Dear Emily:

I think, for most Western Buddhist monks, celibacy is neither a moral issue or related to denial or asceticism; it is related to practicality.  Having decided that spiritual pursuits are the most important issue in life, relationships (maintaining them, perusing them, relating to their conflicts) are just too demanding/ distracting.  Celibacy with all of its problems and distractions is the lesser of the two difficulties (neither is evil). 

It would be silly to fantasize that we monks spend all of our time in blissful, pious, devotional pursuits, as it would be equally silly to believe that being sexually active, in or out of continuing relationships, is not without disappointment, disillusionment or dissatisfaction.  

I have been a monk for 22 years; I was married for 26 years and indulged other possibilities for some 10 years.  Even my ex-wife judged that I seemed to be happier and was a better person because of my monastic life.  Do monastics miss anything?  Yes (they get horny/ they fall in love)?  Do they miss anything essential?  Apparently not.

 
Yes, not everybody thrives on monastic life but not everyone thrives in relationships.  There is no universal template; there are choices.

 
The question just seemed to spark your curiosity; I hope that satisfies it.  If you are really interested, we could explore it further.

Thanks very much for your reply! 

Well, so I would say on the one hand that I can certainly see how celibacy would be useful if one were working on something all-consuming. And it seems that in the context you describe a lot of the issues that one normally associates with abstention and denial (e.g. in Catholicism) simply aren't there.  Celibacy begun at a particular point in one's life makes much more sense to me than the idea that sexuality is somehow orthogonal to one's spiritual development from the beginning, even before the spiritual path acquires the urgency which makes one reduce other distractions. So this part of your answer makes sense to me -- thanks.

There's another layer to this which I'm curious about, though I'm not sure how well I'll be able to express it. It seems to me that in one's pursuit of the holy, a natural step would be a kind of sanctification of everyday life -- an understanding of the resonance of one's various physical desires. For instance, the constant cycle of hunger and eating can, I think, become quite a beautiful reminder of one's openness to nourishment, the sustaining richness of the world and so on, provided that it is done mindfully and that one also is reasonably sparing. In fact I would go further, and say that this cycle, because of its tie to the body and its reminder of physicality, is also intellectually useful in a spiritual context -- we are, after all, physical creatures, and presumably it is the correct understanding of our physical life which will give us insight.

But the emphasis on celibacy in many religious traditions implies that sexual energy is not something which is thought to be useful in this way. Why is this? Is it too distracting? too dangerous? too banal? too erratic? Is it simply something which, empirically, people are not particularly good at dealing with and so most well-run religious institutions are smart enough to avoid? That would be my guess, but I'd still be interested in the philosophical question. Is sexual energy something which is accessed on a different level when one turns to mainly spiritual and intellectual pursuits? Or is it simply not that important?

Would appreciate any thoughts.