Through Catholicism, I was introduced to the greater concepts of right and wrong.
Through Buddhism, I began to understand that following right and avoiding wrong protected and benefited myself.
Through Confucianism, I began to learn to take joy in right and become saddened at wrong for others' sake, and to fully understand why that is.


As I grew up, going through local public schools up until middle school, I was never exposed to an actual system of ethics. Sure, there was the usual authoritarianism that public schools invariably indoctrinate into its students, the superficially supervised playtime in which only physical violence is somewhat stopped (but certainly not verbal or emotional) but not reformed, and of course the 'government and citizenship in a nutshell' activities. But if you asked me anything about ethics, or what it meant to being a good person, I might reference something I learned in class about "random acts of kindness" or recycling to help the environment. I can't exactly recall how deeply I thought about right or wrong acts, though I did have a big problem with how friendship was conducted during my elementary school years, but I certainly couldn't have given you a straight answer back then.

And when they taught us sex "education," I didn't even think to bat an eye at the fact that they were showing everyone how to use condoms right in the middle of class, or the fact that people did not discuss why sex should be done only in certain social situations and what those situations were (in a steady dating relationship? or only after marriage? were one-night stands acceptable assuming mutual consent? how do you ensure mutual consent without losing the 'romantic' atmosphere, or at least the sexually-charged feelings of the moment?).

When one of my 6th grade friends talked about his drug experiences, and later on in 8th grade, his experiences in having sex, I both felt deeply uncomfortable, but a bit excited for him, and had no idea why I had these mix of feelings. Even if I could express them back then, I certainly couldn't justify or explain why.

I had been going to the St Andrew and Paul Korean Catholic Mission since I was in elementary school, but ethics were told, but not actually taught. I never encountered an actual explanation as to why pre-marital sex was wrong, maybe outside of something vague like "God wants you to..." And unsurprisingly, once most of the kids I knew from the church got out of their parent's control, they committed all the sins (or what I'll refer to as "near-sins") they were told not to, because they never developed a strong understanding of why they shouldn't do certain things.

So what do I mean by "sins" versus "near-sins"? If a sin is pre-marital sex, the near-sin would be dressing in lingerie to a Halloween party. The explicit sin is the extramarital sex (adultery or fornication), but the underlying vice is lust. So even though dressing in lingerie to a Halloween party, or dirty dancing for that matter, is not explicitly written out as a sin (as extramarital sex is), it's the same depravity at work. So the nature of all these activities should be considered to be sinful.

Bellarmine was different, but to varying degrees, depending on the teacher and the setting. Same basic conservative morality, but certainly different teaching approach. Some teachers were more rigorous than others, namely the great and universally honored Dr. Dalton, guiding us through moral thinking and development. Do we really want to live in certain ways? Do we really want to live in a society that purchases Disney merchandise made through exploitative child labor? Is there something greater to life than grades and the material wealth that supposedly comes from higher education? For the first time, I had teachers that explicitly told us that "freak dancing" (dirty dancing that simulates the act of sex) is wrong. This was the beginning of formally and consciously tackling these questions.

Still, while going through Swarthmore, and my atheistic/materialistic phase, I was hard pressed to explain to my fellow students, who were much more liberal than I ever was at my peak of liberal affiliation, my more conservative views. The best I could do to counter the idea that "having sex before marriage is like test-driving a car, you need to do it before you make the purchase" was to point out that people aren't cars. But I couldn't really articulate myself beyond that, even after putting further thought into it. I knew that there was definitely more to sex, but I couldn't give a logical explanation beyond something that might be considered 'merely' poetic or unrealistically romantic.

The closest justification I could come to expressing was through evolutionary psychology. Unbeknownst to me at the time, I was attempting an examination of fundamental human nature in order to establish a sense of what we should do and shouldn't do. I was tired of hearing that everything was a social construct, or that things are "not necessarily true" and have exceptions as a reason to disregard the entire principle (because it did not account for 100% of reality).

So in terms of the premarital sex question, I could point out that human beings have evolved to require heavily parental investment in their children (babies are born premature, and children really need parents to take care of them in a purely physiological/biological sense up until puberty, and even afterward, parents must teach them how to incorporate themselves into society for survival's sake), and their behavior (including emotional reactions to various social and biological stimuli) must have evolved to seek partnership relationships with the individual(s) they have sex with. So human beings are definitely not supposed to have one-night stands with strangers, with no sense of obligation, because the implications for the survival of our offspring are disastrous. Instead, we've evolved to psychologically demand stability from our sex partners, which, in social terms, culminates in the institution of marriage. A violation of this biologically innate demand for stability in our mates will cause us significant distress, physically and emotionally.

But explaining why people are predisposed to act and respond in certain ways because of its evolutionarily-mandated drive for survival is hardly a foundation for morality and spiritual development. Seeking only survival of oneself and one's offspring often, in fact, runs contrary to our understanding of true morality and ethics. After all, rape could theoretically be justified if evolutionary survival were to replace ethics, because this is a way of maximizing one's offspring potential. And surely, by virtue of having human hearts, we all find reasoning utterly deplorable.

After graduating from Swarthmore, I began to attend the Zen Center of Sunnyvale partly out of intellectual interest, but partly because I was interested in joining a religious community again. I had left the Catholic church because I couldn't reconcile various aspects of its theology with itself, so I thought I'd investigate a religion that was known for its logical rigor.

And logical it is! I could go on ad infinitum about Buddhism, but with respects to morality, there are two big principles at play here; karma and compassion, which in a sense reflect two sides of the morality coin.

Karma describes cause and effect. (The Sanskrit literal meaning is "action," but one cannot talk about action without its results in Buddhism.) Karma can be understood to have two components - 1. the physical, seeable results of the action and 2. the intention behind them. These two factors will combine to produce an effect that returns to the doer of the karma. So karma could be described as "volitional action" that creates a specific result to self and others.

For example, doing community service for Habitat for Humanity in order to improve one's college application would involve good physical, and seeable results. However, the volition is not so pure; the intention was not compassion, because the point of the service was not to help others, it was to help oneself. Because the compassionate intent was not there in doing the good, the 'merits' (or colloquially, the benefits for yourself) of the community service is muted to some considerable extent. On the other hand, if someone accidentally steps on a bunch of ants while taking a stroller, totally unaware, the act is physically harmful but the intention to harm was absent. The results of this action is also muted to some considerable extent, perhaps completely and totally. The volition is a critical component of the merits produced.

Karma also has a reinforcement effect on your mind. If you keep doing compassionate acts, you will become more compassionate. If you keep doing malicious acts, you'll keep becoming more malicious. If you keep indulging your greed or lust, you'll become even greedier and more lustful.

Compassion is less difficult to explain. If you have the intent to alleviate others' suffering and bring them happiness, it's naturally you'll avoid certain things and commit certain actions. For example, becoming vegetarian is advocated because one will be freeing livestock animals from harm. You might donate to charity simply because the charity will inevitably help people.

So with regards to premarital sex, because sex in an unstable relationship can really end up hurting people, a good Buddhist will avoid having sex recklessly. And because indulging in lust will bring about more lust (and lust, or greed, is one of the "three poisons" that causes suffering), sex in general is to be avoided as much as possible. So certainly, one-night stands are not looked favorably upon. I would even argue that upon these grounds, a compassionate individual would have sex only in the context of marriage, because this is the safest and most stable scenario for his would-be sex partner. A lot of anxiety and confusion arises with premarital sex, and if you truly loved someone, you would keep him or her from experiencing that. At the least, you ought to assure your loved one that you'll always be there for him/her (which is one of the central elements of, of not in and of itself totally equivalent to, marriage) before you start having sexual relations.

To further my point, I'll quote from the Buddha himself, who describes in the Culakammavighanga Sutra (found in the Majjhima Nikaya of the Pali Cannon) a person who commits sexual misconduct as a person who

has intercourse with women who are protected by their mother, father, mother and father, brother, sister, or relatives, who have a husband, who are protected by law, and even with those already engaged.

It's pretty clear that the Buddha did not look favorably upon extramarital sex, whether it's premarital sex or adultery.

(At this point, I'd like to refer to the fact that mental health problems (eg depression, suicide) are strongly correlated with premarital sex, particularly for the teenage age range. I won't discuss this evidence further in this post, but I certainly will soon in the future.)

From a strict interpretation of the Buddhist perspective, premarital sex results in harm because it engages oneself and one's partner in lust, and the instability of the non-marital relationship creates anxiety in both sex partners. Furthermore, the risk of pregnancy always haunts the couple, no matter what contraceptive is used. If a fetus is aborted (and in Buddhism, life begins at conception), murder is committed upon one's child, which of course is evil karma. If a child is born, he or she is born into an unstable family situation, and there are various harms resulting from that as well. So premarital sex results only in harm, the least of which is indulging in lust and living in anxiety, and the worst being either ruining a child's life or murder itself.

A similar analysis could be done on the "near-sins" of dirty dancing or lewd appearance. They arise lust in others, they arise lust in oneself, both of which is bad in and of itself. But this lust can result in harm later on! At Swarthmore, there used to be (and perhaps still are) an annual campus-wide party in which women dress in lingerie. Not too surprisingly, the vast majority of rapes during the school year occurred during that one night. By arousing lust in others, you are putting both yourself and others in grave danger.

Of course, I'm not justifying that a woman who dresses lewdly "deserves" to be raped. No one in the world deserves such a heinous experience, for any reason whatsoever. But I do liken the situation to one in which one approaches dogs with rabies. In that situation, no one deserves to be bitten, but one should certainly avoid that situation for his own safety!

So in Buddhism I found the justification of morality as "do not harm others" and "try to benefit others." Rather than speaking of individual rights, in which you could do whatever you wanted within those boundaries, harmful or beneficial, Buddhism talks about causality (karma) and compassion.

One of the things I found in Confucianism that I found to be lacking in Zen cultivation was finding the spiritual and sacred in all worldly things, the transformation of mundaness into richness, channeling suffering and the lesser desires into forces of benevolence and virtue.

The essence of Confucian morality is incredibly difficult to explain because it is infused with spirituality to the point of oneness. Confucian morality is not simply united or integrated with spirituality, they are one and the same. A separation between morality and spirituality comes only from a lack of cultivation.

The point is further muddled when we consider the fact that other religions have something of a claim to this effect as well. For example, Buddhists can argue that a highly cultivated individual will naturally act ethically. In Mahayanan Buddhism, when one perfects one of the six paramitas - charity, morality, patience, effort, meditation, wisdom - one perfects all. While I do agree that the perfected individual of any religion does not morality and spirituality, the emphasis on this oneness as critical for the path of cultivation lies best with the Confucians. The intermediate Buddhist cultivator will have a lesser ability to integrate the two than the intermediate Confucian cultivator, even though the perfected ideal (the "sage" in Confucianism, the fully-enlightened Buddha in Buddhism) is the same, because of the difference in emphasis for practice. An opera composer needs to develop different skills in order to create the 'perfect opera.' In doing so, he can choose to see the poetics of the text as primary, with the musical score and plot following naturally. Or he can see the musical score as primary, with the poetics and plot following naturally, or he can see the plot as primary, with the poetics and score following naturally. Whatever focus he chooses, he will produce different products based on that focus than had he chosen a different focus, until he reaches a stage where all skills are fully mastered.

To return to Confucian ethics, each action has an ethical dimension because it inevitably effects others. Ethics, especially in Confucianism, is not about the individual, but rather about relationships. The concept of individual rights is superceded by the ideal of harmony. Harmony is expressed through ritual, propriety, and ettiquette. Ettiquette, in fact, is the outwardly manifestation of ethics. A handshake in the Western culture, or a bow in the Eastern culture, are symbolic acts both of ettiquette and ethics. Propriety has an important place, because it emphasizes order and ettiquette, and is infused with a sense of sacredness about every action. Ritual, ettiquette, propriety - these are all orderly and harmonious actions that connect us to other human beings and the cosmos in a profound and sacred way.

So to apply this understanding to sexuality is intellectually fascinating, but more significantly, empowering and enriching. Sex, to a Confucian, is among the most intimate of relational acts, and the most intimate of the marriage relationship. Sex is tantamount to an expression of the closest intimacy. Intimacy, by definition, cannot be established with multitudes of people, but rather with a select few. Exclusion is necessary for the closest and highest intimacy to occur. Therefore, to have sex with many individuals means to express the highest intimacy with many individuals.

But do people who have sex with many individuals really have the highest intimacy with all of those individuals?

The answer, practically speaking (and Confucians are strong on practical ethics), is no. Clearly, even if at some point the couples felt intimate, that intimacy is no longer there, by decision (excluding cases of death).

The marriage bond is built upon a promise of intimacy and security. If sex is to have spiritual and sacred meaning as an act of intimacy, it should be reserved only for as few as people as possible. As few as people possible ideally means only one person. That one person should be one's spouse, because no one else in the world is expected to be as intimate in which sexual relations are appropriate.

So why is sex so natural to be chosen as the act of sacred and spiritual intimacy? Becaise Confucians believing in transforming the lesser desires into virtues, finding the spiritual in the mundane. As I've established before, sex undeniably has strong emotional feelings attached to it, and is certainly physically highly pleasurable. So the Confucian takes these spontaneous, natural responses and transforms them into something sacred, spiritual and noble. They no longer become simply pleasures of the body and heart - they have spiritual meaning!

Sex then becomes an expression of "I love you" with physical, emotional, and spiritual meaning of the highest intimacy. And in order for this expression to be most meaningful, sex should be reserved only for husband and wife, after they have verbally dedicated themselves to each other.