoming. Sex being sex, there is no call to fill the earth with more suffering life forms. It is so highly desirable by men and women, as the pinnacle of sensual experience, that there is very little danger of it being completely abandoned. Sex after the sexual revolution is less frequent, less widespread, but it still happens even if it's lost any bigger point.

The Buddha was the father of a boy, Rahula, whom he abandoned to be raised by his mother and parents in a royal court when he began his quest for awakening. The name "Rahula" is translated as "fetter" in one strand of the tradition. A fetter is something that binds one to becoming, and there is no starker contrast between East and West than identifying your own royal heir as one. Most parents think of their children as fetters at times, but for vastly different reasons. "Johnny has a cold, so we can't go out dancing with Bill and Susan tonight..."

Or, "AI has wiped out all the remaining middle-class jobs, so Susie will be living in my basement and doing gig jobs if they're available..."

Christian parents look forward to a new round of becoming in which their offspring – via divine election – are raised up in a new body to the throne of Yahweh. Hopefully. In Buddhism, the final goal is to never take on another form, however sublime. If you want to go to heaven, that's commendable, but the real prize is a full exit from samsara.

Christian parents invariably assume that their practice will probably produce future saints. "Other people's children go to hell, but our kids are okay." They don't really take Christ's words seriously, or consider for a moment whether the praise of celibacy is perhaps rather darkly a way of limiting the number of men and women who will only ever know unending agony after death.

Baptism and confirmation for a child improve their chances of escaping hellfire, but it's not a golden ticket. The path to hell is, as one saint is said to have said, paved with the skulls of priests and bishops. According to the theology of being, annihilation is the worst outcome, so hell is still good even if you are parked there forever. Agony without end is still better than nothingness since you are still made in the image of God even in the hell realm. Of Judas, Jesus said:

The Son of man goeth as it is written of him: but woe unto that man by whom the Son of man is betrayed! it had been good for that man if he had not been born.

The implication is that nothingness – total voidness of being – was desirable for at least one member of the human race. This is a metaphysical impossibility in Buddhism, so perish the thought.

The Buddha, however, was the most compassionate of men and gods, and his mission as a young man was to end suffering, for himself, his family, and all beings. If he could discover the lost path, the path overgrown by weeds, he could save unhappy creatures, including his own son, parents, former wife, and family. Westerners sometimes only hear, "He abandoned his son," and get stuck there. The Buddha abandoned his son so that he might never taste death again.

The Buddha succeeded in his mission, of course, and his son Rahula later joined him in the sangha. Junior became an arahant, died before his father Gautama, and is nowhere to be found in the cosmos. The Buddha didn't weep as the body of his only son was consumed on the funeral pyre. Christ, the son of God, uttered the last words, "It is finished," as his mother looked on and wept. The Buddha perhaps said, upon seeing his son's corpse, "the holy life has been lived, and all that was to be done is done." Christ's last words are meant for some; the latter is a conclusion for one.

Rahula's biological father ended his suffering once and for all by finding the lost trail, the one forgotten. There is no greater gift that a father could give to his son, and this is, I think, a good model for fatherhood. No, most men will never become buddhas with sons, but they can teach their children Right View and show them that the wholesome is always preferable to the unwholesome. There is no greater field of merit for a layman than sharing the good, the worthy, the Triple Gem with his children.

In Buddhism, the human body is the rarest gift, a precious opportunity to hear the dhamma and to practice the good. The denizens of hell are in so much agony that mindfulness is impossible; most devas are so enthralled by pleasure that a 30-minute sit is just as impossible. For a Buddhist to produce children here in the earthly realm is to participate in a very rare occurrence in nature. Anti-natalism is nowhere near the default position of the buddhadhamma.

Presently, we understand that a demographic collapse is underway. Thailand is reported to have a birth rate of 0.82; South Korea's is also bleak. The West is heavily reliant on immigrants to maintain its economy. Toward the end, Ancient Rome imported farmers and recruited foreign soldiers for its army. Military planners at the Pentagon have discussed something like this in recent years: citizenship for illegals for active duty military service.

Tainter would cite this as an example of his numinous "complexity," but the causes were moral: ruling classes made life so unbearable for the natives that they stopped forming families. Checking out among the young is not a new phenomenon and, in its current manifestation, cannot be blamed purely on smartphones and doomscrolling.

Collapse writers frequently mention that failing civilizations are marked by a male retreat from marriage and family formation. They silently withdraw from the social project because it is seen as having only high costs with no reward. In Tainter's The Collapse of Complex Societies, he mentions narratives in which the lower classes (Toynbee's "internal proletariat") withdraw all affection from the patria. They refuse to feed these systems with their labor and blood once they become clearly destructive to their own modest ends: a wife, kids, safe neighborhood. The withdrawal of affection in marriage is also a sign of its impending collapse.

Declines in fertility are not directly caused by feminism but rather by advances in technology and its proliferation. Feminism is a luxury designer ideology made possible by techne. Every advance in technique leads to greater satisfaction among women with their roles as market actors, building small businesses, running a farm, or, in Victoria Nuland's case, starting wars and getting men killed. Men are no longer essential to the running of a society, unless the lights go out, or there's a major wildfire bearing down on an upper-middle-class subdivision in Los Angeles.

Technological societies require specialists with years of post-high-school training. Women are conscripted by the state to become tax donkeys (like the men) for the military-industrial complex and oligarchic class, the thought being that whatever population decline happens as a side effect can be offset with much cheaper immigrants who are desperate and, therefore, compliant. H-1 B employees say "Yes" a lot because they have to; they've no choice.

Educating a child in preparation for decades of mentally challenging work in white-collar professions is extremely expensive, requiring incredible "investment" in time and money on the part of parents. The parents will likely see no ROI unless their kids become wealthy and pay it back. It's a gamble that more and more adults are forgoing, given the high risk. It is a sounder calculation to work for oneself, using the extra savings for pleasurable experiences and lowered stress levels. Love is the cause of pain, disappointment, and suffering. Ask a parent whose child dies prematurely, or has run away from home, or gone full "no-contact." Future orientation measured in generations goes out the window when these possible scenarios are laid out before young adults.

The foregoing sounds like a cold appraisal, and it is. In simpler agrarian societies, marriage, sex, and family formation are, long term, a financial boon since many children make the work easier and go faster. Children trained by their parents in an occupation don't go to college, take on unpayable debts, and then struggle to establish their own households. Instead, they give their labor in exchange for training; at 18, they are ready to strike out on their own, but they will have established strong interdependency with their biological families. A son who spends his youth at his father's elbow learning a trade has layers of binding that make him a powerful future ally in business and status. Even in our degenerate age, we will still admire the rare skilled tradesman who learned under his father's tutelage, becoming in adulthood a friend and business partner to his parents.

Men still like women. It's unclear whether women are as enthusiastic about men as men are about women. Given the choice between working for a man in an office (after piling up hundreds of thousands in debt) and staying home to raise children, most women in an advanced economy will choose the former because men have become optional. The woman who dreams of getting married and pregnant at 18 or 22 is now a rarity. This is not a purely Western matter, as I indicated by the Asian birth-rate collapse. Japanese women are not keen to become, as Catholic women I knew used to say, "brood mares" and "baby-making machines." I've also talked to a few women who were frustrated that they can't have the traditional marriage that their parents and grandparents had.

Instead of becoming mothers in Japan, they sometimes enter the porn industry when their dull bank jobs become unbearable.

"While there were always spots open for amateurs in the '90s, now it’s said only 15 out of 100 aspiring actresses can get a role and the rest are turned away at the door. It’s just like applying for a part-time job at a convenience store."

While the adult video industry is known for being recession-proof, Nakamura points out that not all applicants are in it for the money: "One girl had been working for a major bank for one or two years and had begun to feel unsure if it was the right career choice for her. She likes sex and realized she could be an AV actress, and told me she was really happy with her career change."

And, despite the nature of the work, a strong academic or educational background is valued by producers when trying to sift through so many applicants. "Girls from top-tier colleges are often chosen over those who have a weak academic background," said Nakamura. "Those with credentials and a job are also more likely to make the cut, especially teachers and nurses."

Credentialism has reached even the flesh pot business. It's no longer enough to have sex with strangers on camera; you need a degree to get ahead, to, in fact, give head professionally.

I don't know if Japanese women have to go deep into debt to get their sheepskins because of the highly technical work required by pornography. (Tainter's invisible hand of complexity is in the room with us right now, hovering over the adult film industry.)

Young, educated Japanese women like our bank officer are not reproducing, finding porn to be a better activity, a side-hustle since it pays while providing more stimulation than their drab 9-5 jobs. Everyone thinks financial independence is still possible, and they are told that if they give up their ethics and sell their souls, they can get the good life promised in advertising.

I write this within weeks of the U.S. Secretary of the Treasury, Scott Bessent, intervening to prop up a falling yen. So far, it's not going well. It's not clear how degreed Japanese women on porn sets will be able to pay off the largest debt of any industrial nation, but I assume these side gigs are taxable income. Maybe that's Japan's strategy for paying down its debt, to push its womenfolk into side gigs making porn. Older generations would see this as a national defeat. But childless people do not have long time horizons, and they are unlikely to become more taxpayers as wives and mothers given their career choices.

In middle age, I reflect back on my youthful naivety. In my teens, it seemed I would go to college and, like an older brother, be married at 25 with one or two children. I had watched the Soviet empire collapse and, before my senior year of high school, lived in Germany for a summer. I visited East Germany and Prague, seeing the misery of these areas up close. I remember one day trip into the region of Prussia with a group of Western tourists, and how hard it was to find a restaurant that could serve the 10 or 20 of us because there was no food to spare. We ended up eating shriveled sausages in a dingy dining room of an old, dilapidated hostel. At 17, it was the most sobering thing I had ever seen: the near-total absence of anything like fast food. I was numb at the thought that there were no Burger Kings in an entire nation and that we might have to go hungry for a day before we reached civilization and tables of fine dining again.

In my teen years, women's bodies were of course very interesting to think about, but I didn't stop there. No, for every crush, I would develop elaborate future scenarios where we were married, living in a comfortable starter home with cute little babies. Beta males are the glue of society, and I fall solidly in the camp, seeing nothing wrong with being a worker bee. But worker bees have to benefit from the colony they support with their labor.

Russia had turned a corner, PCs promised a world of plenty and interesting work, and there was no need to think about a dark future of possible nuclear annihilation. We looked forward eagerly to the "peace dividend." Thankfully, the recent Russia-Ukraine war revived something of the existential dread found during the Cold War. Something old, something familiar from childhood restored to me in middle age.

Young men and their hormones are frequently berated now in Western culture, but I grew up with several older siblings and thought a large family was normal and desirable. The Brady Bunch and Eight Is Enough were in syndication, probably for Catholics and those WASPs who refused to use birth control, but just as likely a recognition that divorce was a fact and blended families a reality. My first cousins were even more numerous, and we spent a lot of time with them doing kid stuff. It was only later that I learned we were oddballs, since by then most families had only one or two children. In hindsight, my closest school chums were sometimes only children. Later in life, my mom told me that people would glare at her when they saw her with her gaggle of well-behaved boys in tow.

My visions of the good American life (post-Cold War edition) with a wife and children at 25 or 30 were built on mental fabrications rooted in older ideals picked up from religion and family. More specifically, my biological form was constructing a future in which regular sex with a cute girl led to a family and integration into a wider community. In college, I learned that women didn't seem to have these goals. Some did, but I was becoming less and less certain about the future as NAFTA kicked in and lower-middle-class jobs in my town dried up. I had no desire to work in a factory since I was in college, but I could tell the options for a traditional lifestyle were fading, even though the U.S. had won the Cold War against its adversary, the Soviet Union.

I landed on my feet and, well into my twenties, began looking more closely at marriage. I was still a hopeless romantic, fueled by elaborate fantasies of meeting a wonderful, cute, all-American girl who liked cuddles, children, funny jokes, talking about books, watching Dr. Who and other nonsense. The marriages I saw up close, however, were not especially pleasant or easy. Divorce was more common, and my more dreamy visions of conjugal life began to fade. People with highly developed theologies often trip over the ordinary earthly obstacles. The ideal falls short of the actual experience.

With the fog lifting, I could see that marriage was unsatisfying, a daily struggle, and that Christian affiliation or devotion didn't really matter. Marriage, in fact, seemed downright stressful, not something any sane man or woman would want long-term since change is constant, unpredictable, and uncontrollable. Even now, it's unusual to hear a married person talk openly about their spouse, the pleasure of their companionship after many years together. Wedding rings are optional, and one can no longer assume marriage status by their absence.

College and the workplace showed me the dark side of male and female sexual psychology. I stopped romanticizing women – what the kids call putting women on a pedestal – as my powers of observation improved. In the last few decades, things have gotten only worse, with men and women actively despising one another. When I was in high school, boys and girls enjoyed each other's company. Physical attraction was a big part of it, but I also remember fondly just the pure fun of flirting and joking around with them. We in the GenX cohort, at least in my neck of the woods, didn't view the opposite gender as worthy of derision and open detestation. Far from it.

I feel especially blessed to be single in middle age. Not all marriages are bad, and I see the rare happy couple built on long-term friendship as something like winning the lottery. Rare, but it happens.

Marriage, more generally, is now completely rooted in delusion. Earlier primitive societies in India, China, and the pre-modern West treated marriage as a survival strategy, and that pressure was enough to guarantee its stability; but in the West today, its observance is more of a lifestyle choice. Meaning, one can pile on whatever delusions he or she wants to make it appealing, expecting more than it can give. Of course, delusion is easily torn apart. If one's own ego-driven fabrications are used to veil the object of desire – a man or a woman – then heartache will attend when the curtain drops.

The sex act itself is wonderful, but it's also, paradoxically, unsatisfactory. I remember sitting in a Knights of Columbus bar in Washington, D.C. at 19, looking at a poster of a young Kathy Ireland in a swimsuit on the wall. Underneath her were the words, "Somewhere, some guy is sick of her shit." This was a statement of dukkha, and it could be applied from a woman's perspective to any desirable man.

Any man who has been with the same beautiful woman can grow tired of her because there is nothing satisfying in this kind of life beyond a few moments of delight. If he is not of a compassionate bent, is not looking to make children, or lacks any kind of spiritual outlook rooted in an authentic tradition, he can become very callous, seeing her body as a source of pleasure that no longer provides. Physical attraction, even in a committed relationship, is not the basis for the wholesome life. Couples who actively work against pregnancy because it interferes with their personal goals and desires will be frustrated when sex loses its draw. Everything desirable loses its luster eventually. If one has skipped the practice of metta, the reserve tanks of compassion will run on empty.

I bring this up because when young men look at women, they become hyper-focused on sex, the sensual pleasure. This is, contrary to some feminist thought, a deeply biological programming rooted in evolution, not a manifestation of sociology or ideology. Men are attracted to women initially for reproductive purposes, and the men themselves don't know that they are being used by Mother Nature. Aristotle saw procreation as the best way to reach eternity, but its fuel was firmly natural, limited, and restraining. Sometimes it feels like life is a play, and we are just actors following a script we didn't write. We are machines whose buttons are being mashed by someone we can't see, off in a dark corner behind the stage.

Christian couples don't think to themselves during the moments leading up to sex that, if they carry through with it and a new life is created, that life will likely just end up consigned to a lake of molten fire for all eternity, with companions like demons, murderers, thieves, and the like. Parents used to worry endlessly about their kids falling in with a bad group of friends. They believe things work out according to a divine plan and that their beliefs provide reasonable protection against a bad end for their offspring. Nature, not super-nature, governs reproduction at the physical level.

"Better to marry than to burn!" says the Apostle.

Sex inside of marriage becomes a lesser evil than masturbating in the shower or hooking up with gay men at truck stops. These are mortal sins. If the children of Christian marriages end up in hell, then it's on them, and everything works out for the glory of God. It doesn't matter, in other words, whether one's children are damned, since the saints in heaven delight in the punishment (not the suffering) of the wicked for all eternity. If your child is numbered among the population of hell, it's a source of pleasure in heaven. Justice is being done, and God is greater than any child.

This sounds callous, of course, but if you feel this way, then you do not understand just how outside of reality God really is. In heaven, the saint who smells the smoke and hears the screams of his children sees things in a very different light. Having been perfected, rid of his own sin, everything is laid out very clearly, and the exercise of divine justice more than makes up for the eternal death of a child. "We see through a glass darkly" gives way to clear light and the Big Picture.

This is a major difference between Buddhism and Christianity: In the former, one directs compassion towards all beings regardless of their state, dares even hope that all will find final release; in the latter, the Christian saint undergoes some profound ontological change in which he becomes completely detached from his own children, such that he can rejoice at their being the objects of divine justice for all eternity. "The Lord giveth, the Lord taketh: blessed be the name of the Lord!"

This hardness actually runs completely counter to the natural instinct of higher animals, who are pained at the thought of their offspring being harmed. Mama cats grieve the loss of a kitten, but projecting the fate of their babies into eternity is impossible. A dead kitten is annihilated – reduced to nothingness – in the Christian telling. Mama cat forgets her dead baby and moves on to her own future meeting with the Grim Reaper.

Longevity is a real issue in marriage now. Traditional religions expect a couple to live to 75 or 80 and take care of each other. I've watched religious couples fall apart since humans, despite William James's observation, are anything but bundles of habit by age 30. People do change as they age, sometimes greatly, sometimes not so much, but there is change.

It's now normal to hear about gray divorces. As a couple enters their twilight years in an empty nest, the idea of spending their last days married to the same asshole becomes unbearable, and divorce papers are filed. I don't hear much about religious pursuits being taken up as a preparation for death, as an alternate motive. This would actually be laudable. "Honey, our marriage has served its purpose, but I need to spend more time at the foot of a tree, watching my breath... let's get a divorce!"

Classical Indian society depicted people marrying young and, once their children were grown, leaving behind the householder life to enter religious and metaphysical practices aimed at liberation. How often this happened is unknown, and it may just be a pious aspiration seldom acted on. Regardless of the answer, it seems a sane way to live. Marriage is for the maintenance and well-being of the species, but it is subordinate to spiritual life. Like the Buddha, one leaves it behind when it calls.