2023-06-25 09:00:10
Members of the ‘Kinnar Akhada’ transgender congregation during the first ‘Shahi Snan’ (deep bath), during the Hindu ‘Kumbh Mela’ pilgrimage, in Allahabad, India on January 15, 2019. HINDUSTAN TIMES VIA GETTY IMAGES
Studying the question of homosexuality in Eastern religions is a challenge. Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism, Shintoism, all these religious traditions are extremely varied and do not express themselves in unison. Moreover, within the same religion, the teachings can differ, Indian Buddhism being, for example, very different from Chinese Buddhism. It is nevertheless possible to highlight some main principles.
Overall, benevolent neutrality
Having elevated compassion to the rank of the most important virtues, a large part of Buddhists invites us not to anathematize homosexuals. After initially qualifying homosexuality as “sexual misconduct”the Dalai Lama went back on his remarks. ” The times have changedhe argued. Only respect and attention to the other should govern the relationship of a couple, whether heterosexual or homosexual” (quoted by Eric Rommeluère in the Dictionary of Homophobia, PUF, 2003). The Tibetan leader even went so far as to defend, in 2014, same-sex marriage : “If two people, a couple, feel it’s more convenient, they feel more satisfied, and both sides agree, then okay. »
A discourse of compassion that we find in a certain way in Jainism, an Indian religion which advocates non-violence towards all living beings. Associating the sexual inclination of an individual with karma, it has the particularity of distinguishing biological gender and psychological gender.
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Tolerant vis-à-vis the sexual orientations of each, Shintoism, in Japan, is also. In this religion, nature is considered sacred. And everything in it must be fully accepted. While some sexual acts are reprehensible, homosexuality is not one of them, unlike incest or bestiality (zoophilia).
This benevolent neutrality can give way to a frank acceptance of relations between individuals of the same sex, sometimes endorsed by mythological texts. In India, the most popular god of Kerala, Ayyappan, was he not born, according to legend, from the homosexual union of the gods Shiva and Vishnu? And doesn’t the great epic of the Mahabharata tell how Krishna, disguised as a woman, offered his first sexual experience to Arvan Swami, the eldest son of the hero Arjuna?
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The Jatakas, accounts of the Buddha’s past lives, also refer to the ambiguous feelings that would have united the Sage and his closest disciple, Ananda. In one of them they are presented as two inseparable stags, “Huddled together, very happy, head to head, nostril to nostril, horn to horn”.
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