Rai-1 Nagendra Prasad Rai Bhushan Arayal Advanced Seminar on 211st Century Sexualities 31 March 2011 Perspectives on sexualities

in Human Civilization Human civilization so far, gradually began since the origin of human beings. Civilization is a way of culture, tradition, life of society in a particular period of time. The civilization is a state of human society that is very developed and organized. On the journey of human civilization, the sexuality and sex has become integral part of human beings. The civilization and sexuality journey has arrived in this 211st century with different forms and perspectives. The advocacy on sexualities has been given by different writers, intellectuals, thinkers, politicians etc.. The discourse and discussions have tremendously proliferated. Different views, perspectives have been presented in a way or other on it. T. S. Eliot present in the Waste Land, modern world is spiritual and emotional sterility and living the bodies in death. The modern wastelanders have lost their sense of good and evil and lived life of complete inactivity, listlessness and apathy. The poet starts the line from, April is the cruelest of months, breeding(The waste Land,1236). The lines reveal that people dislike to be resurrected from their death-in-life. The modern wasteland has sprung from the degeneration, vulgarization and commercialization of sex. It was the time; the sex act was connected source of life and vitality, procreation and love. But, sex-act developed as consuming enjoyable things along with the human civilization. It has become game of seduction and exploitation of the innocent. People are boring and monotonous despite all the luxuries. The life of modern wasteland has been routine, neurotic which has a hysterical. There is no charm of lif

Rai-2 sexual relationship. It was the time that the tortures and sex violations used to transform into purification. The lines: The change of Philomel, by the barbarous king So rudely forced; yet there the nightingale Filled all the desert with inviolable voice And still she cried, and still the world pursues, Jug Jug to dirty ears (1239). Here Philomel is telling how she was raped, her tongue cut, and how finally she was transformed into the nightingale of golden voice. Her song filled the Waste Land an antiquity with melody and it echoes still. But to dirty ears of modern man it is a meaningless jug jug!. The Waste Landers fail to understand the real significance of Philomelas story purification and transformation through suffering. The violation of sex has always resulted in spiritual wasteland, both past and present. It shows the degeneration of love into lust. But in the past, suffering led to transformation and regeneration, but there is no such hope for the modern man. The sexual relationship can be seen the mechanical relationship in the modern Waste Land. There is neither repulsion nor any pleasure, and this absence of feeling is a measure of the sterility of the age. The sex relationship has not only lost but also developed into different forms. The play in The Goat, the written by Edward Albee, presents directly or indirectly different forms of sexualities. The tale of a married, middle aged architects life crumbles when he falls in love with goat the Sylvia. The focuses on limits of an ostensibly liberal society. Showing this play , the family crisis, Albee challenges audiences members to question their own morality in the face of other social taboos including infidelity, homosexuality, pedophilia incest and, of course bestiality. The play crosses boundaries of all kinds raises

Rai-3 issues that are so remote from our everyday experiences. We dont even talk about them. If we thought there was nothing left to reveal about sex, then perhaps we havent given bestiality enough consideration. In a key scene between father and son, Albee does suggest that sexual impulse can come from inappropriate sources, but it should be understood as just that not as a permanent affliction. Billy, a child-man suddenly crossing a minefield, unsure of his own sexuality and facing the collapse of the family unit that anchors him to certainty. Similarly, the issue of sexuality is picked up by Michel Foucault from the history and gives crystal clear perspective on it. During the 17th century, sexuality was not considered illicit and sexual acts were pursued more or less flagrantly. There was no taboo regarding sex, and even children were commonly aware of sexual behaviors. Then sexuality was gradually shifted into the home, where it became a personal matter between exclusive partners. Sexuality was controlled and manipulated to become productive and reproductive of national power. Thus, the repression of sexuality led to the concentration of power, whilst power became simultaneously equated to pleasure. Throughout the 18th and 19th centuries, sexuality became taboo, became socially non-existent, and the discourse of sexuality fell silent, even as populations continued to increase rapidly. In contemporaneous times, Freud and other sexuality theorists eventually began to investigate the silent paradigm of sex. But this trend could remain no longer and turned into the home during the 18th, 19th , and 20th centuries. The sex was confined into utilitarian and fertile one. Three volumes of The History of Sexuality were published before Foucault's death in 1984.it focused primarily on

Rai-4 the last two centuries, and the functioning of sexuality as an analytics of power related to the emergence of a science of sexuality, and the emergence of biopower in the West. In this volume he questions the "repressive hypothesis", the widespread belief that we have, particularly since the nineteenth century, "repressed" our natural sexual drives. He shows that what we think of as "repression" of sexuality actually constituted sexuality as a core feature of our identities, and produced a proliferation of discourse on the subject. By the seventeenth century in France, censorship of sex and sexuality among bourgeois society initiated modern prudishness. Foucault proposes, however, a discursive explosion (The Incitement to Discourse,17) through confession resulting in policing of statements and a whole restrictive economy accompanying the social redistributions of the classical period (18). Consider the evolution of the Catholic pastoral and the sacrament of penance after the council of Trent (18) where new rules applied to the actual words used to describe the sex act. But while the language may have been refined, the scope of the confessionthe confession of the fleshcontinually increased (19). According to the new pastoral, sex must not be named imprudently, but its aspects, its correlations, and its effects must be pursued down to their slenderest ramificationseverything had to be told (19). The flesh was (re)constructed as the root of all evil while also being the source of desire. It was desirethoughts, feelings, stirringswhich were considered sinful. Discourse, therefore, had to trace the meeting line of the body and the soul ( 20). This scheme of transforming sex into discourse had been devised long before in an ascetic and monastic setting (20). In the seventeenth century it was the rule for every good Christian: you will seek to transform

Rai-5 your desire, your every desire, into discourse (21). And then it could be censored or made acceptable by the clergy. Western man had been drawn for three centuries to the task of telling everything concerning his sex; that since the classical age there has been a constant optimization and an increasing valorization of the discourse on sex; and that this carefully analytical discourse was meant to yield multiple effects of displacement, intensification, reorientation, and modification of desire itself. (23) Foucault further elaborates upon this process. Toward the beginning of the eighteenth century, there emerged a political, economic, and technical incitement to talk about sex (23), not only from a moral point of view, but from a rational one. Sex became a police matter (24) and policing of sexthrough useful and public discourses (25) became necessary. Policing of sex arose along with several other techniques of power in the eighteenth century. The idea of population became an economic and political problem. population as wealth, population as manpower or labor capacity, population balanced between its own growth and the resources it commanded. Governments perceived that they were not dealing simply with subjects, or even with a people, but with a population, with its specific phenomena and its peculiar variables: birth and death rates, life expectancy, fertility, state of health, frequency of illnesses, patterns of diet and habitation. ( 25)

Rai-6 Sex became interesting in terms of birthrates, age of marriage, illegitimate births, frequency of sexual relations, fertility, and contraception. Sex became an issue between the state and the individual, including children. In secondary schools of the eighteenth century the question of sex was a constant preoccupation (27). The sex of the schoolboy became in the course of the eighteenth centuryand quite apart from that of adolescents in general a public problem ( 28). Foucault brings these discourses on sex of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries together through medicine, psychiatry, criminal justice, and social controls. Each of these disciplines had something to say about the sexuality of individuals, of couples, of children, and of adolescents. Foucault asks if all of these social controls and discourses were merely to reinforce procreation and take the pleasure out of sex? He believes it is right but he takes it a step further. Foucault notes that the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have been the age of the implantation of perversions and the initiation of sexual heterogeneities (The Perverse Implantation,37). Going back to the eighteenth century codes, Foucault notes three which governed sexual practices: the canonical law, the Christian pastoral, and civil law. These codes delineated the division between licit and illicit (37) sexual activity. Marital relations were saturated with prescriptions (37) and under constant surveillance. Breaking the rules of marriage or seeking strange pleasures brought an equal measure of condemnation ( 38). Homosexuality, infidelity, marriage without parental consent, and bestiality were all

Rai-7 condemned equally. Prohibitions bearing on sex were essentially of a juridical nature (38). Hermaphrodites, for instance, were seen as criminals or crimes offspring (38). Two changes occurred as a result of the explosion of discourse in the eighteenth and nineteenth century: a focus upon heterosexual monogamy and scrutiny of the sexuality of children, mad men and women, and criminals. The libertine of the past became the pervert of the present; unnatural; degenerate. Perverts were akin to madmen and friendly with delinquents. Foucault attempts to tie these changing attitudes back to repression and social control by addressing the forms of power that were exercised. Marriage was the best, adultery was wrong, masturbation and incest became of interest along with childrens sexuality ,the homosexual was now a species, sodomy had been considered a forbidden act, but now sodomy described a person or an identity, along with other so-called perversions. The medical examination, the psychiatric investigation, the pedagogical report, and family controls may have the over-all and apparent objective of saying no to all wayward or unproductive sexualities, but the fact is that they function as mechanisms with a double impetus,pleasure and power. Through heterosexual, socially sanctioned marriage, the family became the focus of all sexual activity: all this made the family, even when brought down to its smallest dimensions, a complicated network, saturated with multiple, fragmentary, and mobile sexualities (46) leaving the classroom, the dormitory, the visit, and the consultation the site of forms of a nonconjugal, nonmonogamous sexuality. Nineteenth-century bourgeois societyand it is doubtless still with uswas a society of blatant and fragmented perversion.Modern society is perverse, not in spite of its puritanism

Rai-8 or as if from a backlash provoked by its hypocrisy; it is in actual fact, and directly, perverse (47). The growth of perversions is not a moralizing theme that obsessed the scrupulous minds of the Victorians. It is the real product of the encroachment of a type of power on bodies and their pleasures. It is possible that the West has not been capable of inventing any new pleasures, and it has doubtless not discovered any original vices. But it has defined new rules for the game of powers and pleasures. Therefore, Foucault concludes, we must abandon the idea that modern industrial societies ushered in an age of increased sexual repression (49) and understand that it is the opposite that has become apparentnever have there existed more centers of powernever more sites where the intensity of pleasures and the persistency of power catch hold, only to spread elsewhere (49). Regarding the perspective of sexuality on the bases of these statements, the discourses and discussions on have developed different forms and been followed to unlimited sexuality acts. The historical development of sex is tremendous and gives different practices, forms of sexualities which are more or less similar as degeneration of sexuality in the Waste Land. To explore the more about civilization and sexuality we must go through The Subversive Bodily Acts by Judith Butler in connection of the Waste Land. She focuses how gendered identity is socially produced through repetitions of ordinary daily activities. Her goal is to uncover the assumptions that restrict the meaning of gender to received

Rai-9 notions of masculinity and femininity. Key for Butler is the insistence that nothing is natural, not even sexual identity. Following Foucaults work in The History of Sexuality (1976), Butler stresses that modern culture sees sexuality as a fundamental constituent of identity. Our sex and sexual desires and activities are profound indices of who we are. Butler attempts to reveal that the seemingly natural is actually socially constructed and, thus, contingent. The established and conventional connections between anatomy and desire, and between sexual activities and ascriptions of identity, are not inevitable; they have been different in other cultures and in other historical eras, and they are open to revision. To expose the foundational categories of sex, gender, and desire as effects of a specific formation of power requires a form of critical inquiry for the origins of gender, the inner truth of female desire, a genuine or authentic sexual identity that repression has kept from view. Categories of true sex, discrete gender, and specific sexuality have constituted the stable point of reference for a great deal of feminist theory and politics. These constructs of identity serve as the points of epistemic departure from which theory emerges and politics itself is shaped. In the case of feminism, politics is ostensibly shaped to express the interests, the perspectives, of women. But is there a political shape to women, as it were, that precedes and prefigures the political elaboration of their interests and epistemic point of view?(Subversive Bodily Acts,372). The construction of coherence conceals the gender discontinuities that run rampant within heterosexual, bisexual, and gay and lesbian contexts in which gender does not

Rai-10 necessarily follow from sex, and desire, or sexuality generally, does not seem to follow from genderindeed, where none of these dimensions of significant corporeality express or reflect one another. When the disorganization and disaggregation of the field of bodies disrupt the regulatory fiction of heterosexual coherence, it seems that the expressive model loses its descriptive force. That regulatory ideal is then exposed as a norm and a fiction that disguises itself as a developmental law regulating the sexual field that it purports to describe. Such acts, gestures, enactments, generally construed, are performative in the sense that the essence or identity that they otherwise purport to express are fabrications manufactured and sustained through corporeal signs and other discursive means. That the gendered body is performative suggests that it has no ontological status apart from the various acts which constitute its reality. This also suggests that if that reality is fabricated as an interior essence, that very interiority is an effect and function of a decidedly public and social discourse, the public regulation of fantasy through the surface politics of the body, the gender border control that differentiates inner from outer, and so institutes the integrity of the subject. If the cause of desire, gesture, and act can be localized within the self of the actor, then the political regulations and disciplinary practices which produce that ostensibly coherent gender are effectively displaced from view. The displacement of a political and discursive origin of gender identity onto a psychological core precludes an analysis of the political constitution of the gendered subject and its fabricated notions about the ineffable interiority of its sex or of its true identity.

Rai-11 Butler suggests that drag fully subverts the distinction between inner and outer psychic space and effectively mocks both the expressive model of gender and the notion of true gender identity. The notion of gender parody defended here does not assume that there is an original which such parodic identities imitate. Indeed, the parody is of the very notion of an original; just as the psychoanalytic notion of gender identification is constituted by a fantasy of a fantasy, the transfiguration of an Other who is always already a figure in that double sense, so gender parody reveals that the original identity after which gender fashions itself is an imitation without an origin. To be more precise, it is a production which, in effect that in its effectpostures as an imitation (379). Butler further asserts that hegemonic, misogynist culture are the part of parodic styles and they are denaturalized and mobilized through their parodic recontextualization. Imitations effectively displace the meaning of the original, they imitate the myth of originality itself. In the place of an original identification which serves as a determining cause, gender identity might be reconceived as a personal/cultural history of received meanings subject to a set of imitative practices which refer laterally to other imitations and which, jointly, construct the illusion of a primary and interior gendered self or parody the mechanism of that construction. Parody itself is not subversive, but what makes certain kinds of parodic repetitions effectively disruptive, truly troubling, and which repetitions become domesticated and recirculated as instruments of cultural controlling factor. So identity is problem. We must not be trapped in the name of identity box. We have endless potentialities to have identities and can be explored multiple identities. Gender is not

Rai-12 expressive but performative. The distinction between expression and performativeness is crucial. The acts which are performed by body are culturally inscribed. The gender reality would be created trough sustained social performances. Masculinity and feminity are also constituted as apart of the strategy that conceals genders performative character and the performaive possibilities for proliferating gender configurations outside the restricting frames of masculinity domination and compulsory heterosexuality. The relations between the different perspective on sex and gender and deformative practices in the modern wastelanders somehow have developed closer and closer. The sex or gender should not be trapped in the box of masculinity and feminity. When this norm and perspective is present then it leads to physical pleasure rather than spirituality in the sex. It goes to barren land and modern people should survive in the position of sterility. To travel and explore the new alternative forms of sexualities and advocacy on it is, another an eye opening event for us in the 21st Century Sexualities. While going through the issues of it, we find that mind striking, surprising, almost unacceptable issues but they are really growing as an integral part of human civilization. They are socially, politically, economically, and sexually itself burning issues. They are the outcome of the modern civilization of human beings. The advocacy of the writers, politicians, intellectual, artists etc. have obviously preserved the human rights and raised the questions whether the freedom of human beings are constructed are natural. But it seems, in a way, the destruction of decent human civilization and leading to spiritual degeneration all around in the modern wasteland. It is mechanical acts and detachment of spirituality of human beings and leading to unseen

Rai-13 dark desert of civilization. However, it would be wrong to say that the advocacy for alternative forms of sexualities merely depicts the degeneration of sexuality and destruction of modern civilization.

Rai-14 Work cited Butler, Judith. The Cultural Studies Reader. ed. Simon During. New York: Routledge, 2007, 371-82. Eliot, T. S.. The Waste Land. The Norton Anthology of Poetry. ed. Margaret Ferguson, Mary Jo Satter and Jon Stallworthy. New York: Norton, 1996. 1234-47. Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality: Trans. Robert Hurley. London: Penguin Books, 1998.

Rai-1 Nagendra Prasad Rai Prakash Subedi Religion: Buddhism 07 April, 2011 Buddhas Multiple Body in Mahayana Buddhism Buddhism is a path of practice and spiritual development leading to Insight into the true nature of life. Buddhist practices such as meditation are means of changing oneself in order to develop the qualities of awareness, kindness, and wisdom. The experience developed within the Buddhist tradition over thousands of years has created an incomparable resource for all those who wish to follow a path - a path which ultimately culminates in Enlightenment or Buddhahood. Because Buddhism does not include the idea of worshipping a creator god, some people do not see it as a religion in the normal, Western sense. The basic tenets of Buddhist teaching are straightforward and practical: nothing is fixed or permanent; actions have consequences; change is possible. Thus Buddhism addresses itself to all people irrespective of race, nationality, or gender. It teaches practical methods (such as meditation) which enable people to realise and utilise its teachings in order to transform their experience, to be fully responsible for their lives and to develop the qualities of Wisdom and Compassion. Buddhists follow many different forms of Buddhism, but all traditions are characterised by non-violence, lack of dogma, tolerance of differences, and, usually, by the practice of meditation. Among the different forms of Buddhism, Mahayana Buddhism is one of the main Buddhisms that means "great vehicle," and the primary distinction of Mahayana is its emphasis on the enlightenment of all beings. Mahayana idealizes the bodhisattva, an enlightened being who remains in the world to work for the liberation of others.

Rai-2 In Mahayana Buddhism, the body is recognized as Trikaya which is the combination of three bodies or kayas: Dharmakaya, Sambhogakaya, and Nirmanakaya. The Body in common sense, is physical structure possessed by living beings. It can also refer to any collection of things classed together as text. But whatever its meaning is borne in mind that is completely different in the sense of Buddhism or at the case of the Buddhas multiple bodies. The dharmakaya is sometimes called the Truth Body or the Dharma Body and is identified with shunyata. Dharmakaya is everything, unmanifested, free of characteristics and distinctions. According to the Mahayana teaching of shunyata, beings and things have no intrinsic existence in themselves. All phenomena come into being because of conditions created by other phenomena. Thus, they have no existence of their own and are empty of a permanent self. There is neither reality nor not-reality; only relativity. This emptiness is not nihilistic. All phenomena are void of self-essence, but it is incorrect to say that phenomena exist or dont exist. Form and appearance create the world of myriad things, but the myriad things have identity only in relation to each other. Beyond identity, shunyata is an absolute reality that is all things and beings, unmanifested. According to Paul Griffiths (1994) in classical doctrine, Buddha is said to have three types of body. These bodies consist of the dharmakaya or svabhavkaya- the real body, the sambhogkaya- the body of communal enjoyment, and the nirmanakaya- the body of magical transformation. The dharmakaya refers to those factors or dharmas the possession of which serves to distinguish a Buddha from one who is not a Buddha. Buddha is possessed of a body of Dharma, his teaching, or perhaps a body of dharmas, his Buddha qualities. These qualities distinctly contrast that the actual physical body of Buddha and with Buddhas true body. The physical body passes away as Buddhas body already passed away but his true

Rai-3 body continues. The true body is either his teachings (Dharmas) that remain and lead to enlightenment, the qualities the possession of which to their fullest degree make him a Buddha and that can still be obtained by his followers. Buddha can be seen through a physical body but can actually be seen with the eyes of Dharmas. Thus through understanding his teachings one sees the true body of the Buddha, yet the very point of those teaching is that emptiness is not something that can be seen at all in the normal way of seeing. So the Buddha body is as eternal, unalterable, auspicious, made of Dharma. He thus does not die and remains with skills to help others. Nagarjuna puts it in his Paramarthstava (Hymn to the Ultimate), the Buddha has not been born, remains nowhere, neither existing nor non-existing. This is actually the way of things (dharmata), emptiness itself (Buddhism, 174). Madhyamaka sources also speaks of the dharmakaya- the body whisch is the collection of ultimates(i.e. for Abhiddharma, dharmas ) - as emptiness. But of course while emptiness applies to everything, one specifically refers to the dharmakaya is spoken of in the context of Buddhology. According to basic structure of theclassical doctrine associated with Yogacara, the dharmakaya is to be equivalent to the actual true way of things (tathata), the purified dependent aspect. Similarly, the sambhogakaya, the body of communal enjoyment, is wonderful form-body (rupakaya). Sambhogakaya is the Reward Body. It is the bliss of enlightenment and the reward of spiritual practice. It appears in the physical form to benefit others. It clearly shows way of fulfilling the Buddhas great aspirations to help other. The body of communal enjoyment is Griffiths Buddha in heaven. It appears according to the needs of sentient beings in glorified body ornamented with the 112 marks of Buddha who is often seen on

Rai-4 statues such as long ears, cranial bump, etc. The Buddha appears in a pure land seating on a lotus throne where a sambhogakaya form of Buddha appears is another plane. Buddhist scholars generally understand a Pure Land as a transcendent state of being. It is a Pure Land is thought of as a real place, not unlike the way many people conceptualize Heaven. The Pure Land is not the final destination, however. The Pure Land is believed that achieving the liberation of Nirvana through a life of monastic austerity was too difficult for most people. They rejected the "self effort" emphasized by earlier schools of Buddhism. Instead, the ideal is rebirth in a Pure Land, where the toils and worries of ordinary life do not interfere with devoted practice of the Buddha's teachings. By the grace of Amitabha's compassion, those reborn in a Pure Land find themselves only a short step from Nirvana. To access to Pure Land, Buddhists accept the basic Buddhas Teachings of the Four Noble Truths and the Eightfold Path. The primary practice common to all schools of Pure Land is the recitation of the name of Amitabha, who is also called Amida. The practices and meditation that help the Pure Land Buddhist visualize Amitabha Buddha. In the most advanced stage of practice, the follower contemplates Amitabha as not separate from his own being. In the Pure Land, Buddha teaches the doctrine to an assembly made up mainly or entirely of advanced bodhisattvas. The place is populated by infinite number of bodies of communal enjoyment because the infinite time and the infinite beings have become Buddha. The sambhogakaya teaches only the Mahayana because these teaching truly manifest in a superior sambhogakaya form. To have direct access to the body of communal enjoyment it is necessary to have spiritual attainments that will allow one, either in this life or in another, to reach the relevant Pure Land.( Buddhism,175)

Rai-5 On the other hand, nirmanakaya, the body of magical transformation is also physical form or appears in the form-body (rupakaya). Nirmanakaya is the Transformation Body, or the body that appears in the world to teach and liberate others. It manifests as automatic ways of fulfilling the Buddhas great aspirations to help others made throughout their long career as boddhisatvas. Sakyamuni Buddha and his great deeds are described on the model of nirmankaya. But the magical transformation can appear in any form that will benefit others and is not limited to appearing in accordance with the classic model of the life of the Buddha. Sakyamuni Buddha emanates as a body of magical transformation since it is asn overflow of the Dharmakaya. The nirmanakaya is the earthly, physical body of a buddha, which manifests in the world to teach the dharma and bring all beings to enlightenment. For example, the historical Buddha is said to have been a nirmanakaya buddha. The nirmanakaya body is subject to sickness, old age and death like any other living being. In conclusion, a Buddha having three kayas, however, wishes to help everyone to benefit in unison.

Rai-6 Works Cited Griffiths, P.J. On Being Buddha: The Classical Doctrine of Buddhahood, Albany, N. Y.: State University of New York Press, 1994. Nagarjuna. On Voidness: A study on Buddhist Nihilism, Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1995. Williams, Paul. Religion: Buddhism, Kathmandu: IACER, 2011.