And One Monk Who Does Not

The Dalai Lama, the exiled Tibetan spiritual and temporal leader, on Friday said sex spelt fleeting satisfaction and trouble later, while chastity offered a better life and "more freedom."

"Sexual pressure, sexual desire, actually I think is short period satisfaction and often, that leads to more complication," the Dalai Lama told reporters in a Lagos hotel, speaking in English without a translator.

He said conjugal life caused "too much ups and downs."

Considered a Buddhist Master exempt from the religion's wheel of death and reincarnation, the Dalai Lama waxed eloquent on the Buddhist credo of non-attachment.

"Too much attachment towards your children, towards your partner," was "one of the obstacle or hindrance of peace of mind," he said.

The Dalai is to be congratulated for a clear explanation of his religion. In regard to sex outside of marriage, the Dalai's view of sex is right on the money. Sex between unmarried and married couple cannot even be compared, they are not the same thing. The unmarried act being usually of desperation, rape or selfishness, the married act being of selflessness, of love. But he is clearly lumping all sex together which renders his pronouncement quite silly. In it we can see Buddhism's fanciful rejection of our basic human nature, it's uselessness and a sort of second-guessing of God's plan. He isn't wrong so much as he is not seeing the whole picture, he sees only part and then erroneously extends it as a whole.

One fun way to evaluate something is to make it universal law and then see what happens. What does the Dalai propose? If everyone achieves this "peace" by following his dictats, do we all live in cells and report periodically to the reproductive center just to keep the race going? Can everyone be a monk? Of course not, that's like dictating that every animal must be an owl.

In this Buddhist pronouncement we see a dreary, monochromatic world. Contrast this with the Christian vision with its emphasis on love in all of its versions with people seperated out into vocations: the religious, the celibate, the married.

Summary: Buddhism is useless outside of being an actual Buddhist monk, hence its attractiveness to counter-culture types in the West who are not seeking God but are throwing on a religion only to later justify their intellectually superior athiesm.