Human Sexuality Discussed in the Jātaka Stories
Posted on November 30th, 2016

Dr Ruwan M Jayatunge M.D. 

The Jātaka stories 

The Jātaka stories or Jātaka tales are a voluminous body of folklore concerned with previous births of the Buddha which is based as a collection of five hundred and fifty stories. Originally it comprise of 547 poems, arranged roughly by increasing number of verses. According to archaeological and literary evidence the Jātaka stories were compiled in the period, the 3rd Century B.C. to the 5th Century A.D. As Professor Rhys Davids indicated Jātaka stories are one of the oldest fables.

Human Sexuality and Jātaka stories 

The first evidence of attitudes towards sex comes from the ancient texts of Hinduism, Buddhism and Jainism (Chakraborty &  Thakurata , 2013). Many centuries before Sigmund Freud, Richard Freiherr von Krafft-Ebing, Albert Moll or D.H. Laurence the Tantric Buddhist monks discussed the wider aspects of human sexuality.

Tantric is often viewed as the third major school of Buddhism, Tantric philosophy has a complex, and multifaceted system of Buddhist thought and practice which evolved over several centuries and encompasses much inconsistency and a variety of opinions (Macmillan Encyclopedia of Buddhism, 2004).

Based on the general definition human sexuality is how people experience the erotic and express themselves as sexual beings; the awareness of themselves as males or females; the capacity they have for erotic experiences and responses. Sexuality varies greatly by culture, region, and historical period, but in most societies and individuals has a large influence on human behavior.

Human sexuality has been described as the capacity to have erotic experiences and responses. Human sexual behavior is different from the sexual behavior of other animals, in that, it seems to be governed by a variety and interplay of different factors (Molina, 1990).  A person’s sexual orientation may influence their sexual interest and attraction for another person (APA). Sexuality may be experienced and expressed in a variety of ways, including through thoughts, fantasies, desires, beliefs, attitudes, values, behaviors, practices, roles and relationships (WHO).

According to Adler (2011) doctors and sexologists increasingly medicalized and pathologized sexual and gender deviance. Foucault’s History of Sexuality is based on his view that the discursive practices in the medical community created deviant identities, and produced and regulated sex practices starting in the late nineteenth century (Adler, 2011).

The Jātaka stories view sexuality as an essential component in the human existence. It accepts sexuality as a normal human condition. But the Jātaka stories highlight impermanence, suffering and non-self. In addition some of the stories converse about the true nature of the human body which is impermanent and subject to change in the process of aging and in sickness.

Udancani Jataka was about sexual seduction. The Bodhisatta and his son lived in a hermitage practicing spiritual activities. His son was very obedient and pious. One evening when the Bodhisatta returned to the hermitage after collecting fruits he found his son was having an unusual behavior. He was no longer practicing meditation. When the son was questioned he answered that during his father’s absence he met with a young woman and she tempted him. He has had a physical relationship with the woman and it changed his life exclusively.  He further said that he needs to go with this woman and live with her.  After the sexual seduction and sexual encounter the son did not want to be with the father in his hermitage. He had different life plans.

Rādha-Jātakaya indicates the character of an adulterous woman. She was a wife of a Brahmin in the Kāsi country and when her husband travels to another county she gets an enormous freedom and invites different men to her house and sleeps with them.

Takka Jātakaya is a storyline about a treacherous woman who had an increased libido. According to the story once the Bodhisatta was an ascetic on the banks of the Ganges and he rescues a young woman named Dutthakumari. She was a daughter of a merchant from Benares and she had been thrown into the flood waters by her infuriated servants.

After the rescue the pretty Dutthakumari falls in love with her rescuer and they live together. After some time the Bodhisatta decides to go to the nearest village to sell curd. They travel together. On the way they were attacked by a gang of thieves and they kidnap Dutthakumari. She was taken before the robber chief. By seeing his physique she agrees to have a sexual relationship with him. Hence she willfully lives with him. But she has a fear that her former husband would come to claim her; she therefore scheming to murder him.

Dutthakumari requests the robber chief to capture the Bodhisatta then torture and kill him. The robbers capture the Bodhisatta and he was subjected to torture. While suffering in the hands of his tormentors the Bodhisatta tells the robber chief how he saved her life. The robber chief realizes the ungratefulness of Dutthakumari and releases the Bodhisatta. Then he kills Dutthakumari who betrayed her husband.

Anabhirati Jataka relates to an adulterous woman. She goes after men when her husband is away.  Her behavior becomes uncontrollable. Following her promiscuous behavior her husband was unable to concentrate on his work and studies.

Mudulakkhana Jatakaya narrates sexual seduction. In this story line the   Bodhisatta was once an ascetic named Mudulakkhana, of great spiritual attainments, living in the Himalaya. On one occasion he came to Benares where the king pleased with his demeanour, invited him to the palace and persuaded him to live in the royal park. Thus he lives sixteen years in the royal park continuing his spiritual work. One day when the king was away Mudulakkhana hermit happened to come to the palace. There he sees his queen and he get an urge to have a physical relationship with the queen. Then he appeals to the queen to satisfy his sexual desire.

Asatamanta Jātakaya recounts the sexual arousal of an old senile woman. In this story a wise and a famous teacher in Takkasila cares for his aged 120 years old mother as a son should, but he has no illusions regarding her moral character. He knows that obviously she is driven by basic instincts and lust and decides to demonstrate this to his student as a salutary lesson.

He instructs his student to massage her hands and feet and tell her that she is beautiful. She is described as a blind, decrepit hag, but she still seethes with a woman’s sexual appetite. She deludes herself that the young student desires her and propositions him, but following his teacher’s instructions the   student informs her that he would be punished if they were caught. In response she proposes that she would murder her devoted son who has selflessly cared for her. The teacher knowing the plot made a wooden figure and placed it on his bed. The old woman with murderous intentions struck it with an axe

The Kachappa Jātakaya (storyline) narrates a homosexual relationship between two Ministers of the King Pasenadi Kosol’s Court. However the Buddhist philosophy does not consider gays as sinners or condemn LGBT people.

In 1952, in the first edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), the manual issued by the American Psychiatric Association for the classification of mental disorders, homosexuality was included under the category sociopathic personality disturbances” – not as a true pathology or disease. The second edition of the DSM issued in 1968 re-classed homosexuality as a non-psychotic mental disorder”, effectively making it a disease (Young, 2011).

Powell and Stein (2014) indicate that the United States has recently made significant and positive civil rights gains for LGB people, including expanded recognition of marriages between people of the same sex. Among the central tropes that have emerged in the struggle for the rights of LGB people are that they are “born that way,” that sexual orientations cannot change, and that one’s sexual orientation is not affected by choice.

Although the attitudes towards homosexuality have become more liberal, particularly in industrialized Western countries, there is still a great deal of variance in terms of the worldwide levels of homonegativity (Jäckle & Wenzelburger , 2014). Disapproval of homosexuality is the cause of tremendous suffering among sexual minorities (Nguyen& Blum, 2014). Kuyper &Fokkema (2011) point out that minority stress is often cited as an explanation for greater mental health problems among lesbian, gay, and bisexual (LGB) individuals than heterosexual individuals. Prejudice and social stress impact the psychosocial wellbeing of the lesbian, gay, and bisexual populations. It’s significant to know that over 2500 years ago the Buddha had a democratic view and profound understanding about the LGBT community.

In the Jātaka story book -Nalini Jātakaya describes broad aspects of human sexuality. It is a story of a young hermit who lived in a jungle since his birth and never had seen or heard of women. He had not heard of sexual relationships between men and women and when the young Princess Nalini comes to his hermitage, he could not recognize her as a member from the opposite sex. With an erroneous assumption he thought that the Princess Nalini was a hermit like him. The princess deceived the hermit and made him to commit a sexual act. So the young hermit eventually experienced a physical relationship with a woman for the first time in his life. In this story the narrator deeply explore the primal sexual reaction of a human male who was deprived of prior sexual education and sex initiation by a female.

Female sexual arousal has been discussed by various researchers. Traditional models of sexual response reflect a linear approach to desire and arousal (Wood, Koch, & Mansfield, 2006). These models assume that sexual response proceeds from one stage to another in a pre-defined sequential order. According to Basson (2005) linear models do not reflect the reality of many women’s sexual response and female desire can often be rooted in a need for intimacy rather than from physical arousal. Several Jātaka stories including Nalini Jātakaya illustrate female sexual arousal.

Male Sexual arousal is stunningly described in the Haritha Jātakaya. By seeing a naked female body the hermit who practiced sexual abstinence for his life time could not resist the sudden erotic feeling and he eventually commits adultery. His suppressed sexual desires come in to action like a serpent coming out of a den. In this story the hermit’s sexual arousal is extensively described.

Sexual arousal, or sexual excitement, is the arousal of sexual desire during or in anticipation of sexual activity. Oh (2012) and colleagues indicate distinct brain activation patterns associated with visual sexual arousal. For the hermit (in Haritha Jātakaya) it was an unexpected visual sexual arousal.  Many years he had practiced voluntary celibacy. His erotic desires were suppressed but when he saw the naked woman’s body his sexual response became overpowering.

The Oedipal Conflict and Jātaka Stories  

Sigmund Freud introduced the term ‘Oedipus complex’ in his ‘Interpretation of Dreams that was published in 1899 (Ahmed, 2012).  In formulating his psychology of the unconscious, Freud makes constant reference to Sophocles’ version of the Oedipus myth (Bollack, 1993). In the Oedipus myth we find a dramatic representation of the child’s passionate ties to its parents (Zachrisson, 2013).

According to Freud the concept is a desire for sexual involvement with the parent of the opposite sex, which produces a sense of competition with the parent of the same sex and a crucial stage in the normal developmental process (Ahmed, 2012).  As Freud described in the Oedipus complex, largely unconscious ideas and feelings, which concentrate, on the desire to possess the parent of the opposite sex and eliminate the parent of the same sex. Freud analyzed the story of Oedipus Rex, and describes the unconscious motives of patricide He postulated that patricide was the great crime at the base of all social evolution.

In Freud’s theory the Oedipus complex is the core of human sexual development (Žerjav, 2010). Freud believed that by birth man is sexy; a child must possess sexual desire even when he is in his Mother’s womb and this inborn sexual predisposition lays the foundation for all other propensity (Ahmed, 2012).

The universality of the Oedipus complex indicates that the oedipal situation is at the heart of the mental life of man (Lebovici, 1982). Borove~ki-Jakovljev and colleagues (2005) state that  nevertheless, the conflicts of phallic phases of the psychosexual development are universal to all human being, no matter how we call them – Oedipus, Electra or Persephone Complex.

The Oedipus complex wanes as a crucial pathogenic focus to the extent to which its resolution—never achieved once and for all—is more than a repression,” something other than a retreat from and exclusion by what Freud called the coherent ego. Seen from the perspective of parricide, guilt, and responsibility, repression of the complex is an unconscious evasion of the emancipatory murder of the parents, and a way of preserving infantile libidinal-dependent ties with them (Loewald, 2000).

According Freud’s Oedipus complex theory in the unconscious level every male subject has a desire to murder his father and commit an incestuous act towards his mother. Various cultures have folktales that are similar to Oedipus story. The Thayo Darma Jātakaya is a metaphorical story which draws attention to many psychologists and it can be interpreted as an Oedipus complex narrated in the Jātaka storybook.

Thayo Darma Jātakaya is a story about the conflict between a father and a son. The father (King of the monkeys) destroys the genitals of male baby monkeys in order to liquidate any impending future threat by a male monkey. In addition the father monkey keeps all the female monkeys for himself making other male monkeys impotent. One of the male baby monkeys was able to escape physically unharmed and grows up in a hidden area of the jungle. The male baby monkey’s mother secretly feeds him. Hence the male monkey becomes emotionally attached to its mother and hating the father. Once the monkey becomes a fully grown adult he comes out and challenges his father. In this conflict, the son kills the father and becomes the new King.

In Totem and Taboo (1913) Freud writes that the myth of the murder of the primal father.   The primal father is a father who has in his possession and who enjoys all women and this is why the sons decide one day to murder the father. The active words destruction, demolition, which Freud has used in referring to the dissolution of the Oedipus complex, may be heard as reverberations of that dominant feature of the oedipal conflict, parricide, the destruction of the parent by the child (Loewald, 2000).

The murder of the primal father or parricide discussed in the Thayo Darma Jātakaya has a symbolic meaning and it is outstanding. This story was written thousands of years ago. Nonetheless the Jātaka storyteller had an insight about repressed childhood conflicts.

Gender Identity Disorder and Spontaneous Sexual Transformation 

The phenomenon of spontaneous sexual transformation in human beings is clearly recognized in a wide variety of Hindu and Buddhist texts. The Pali Vinaya records the cases of a monk who turned into a woman and of a nun who turned into a man. Although the Vinaya itself gives no indication of the reasons for such changes, its commentary observes that they occur on the basis of powerful good and bad moral deeds – an opinion shared by several other Pali commentaries. More specifically, transformation from male to female occurs as a result of a powerful evil action (such as unfaithfulness to one’s wife), whereas transformation from female to male occurs as a result of the weakening of the inferior karma that brought about rebirth as a woman, accompanied by a powerful good action and/or a strong aspiration to become male (Ohnuma , 2001)

Several medical conditions can result in a natural sex change in humans, where the appearance at birth is somewhat, mostly, or completely of one sex, but changes over the course of a lifetime to being somewhat, mostly or completely of the other sex. The overwhelming majority of natural sex changes are from a female appearance at birth to a male appearance after puberty, due to either 5-alpha-reductase deficiency (5alpha-RD-2) or 17-beta-hydroxysteroid dehydrogenase deficiency (17beta-HSD-3)(Cohen-Kettenis, 2005). A relative handful of male to female changes have been reported, and the etiologies of these are not well understood (Khan , 2008).

Gender identity disorder is classified as a medical disorder by the DSM-5 as gender dysphoria. Gender identity disorder (GID) or gender dysphoria is the formal diagnosis used by psychologists and physicians to describe people who experience significant dysphoria (discontent) with the sex they were assigned at birth and/or the gender roles associated with that sex. Evidence suggests that people who identify with a gender different from the one they were assigned at birth may do so not just due to psychological or behavioral causes, but also biological ones related to their genetics, the makeup of their brains, or prenatal exposure to hormones (Heylens, 2012)

Transsexualism first appeared as a diagnosis in the third edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-III) (American Psychiatric Association, 1980). Transsexualism is when an individual identifies with a gender inconsistent or not culturally associated with their assigned sex, i.e. in which a person’s assigned sex at birth conflicts with their psychological gender. A medical diagnosis can be made if a person experiences discomfort as a result of a desire to be a member of the opposite gender or if a person experiences impaired functioning or distress as a result of that gender identification (APA).

The Jātaka tales describe Gender Identity Disorder and spontaneous sexual transformation in a count named Soreiya.

One day Count Soreyya went to the river to have a bath. There he saw Bikku Kachayana who was very attractive and handsome. By seeing this attractive monk the Count Soreyya had a sexual fantasy which later became an obsessive recurrent erotic thought. Soreyya thought: I wish that monk would become my wife! Or may the color of my wife’s body be like the color of his body.  Simultaneously he had immense guilty feelings knowing that Bikku Kachayana is a perfected person who has attainedArhathood or Enlightenment. Following self guilt and severe mental conflicts with elevated anxiety the count experienced a sex change.

Sexual Jealousy 

Jealousy is a universal feeling. The feeling is normal until it is acted upon and the behaviour or actions become irrational. Many psychologists believe that in human males, sexual jealousy is often marked by violence and consistent attempts to restrict the sexual behavior of women.

Staske (1999) views Jealousy as an inherently relational emotion. The common conceptualization of jealousy is viewed as a perceived or actual threat to the exclusive nature of a romantic relationship (White & Mullen, 1989; Bevan &   Hale, 2006). Jealousy is an aversive and psychologically stressful condition. Evolutionary psychologists hypothesized that jealousy is an evolved adaptation, activated by threats to a valuable relationship, functioning to protect it from partial or total loss (Buss & Haselton, 2005).

Sexual jealousy functions to defend paternity confidence (Daly et al., 1982). According to Buss (2013) Sexual jealousy is a basic emotion.  Jealousy invokes low self-esteem, immaturity or character defects (Bhugra, 1993). Buunk and colleagues (1987) illustrate that sexual jealousy in humans is an emotion of jealousy which may be triggered in a person when a sexual partner displays sexual interest in another person.

The specific innate modular theory of jealousy hypothesizes that natural selection shaped sexual jealousy as a mechanism to prevent cuckoldry, and emotional jealousy as a mechanism to prevent resource loss. Therefore, men should be primarily jealous over a mate’s sexual infidelity and women over a mate’s emotional infidelity (Harris, 2003).

There are several Jātakaya stories exemplify sexual jealousy in males. For instance in Parvakuthha Jathakaya a King becomes extremely jealous when he realized one of his queens committed a sexual infidelity with a minister. The King is experiencing extreme emotional pain, feelings of betrayal, outrage and fear. His violent outbursts and obsessive thoughts are evident.  The King believes that his personal, sexual and romantic relationship with the queen is now being threatened and he seeks revenge. Similarly the Memadha Jathakaya too contains a story about Sexual jealousy.

In Chulla Darmapala Jātakaaya the King Maha Prathapa kills his infant son following sexual jealousy. King Maha Prathapa was infuriated when he noticed his beautiful Queen cared for the infant Prince without paying attention to him. The King perceives mother-infant interaction with extreme hostility. Following anger and sexual jealousy he orders to kill the infant Prince.

The Hypoactive Sexual Desire Disorder (HSDD)

In the last 50 years new research into the sociology, psychology and physiology of sexuality has provided an understanding of decreased libido and inadequate sexual response in the form of hypoactive sexual desire disorder. (Studd, 2007). HSDD is defined as a deficiency or absence of sexual fantasies and desire for sexual activity. The disturbance must cause marked distress or interpersonal difficulty (APA).

The Jātaka storyteller describes complex behavioural components of a young man named Pinguthara who exhibits firm features of Hypoactive sexual desire disorder. The Hypoactive sexual desire disorder (HSDD) is considered as a Sexual Dysfunction and is listed under the Sexual and Gender Identity Disorders of the DSM-IV DSM-IV. It is characterized as a lack or absence of sexual fantasies and desire for sexual activity for some period of time. According to in the Siri Kalakanni Jātakaya Pinguthara is a young man who seems to have suffered from Hypoactive Sexual Desire Disorder. He had no interest in his newly wedded beautiful wife Udumbara Devi. He finds no erotic satisfaction in her and the wife becomes a burden to him. He abandoned her and fled due to lack of interest in women.

Borg and de Jong (2012) view Sex and disgust are basic evolutionary relevant functions that are often construed as paradoxical and in  general the stimuli involved in sexual encounters are at least out of context strongly perceived to hold high disgust qualities. The young man -Pingutthara in Siri Kalakanni Jātakaya and the hermit in Haritha Jātakaya have two opposite reactions when they encounter females.

Incest and Jātaka Stories

Incest refers to any sexual activity between close relatives often within the immediate family irrespective of the ages of the participants and irrespective of their consent that is illegally or socially taboo. Incest is considered as the oldest crime. During the Middle Ages the meaning of incest was paradoxical: when used literally, the word signified the abominable sin of consanguineous sex; when represented allegorically, it signified a mystical union with God (Donavin, 1993).

A significant number of researchers conclude that there is no demographic profile of incestuous fathers. Rather they are a complex, heterogeneous group of individuals who look like everyone else (Groth, 1982; Meiselman, 1978; Smith & Saunders, 1995).  Cohen (1983) believes that incestuous fathers may also have acquired the incestuous behaviour through social learning.

Psychoanalysts contend that incest occurs when the daughter suffers from oral deprivation in the pre-oedipal stage. An incestuous relationship with her father is then established as revenge against her mother, who frustrated her oral needs and simultaneously as a way of satisfying her oral needs. The daughter substitutes the father’s penis for the mother’s breast, which had been denied to her (Dixen & Jenkens, 1981).

Incest may be seen as the other side of parricide, the side where love appears dominant. In parricide, however, underneath or mingled with destructive aggression, there also is a more or less violent, passionate appropriation of what is experienced as lovable and admirable in parents. Similarly, incest does not merely spell love or the urge of Eros to bind together and unite. Incest also contains the exclusion and destruction of the third in the triangle, and often a hateful vengeance perpetrated on the incestuous object that wanted, or allowed and responded to, the rival (Loewald, 2000).

The Seggu Jātakaya of the Jātaka story book reveals the socially forbidden subject of incest. According to this Jātaka story a father takes his young daughter to the jungle and tries to molest her in order to verify her purity. He wants to know whether his daughter had a premarital sexual activity with someone.  During the attempt the daughter becomes frighten and cries in fear and shame. She persistently tells the father that she is inexperienced in sexual relations. Finally the father realizes that his daughter is a virgin and then tells her about his real intentions.

Although in Seggu Jātakaya the father’s motives were not to molest his own daughter it raises a numerous questions. What would have been the father’s action if he found that the daughter was not a virgin? Then she would have been subjected to a sexual assault or to honor based killing.

According to the feminists view incest is a forceful act performed by men who control and subordinate their spouses and their children (Barret, Trepper &  Fish, 1990).  The feminists argue that father-child incest is a product of a patriarchal family structure (Vander Mey & Neff, 1986). The Jātaka Storyteller was well aware of the social forces existed in his ancient patriarchal society. Nevertheless he did not view women as sexual objects. He shows deep compassion for the woman who is frightened and helpless.  On the other hand he intensely describes the complex mental state of the father. The Jātaka Storyteller implies that the father had an underlying motive to molest his daughter if she was not a virgin.

Paraphilias

Humans show a wide array of sexual preferences and behaviors. Although most humans prefer and have sex with consenting adults of the opposite sex, some individuals have unconventional preferences with regard to the sex or age of sexual partners, or with regard to the nature of sexual activities (Earls & Lalumière, 2002).

A paraphilia is a condition in which a person’s sexual arousal and gratification depend on fantasizing about and engaging in sexual behaviour that is atypical and extreme.  Stuart (2012) suggests that paraphilia definitions are based on perceived deviations from inappropriate perfectionist ideals of sexual norms. Paraphilias are often comorbid with other sexual, mood, and personality disorders (Seto, et al., 2014).

Silverstein (1984) states that moral reasoning has to be the primary determinant in the diagnosis of sexual disorders.

The German Psychiatrist Richard Von Krafft-Ebing identified paraphilias   in 1886. His famous book Psychopathia Sexualis (Sexual Psychopathy) describes numerous paraphilias. Conversely Prior to Richard Von Krafft-Ebing the Jātakaya Storyteller illustrated a number of paraphilias that were found in the ancient Indian society. For instance Baka Jātakaya describes a King who had suggestive features of Salirophilia. The King was attracted to a hideous woman called Panchapapa.

Fetishism

Moreover the Jātaka stories describe Fetishism in a young man named Kema.  Fetishism is a paraphilic sexual disorder characterized by recurrent, intense sexually arousing fantasies, sexual urges or behaviors involving the use of nonliving objects (Firoz et al., 2014) Oğuz and Uygur (2005) indicate that underlying personality disorders extending through childhood are thought to be the source of the etiology in Fetishism. Kema obtains sexual arousal by stealing sandals that belonged to a young and attractive Princess. Kema is attracted to the Princess. But his fears and inner mental conflicts prevent him meeting the Princess. But he gratifies his erotic desires keeping her pair of sandals.

Psychoanalyst Wilhelm Stekel (1930) contrasted what he called “normal fetishes” from extreme interests: “They become pathological only when they have pushed the whole love object into the background and themselves appropriate the function of a love object, e.g., when a lover satisfies himself with the possession of a woman’s shoe and considers the woman herself as secondary or even disturbing and superfluous. In Kema’s story his love object becomes the stolen pair of sandals.

Sexual Addiction

Sexual addiction is a form of compulsive sexual behavior in which the individual is unable to control their sexual urges, behaviors, or thoughts (Coleman, 2003). In 1987 the APA’s Statistical Manual of Mental Health Disorders (DSM-III-R) added for the first time the concept of sexual addiction as a specific descriptor that might be applied under the more general diagnosis of Sexual Disorders NOS (Not Otherwise Specified) (Weiss,2012).

According to Wölfle (2010) the phenomenon of sexual addiction as a clinical syndrome is discussed controversially. The frequency distribution of specific Hypersexual Disorder in females has been inadequately studied (Kafka, 2010).

In the past, medical attitudes to female sexuality were grotesque, reflecting the anxiety and hypocrisy of the times. In the medieval world, the population feared hunger, the devil, and women, being particularly outraged and threatened by normal female sexuality (Studd & Schwenkhagen, 2009). The 19th century medical attitude to normal female sexuality was cruel, with gynecologists and psychiatrists leading the way in designing operations for the cure of the serious contemporary disorders of masturbation and nymphomania (Studd, 2007).

The word ‘nymphomania’, the concept of ‘madness from the womb’ and the belief in the existence of a behaviour consisting in an abnormally high female sexual drive converged during the second half of the seventeenth century to give rise to a new clinical category which, with minor changes, has survived until the present -e.g., in ICD-10 ( Berrios & Rivière  , 2006).

The Jātaka stories describe individuals with extreme desire of carnal pleasure. For example Maha Kunala Jātakaya portrays of a Princess named Krishna who had suggestive features of Nymphomania or Sexual addiction. Princes Sthula or Sthula Kumarika (in Chulla Narada Jātaka) has an insatiable desire for sex. She needs multiple partners to satisfy her erotic craving. The Vennukuna Jātakaya indicates a princess who had an intense sexual desire for a man with an extreme physical defect (attraction to disability). She abandons her husband and lives with a man with hunchback. In Kunala Jātakaya (a sub story) describes a beautiful queen named Kinnara Devi who was fond of having a sexual relationship with a foul-smelling vagabond who had extreme physical defects. She was sexually aroused by seeing the vagabond and his physical defects. She derives satisfaction from being his slave and takes pleasure in physical beatings by him. In addition Bandhanamokkha Jātakaya tells the story of a queen, who had committed adultery with sixty-four men while the king was away. When she approached the sixty fifth male   to satisfy her lust he refuses her offer. Then the queen gets extremely angry and seeks revenge. When the king returns she pretends that she became unwell after an attempted rape by the sixty fifth male. The king orders to execute the man. But he reveals the truth and discloses the queen’s true nature. After realizing what had truly occurred the king banishes the queen and rewards the man.

Bonnie and Clyde Syndrome (Hybristophilia)

Bonnie and Clyde Syndrome or Hybristophilia is a paraphilia of the predatory type in which sexual arousal, facilitation, and attainment of orgasm are responsive to and contingent upon being with a partner known to have committed an outrage, cheating, lying, known infidelities or crime, such as rape, or murder.

The Buddhist literature reveals about a rich girl named Kundala Keshi who was sternly attracted to a criminal when she accidently saw him through her window. The King’s men were taking him to the burial ground to decapitate. His well built physique with rough vagabond look vigorously attracted to her. She immediately fell in love with the criminal. She urged her wealthy father to rescue the outlaw from the King’s men. The affluent father bribed the King’s men and released the criminal. He was secretly brought to Kundala Keshi;s house and they become husband and wife.

After sometime the husband with criminal intensions plots to kill his wife and rob her precious jewellery. He takes Kundala Keshi to a mountain to worship a god. When they go to the top of the mountain the bandit husband gets ready to kill her. Kundala Keshi begs him to set her free. But the husband is determined to kill her and take hold of her jewellery. Frightened Kundala Keshi sees no getaway. Somehow she tricks her husband and pushes him over the cliff. The bandit husband was doomed to a violent death.  After these shocking events she has no wish to go home. She becomes a Bhikkhuni or female Buddhist monastic.

Voyeurism

The term ‘Voyeurism’ refers to the desire to spy on unsuspecting and non-consenting people during their private activities. Voyeurism is considered as a precondition for Voyeuristic Disorder. Voyeuristic Disorder belongs to a group of mental conditions under paraphilic disorders in the American Psychiatric Association’s DSM 5.

According to the Bahiya Jātaka story a king with voyeuristic tendencies achieves sexual gratification by observing a woman in the act of urinating and defecating. After seeing the woman the King becomes sexually exited and fantasizes about her. Then he orders his men to bring the woman to the palace.

Zoophilia

Zoophilia is a paraphilia whereby the perpetrator gets sexual pleasure in having sex with animals (Aggrawal , 2011). Zoophilia has lost its character as a severe mental disorder. (Dittert et al., 2005). Earls and Lalumière (2007) describe a case of zoophilia that challenges the widely held assumptions that men who have sex with animals are generally of below average intelligence and come from rural areas. Also they state that zoophilia is not as rare as once thought and shares many features with other atypical sexual interests. Dittert and colleagues (2005) stress that zoophilia shows a variety of manifestations. The subject’s desire to be transformed into the animal he or she has contact with can be understood as a narcissistic compound and is not related to lycanthropia.

The famous Kinsey reports on the sexual behavior of the American male and female also include data on sexual contacts with animals. Kinsey and his colleagues interviewed about 5300 adult, white men and 5800 adult, white women about their sexual experiences. Although the objectivity of the methods employed is sometimes criticized, the studies provide important information. Kinsey and his colleagues found that in rural areas about 40 to 50% of the males had had at least one sexual encounter with an animal, and 17% had even experienced an orgasm as a result of sexual contact with animals during adolescence. Amongst all the American men in the study, however, the prevalence was much lower, about 8% (Kinsey, Pomeroy & Martin, 1948; Beetz, 2005).

The Jātaka Storyteller vividly describes the Zoophilia (Bestiality) tendency of the Queen Mallika who had a sexual encounter with an animal. As the King observes from the upper floor his queen is having a physical relationship with a dog. He becomes puzzled and thinks that it was an optical illusion. Later the Queen Mallika tricks the King and convinces him that it was a misapprehension. However the in her death bed the Queen Mallika recollects this event and her final thoughts become impure.

Vinaya proscribes all intentional sexual activity for monks. During Buddha’s time a monk thought it would be no offence to have sexual intercourse with an animal. He had lured a female monkey into a sexual relationship (Lopez, 2009). When this incident became a known to others and some monks informed the Buddha about this unusual relationship. The Buddha advised the monk who broke his celibate vows. The Buddha later imposed pārājika rules for such acts. A monk or nun who commits a pārājika offence is permanently and irrevocably expelled.

Sexual Sadism and Masochism

Krafft-Ebing coined the term ‘masochism. Prior to that Albert von Schrenck Notzing used the term ‘algolagnia’ to refer to sexual pleasure derived from pain. Algolagnia included sexual humiliation, subjection, and the desire to be under the power of another (Walters, 2012).

Sexual sadism and masochism were described in Vatsyayana’s Kama Sutra (Aphorisms of love) written somewhere between the 1st and 6th centuries.  Sadistic and masochistic behavior became known in 1498 when the Italian philosopher Pico della Mirandola described a man who needed to be flogged before sex (Farin 1990).

The word sadism came from the life and the writings of the French author Marquis De Sade, such as The 120 Days of Sodom. The word masochism was taken from the works of one of his contemporaries, the Austrian author, Leopold von Sacher Masoch (Grenci, 2006).

In Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905) Freud described the tendency to inflict and receive pain during sexual intercourse as the most common and important of all perversions”, and that both psychosexual tendencies usually occur in the same person. That masochism is a form of sadism against the Self, and that sadism and masochism are manifested variously as primary masochism” and secondary masochism”, and as the subordinate forms of feminine masochism” and moral masochism”.

Some of the Jātaka stories discuss sexual sadism and masochism. For instance in Andha  Butha Jātakaya a young wife derives sadistic satisfaction by hitting her blindfolded husband and also humiliating him while having a sexual intercourse with her young lover.

Neurosyphilis

Syphilis is a sexually transmitted infection. The first case of syphilis occurred in Europe around the year 1493. Martin Alonzo Pinzon, commander of one of the three ships of Christopher Columbus, is considered as first documented victim of syphilis (Friedrich & Aigner, 2011). However the symptoms of syphilis in its tertiary form were described by Hippocrates in Classical Greece.

The Jātaka stories indicate that in ancient India prostitution was a socially accepted profession and sex workers were called Nagara Sobhini (lady of the land). They were rich, famous and a socially influential group. The ancient literatures describe sex orgies that prevailed in that era. These parties were called Girraga Sammja (Lay Culture). Unprotected sexual practices existed in all layers of the society. Therefore it is reasonable to believe that sexually transmitted diseases impacted some of the sex workers as well as some of the patrons.

Several Jātaka stories underscore individuals that had clinical features of Neurosyphilis. Neurosyphilis is a form of tertiary syphilis infection caused by the spirochete bacterium Treponema pallidum. Patients suffering from this illness can present with neurological manifestations such as headaches, seizures, hearing loss, and ataxia (Tso et al., 2008). The typical presentation of neurosyphilis marked by neurological and cognitive symptoms (Kinson & Chan, 2013).

Onset of psychiatric symptoms including personality changes are illustrated in several Jātaka stories. According to these stories the sufferers presented with abnormal gait, sudden blindness, disorientation, depression, seizures, memory loss and abnormal reflexes. These symptoms are largely seen in Neurosyphilis.

Brothers Karamazov, Asthramanthra Jātaka Story and Sexuality

The renowned Sri Lankan Literary genius Martin Wicramasinghe D.Lit.  believed that Fyodor Dostoyevsky may have had some influence by  Asthramanthra Jātaka story   to write his psycho- philosophical novel -Brothers Karamazov.

There are many similarities between Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Brothers Karamazov and Asthramanthra Jātaka story.  Both stories describe the sexual craving and indulgence in the old age violating social and moral norms. Both stories profoundly analyze the inner mental conflicts reveling the darkest side of the human mind.

The Brothers Karamazov is tale of bitter family rivalries that was written on two levels: on the surface it is the story of a parricide in which all of a murdered man’s sons share varying degrees of complicity but, on a deeper level, it is a spiritual drama of the moral struggles between faith, doubt, reason, and free will.  In   Asthramanthra Jātaka story too there are two levels: on the surface accumulation of sexual urges following seduction and in the second level the murders impulsions of an old mother who wants to kill her son to have a sexual relationship with a young apprentice. Asthramanthra Jātaka story is a spiritual drama of the moral struggles between maternal love, sexual urge, faith, doubt, reason, and social norms.

In Asthramanthra Jātaka story a senile old woman was seduced by a young apprentice in order to assess the sexual urge in old age. The seduction was done with the consent of the old woman’s son and after a few months the old woman gradually develops an erotic desire beyond her control. Following the seduction the senile old woman’s dormant sexual urges come to the surface like an erupting volcano. She is expecting to have a sexual relationship with the young apprentice. Nonetheless she sees her own son as an obstacle to fulfill her sexual desire. In due course she is determined to kill her own son to be with the young apprentice. One night she comes to her son’s bed room with a sward to kill him.

In this Jathaka story the old woman’s sensual feelings, erotic fantasies, inner mental conflicts and murderous impulses were intricately described by the Jathaka story teller.  The old land owner in Brothers Karamazov and the old woman in Asthramanthra Jātaka have similar characteristics with regard to sensual pleasures. The Jātaka story teller describes the old woman’s sexually inclined mind as the way Fyodor Dostoyevsky described the old landowner’s lustful mind.

Dostoyevsky points out the dual complexities in the human mind.  The Jataka story teller too vibrantly wrote about the complex and dual nature of the human psyche.  Asthramanthra Jātaka story is one of the examples of his exceptional talents. In this Jathaka story he deeply analyzed the murderous impulses of an old woman who was geared by onset awakening of sexual urges.

The old woman in Asthramanthra Jātaka story and immoral old land owner in Brothers Karamazov represent the dark side of the human nature and in later years Carl Jung came up with the concept of shadow that portrays the repressed weaknesses, shortcomings and instincts. In his 1938 work Psychology and Religion” Carl Jung explains the function of the shadow thus.

 Unfortunately there can be no doubt that man is, on the whole, less good than he imagines himself or wants to be. Everyone carries a shadow, and the less it is embodied in the individual’s conscious life, the blacker and denser it is. If an inferiority is conscious, one always has a chance to correct it. Furthermore, it is constantly in contact with other interests, so that it is continually subjected to modifications. But if it is repressed and isolated from consciousness, it never gets corrected.”

According to Jung, the shadow is irrational often projects   personal inferiority into a perceived moral deficiency. Jung wrote a man who is possessed by his shadow is always standing in his own light and falling into his own traps … living below his own level” Describing man’s dark covert desires Fyodor Dostoevsky wrote; There are things which a man is afraid to tell even to himself, and every decent man has a number of such things stored away in his mind.

After seduced by the young apprentice the old woman falls in to her own trap and possessed by her dark shadow like Fyodor Pavlovich the debauched land owner who was sexually fascinated by his own son’s girlfriend -Grushenka. Both the characters forget ethics and morality as well as social norms while making efforts to fulfill their desires.

The Jathaka story teller does not judge the old woman like the way Dostoyevsky judged the old man in his book Brothers Karamazove. The Jathaka storyteller modestly shows the extent of craving and its disastrous nature.

One Response to “Human Sexuality Discussed in the Jātaka Stories”

  1. Christie Says:

    Jataka stories are found in Hinduism and are older than Buddhism. In Hinduism women are portrayed as evil and second to men.
    Nature has men and women with same desires an actions leading to continuity of species.

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