Lapis Magazine

Arousing the Goddess: Sex and Love in the Buddhist Ruins of India by Tim Ward

Offering readers welcome relief from the agony of the world situation, the author of this new book describes his experience of the ecstasy of tantric sex. After years on the dharma trail in India, Tim Ward encounters an alluring Austrian Indologist who opens for him the world of sacred sexuality. Torn between monastic denial and erotic adventure, he comes to see the vital role played by the goddess in Buddhism. Mark Hawthorne reviews.

Mark Hawthorne is a California-based writer specializing in Asian philosophical and religious traditions.

Arouding the Goddess: Sex and Love in the Buddhist Ruins of India by Tim Ward, Monkfish Book Publishing Company, 2003.

What a fickle travel companion fate can be. One day you’re deep in the Himalayas of Buddhist Ladakh, absorbed in the Four Noble Truths and the arduous process of banishing desire, and suddenly fate delivers you to New Delhi, face to face with a woman who inspires new levels of fantasy and challenges your entire belief system. But then, you ask, isn’t there room for both spirituality and sexual passion within the same person? This is the riddle author Tim Ward skillfully addresses in Arousing the Goddess, the third book in what has now become his ‘nirvana trilogy.’

Inspired by the Buddha’s advice not to believe his words, but to put them to the test, philosophy graduate Ward left the comforts of his native Canada to travel through Asia in the 1980s. His six-year sojourn took him through remote ashrams and monasteries in India, Nepal, Bangladesh, Thailand, Indonesia, China and Tibet, giving him plenty of opportunity to examine the truth in the Buddha’s teachings. Ward is a pioneer in the nascent genre of spiritual journalism, which explores the frontiers of philosophy and mysticism through the lens of the author’s own experience. While his earlier books, What the Buddha Never Taught and The Great Dragon’s Fleas, focus on the Theravada and Mahayana schools of Buddhism, tantra is the thread pulled through Arousing the Goddess as Ward explores both his intense physical and emotional sensations and the various facets of a practice with roots in both Buddhism and Hinduism. Indeed, ‘tantra’ comes from the weaving trade and signifies texts spun out and woven together. Today we know it as a highly ritualistic practice in which the physical and spiritual worlds affect each other. Tantric practitioners often revere the body as a temple and indulge its most sensual impulses. But Arousing the Goddess is no dispassionate description of psychophysical phenomena; it’s a subjective and brutally honest account of a mystical experience induced during tantric sex and how it represents the union of the soul with the Goddess.

Fresh off the dharma trail in India, his soul filled with monastic attitudes, Ward meets and is quickly traveling with Sabina, an alluring Austrian Indologist working on her thesis, for which she must record every statue in India that displays the Buddha-touching-the-Earth motif. This is a seated Buddha with the fingertips of his right hand gently touching the ground and signifies the moment of the Buddha’s enlightenment. As Sabina explains, after the Buddha’s enlightenment under the Bodhi Tree, Mara, the Great Tempter of Buddhism, challenges him by sending his three beautiful daughters to seduce him. But the Buddha recognizes Mara’s trickery and turns the daughters into hags. Now angry and desperate, Mara says no one will understand the Buddha’s enlightenment, since there is no one to witness his great achievement. In reply, the Buddha calls the Earth herself to witness by touching the ground; an Earth Goddess appears from beneath the Buddha’s hand and Mara is defeated once again. Ward and Sabina fall in love, and the Earth-touching gesture of the Buddha becomes a metaphor for the awakening wisdom Ward experiences as he and Sabina enjoy what he soon realizes must be tantric sex. Indeed, one of Ward’s most insightful musings is that in touching the Earth, Buddha is in fact connecting with the ultimate feminine power, and the author posits there is a goddess at the very heart of Buddhism itself — an interesting revelation in light of Buddhism’s patriarchal cosmology. Ward sees that the Earth Goddess was real, while Mara’s daughters were an illusion. Since the Buddha felt compelled to respond to Mara’s challenge, he wisely acknowledges, perhaps there is some deeper truth about sex.

And a deeper truth about sex is what lurks in the heart of Arousing the Goddess. Ward admits he’s looking to satisfy his physical urges, as Sabina seems to be just beyond his grasp, her golden hair a flame to a hundred eager moths. “Sabina was certainly a master in the arts of love,” he writes, “but I wondered if I and all men were for her just canvases on which she expressed her art.” Complicating matters is the conflict Ward must deal with as this Buddhist acolyte is torn between monastic denial and erotic ecstasy — struggling to find solace in detachment while his libido is rocked to the core. Ironically, his time in monasteries and the frankness with which he reveals himself seem to have conspired to prepare him for a sexual experience that transcends the physical and becomes spiritual — a rarefied sexual style and mystical union that most tantric practitioners discover only with the guidance of a qualified guru. He does not describe tantric sex as physically enjoyable, however, characterizing the couplings as more pain than pleasure: “My head, hands, feet and belly felt on fire, the nerves incredibly sensitive to touch. The rush was weirdly ecstatic, electrifying, almost unbearable in its intensity. My body shuddered like paper before it ignites.” Energy, not orgasm, is the key as Ward searches for the meaning behind experiences that, generated spontaneously, leave him confused and yearning for more.

Ward’s prose is vivid, drawing the reader into an exotic landscape of temples and bedchambers as he and Sabina explore India’s museums and each other. We’re not used to reading such intimate details from a man, but it quickly becomes clear we are witnessing a reversal in how we expect men and women to behave. While Sabina is tough and aggressive, Ward is sensitive and nurturing; on a number of occasions, for example, he delights in carefully preparing a hotel room with candles and fresh fruit, waiting for Sabina to return: “Sabina’s eyes slowly surveyed the room. She smiled at the sight of the pomegranate, guava and red bananas I had piled in a bowl in the center of the wide blue bed. On one of the night tables the small white elephant she had given me raised its trunk playfully. I lit four candles around the bed, then turned off the light. Bicycle bells rang in the street below. A burst of firecrackers popped dully in the distance, and the occasional Roman candle sent bars of light in through the cracks in the shutters.

“‘This is our room,’ I said, glad for how she lingered over the small
details I had prepared.”

The author faces personal demons with confessional honesty, which ultimately aids his awakening, yet this is in stark contrast to Sabina’s enigmatic behavior. Although she claims to be annoyed by all the attention she receives from men, Sabina apparently has no compunction in using her charms to further her research. She is equally adept at disengaging herself emotionally, especially after sex — a trait that disappoints Ward as well. True, with her appreciation of other cultures, strong spirit and admirable facility with Hindi, Sabina makes a desirable partner with whom to experience India, but we only get a glimpse of her capacity for genuine intimacy. She often seems as illusory as Mara’s daughters, rather than the goddess Ward sees.

Ward’s portrait of India makes for fascinating reading, and he is at his best describing the everyday aspects of the subcontinent: ablutions in the Ganges, colorful religious festivals and negotiating the seething cacophony of what is at once one of the world’s most dazzling and unsavory lands. This book could serve as a valuable primer — or warning — for anyone embarking on a trip to Asia. He offers enough historical details (including some fascinating background on the goddess Kali) to give richness to the narrative, and his ear for dialogue and talent for engaging all the senses bring the reader into every scene. Ward’s tale inhabits a world we do not often see, but it leaves us encouraged about the potential for spiritual development. Part travelogue, part memoir, part odyssey, Arousing the Goddess is thoroughly engrossing as it unearths gems from surprising terrain, nudging us on the path to our own self-discovery.