Well…no. But for decades a rumour to that effect has been circulating among tantra practitioners. The story about it is entertaining, especially if you’re an Aldous Huxley fan.
Background
Huxley’s most famous book was the dystopian novel Brave New World, which you may have been assigned to read at school. Frighteningly, its themes look like a blueprint for today’s world.
It describes a World State in which stability is prized above freedom. Humans are mass-produced in hatcheries, genetically engineered into castes (Alphas to Epsilons), and conditioned for stability and happiness via “soma” drug dependency, promiscuity, and consumerism. Hmm…
Perhaps you don’t know that Huxley also wrote a novel that portrays a utopian vision for humanity. Entitled Island, it describes a flourishing, fictional society located in the Pacific. In Huxley’s utopia, young people routinely learn to explore sex without climax. (Link to PDF of entire novel.)
This was not Huxley’s first foray into informing readers about sacred sex. He included a substantial appendix about it in an earlier essay collection.
In Island, the concept of non-fertilisation driven sex is easy to drive right by, as is so often the case. In fact, a professor friend who once assigned it to his students to read admitted he missed this aspect entirely!
Island excerpt
Here’s the key excerpt from Island (pp. 69-91) in which islanders Radha and Ranga instruct a visitor from abroad:
“Maithuna,” [Radha] answered gravely, “is the yoga of love.” “Sacred or profane?”
“There’s no difference.”
“That’s the whole point,” Ranga put in. “When you do maithuna, profane love is sacred love.”
“Buddhatvanyoshidyonisansritan,” the girl quoted.“None of your Sanskirt! What does it mean?”
“How would you translate Buddhatvan, Ranga?”
“Buddhaness, Buddheity, the quality of being enlightened.” Radha nodded and turned back to Will. “It means that Buddhaness is in the yoni.”
“In the yoni?” Will remembered those little stone emblems of the Eternal Feminine that he had bought, as presents for the girls at the office, from a hunchbacked vendor of bondieuseries at Benares. Eight annas for a black yoni; twelve for the still more sacred image of the yoni-lingam.
“Literally in the yoni?” he asked. “Or metaphorically?”
“What a ridiculous question!” said the little nurse, and she laughed her clear unaffected laugh of pure amusement. “Do you think we make love metaphorically? Buddhatvan yoshidyonisan-sritan” she repeated. “It couldn’t be more completely and absolutely literal.”
“Did you ever hear of the Oneida Community?” Ranga now asked.
Will nodded. He had known an American historian who specialized in nineteenth-century communities. “But why do you know about it?” he asked.
“Because it’s mentioned in all our textbooks of applied philosophy. Basically, maithuna is the same as what the Oneida people called Male Continence. …
“In a word,” Will concluded, “it’s just birth control without contraceptives.”
“But that’s only the beginning of the story,” said Ranga. “Maithuna is also something else. Something even more important.” The undergraduate pedant had reasserted himself. “Remember,” he went on earnestly, “remember the point that Freud was always harping on about.
“Which point? There were so many.”
“The point about the sexuality of children. What we’re born with, what we experience all through infancy and childhood, is a sexuality that isn’t concentrated on the genitals; it’s a sexuality diffused throughout the whole organism. That’s the paradise we inherit. But the paradise gets lost as the child grows up. Maithuna is the organised attempt to regain that paradise.”
He turned to Radha. “You’ve got a good memory,” he said. “What’s that phrase of Spinoza’s that they quote in the applied philosophy book?”
“‘Make the body capable of doing many things,’” she recited. “‘This will help you to perfect the mind and so to come to the intellectual love of God.’”
“Hence all the yogas,” said Ranga. “Including maithuna.”
“And it’s a real yoga,” the girl insisted. “As good as raja yoga, or karma yoga, or bhakti yoga. In fact, a great deal better, so far as most people are concerned. Maithuna really gets them there.”
“What’s ‘there’?” Will asked.
“‘There’ is where you know.”
“Know what?”
“Know who in fact you are—and believe it or not,” she added, “tat tvam asi—thou art That, and so am I: That is me.” The dimples came to life, the teeth flashed. “And That’s also him.” She pointed at Ranga. “Incredible, isn’t it?” She stuck out her tongue at him. “And yet it’s a fact.”Ranga smiled, reached out and with an extended forefinger touched the tip of her nose. “And not merely a fact,” he said. “A revealed truth.” He gave the nose a little tap. “A revealed truth,” he repeated. “So mind your P’s and Q’s, young woman.” …
More Island
(p. 93) “Were you taught maithuna at school?” [Will] asked ironically.
At school,” Radha answered with a simple matter-of-fact-ness that took all the Rabelaisian wind out of his sails.
Everybody’s taught it,” Ranga added.
“And when does the teaching begin?”
“About the same time as trigonometry and advanced biology. That’s between fifteen and fifteen and a half.”
“And after they’ve learned maithuna, after they’ve gone out into the world and got married—that is, if you ever do get married?”
Oh, we do, we do,” Radha assured him.
Do they still practice it?”
Not all of them, of course. But a good many do.”
Buddhatvanyoshidyonisansrita?
If you were paying attention, you noticed that one of Huxley’s protagonists states that Gautama Buddha himself taught that enlightenment resides in the sexual parts of women (“Buddhatvanyoshidyonisansritan”). Huxley’s work is fiction, so his characters can say whatever they please.
But trouble began to brew. Some tantra-book authors quoted a version of the fabricated phrase attributed to Buddha as if they were the great teacher’s actual words. Devoted Buddhists who stumbled upon this secondary claim were understandably troubled, even angered, according to Cupid’s Poisoned Arrow author Robinson, who had unwittingly shared the bogus claim from a secondary source. (Her publisher has agreed to revise the text going forward.)
So, alas, Buddha, however enlightened, apparently did not teach that “that Buddhaness is in the yoni.” However, though he may not have urged his disciples to seek enlightenment via sexual congress without orgasm, he did urge them not to continue the cycle of suffering by fathering children.
Thus Buddhists who are householders (married) may still do well to choose the path of sex without ejaculation. It accords with Buddhism’s traditional emphasis on compassion, self-control, and retention of semen.
And,
Remember that Tibetan Buddhist tantric sexual practice advocates controlled sexual union as a path to Enlightenment…especially in the Kali Yuga.
