Introduction- the nature of male and female

"The Chinese have always held the Taoist view that sexual relations between male and female are the primary earthly manifestation of the universal principles of Yin & Yang.

As such, the Chinese regard sex to be as natural and indispensable to human health and longevity as rain falling on the fields is to plant life.

The intense sense of guilt attached to sexual matters in Judeo-Christian tradition is, in Chinese eyes, one of the most unpleasant and incomprehensible aspects of Western culture.

Traditional Western hypocrisy towards sex has prevented serious study of human sexuality in the Western world until only a few decades ago. Like everything else in Western philosophy, sex is viewed through the lens of dualism; it is seen as either sacred (in matrimony) or profane (out of wedlock), with no room for anything in between.

The Chinese, however, do not draw distinctions between sacred and profane sex. As far as the Taoist are concerned, the only important distinctions regarding sexual activities are those between healthy and unhealthy habits.

The Chinese approach the subject of human sexuality with a blend of curiosity and reverence, just as they do all natural phenomena.

Since sexual relations are as fundamental to human life as eating and sleeping, Taoist adepts devoted a lot of time and thought to researching its every aspect and implication for human health and longevity. In a society happily free of sexual repression, Taoist physicians took a long and careful look at human sexual behavior, and they candidly recorded their findings in journals and books, couched in the usual florid Taoist terminology.

Consequently, the Chinese have been able to approach and study sexual relations between man and women, with open eyes and open minds, and they have, over three millennia, become the world's most astute observers of human sexuality, as well as the most inventive lovers.

The Nature of Man and Woman

The essential difference between the sexual nature of man and woman lies in the different nature of male and female orgasm.

When a man ejaculates, he ejects his semen-essence from his body.

When a woman reaches orgasm, she too 'ejaculates' all sorts of sexual secretions internally, but these are retained within her body.

For both men and women, sexual essence is an important storage battery for vital energy and a major source of resistance and immunity.

In conventional sexual relations, a man ejaculates every time he has intercourse, regardless of his own age or condition. This habit gradually robs him of his primary source of vitality and immunity, leaving him weak and vulnerable to disease and shortening his life span. Meanwhile, the women gets stronger and stronger, both from her own orgasmic secretions and from her assimilation of potent male semen-essence.

"Sweetie, stop and reread that paragraph again. You've got to understand this point.
I know it sounds strange to you, but you've got to try and open to the idea. Once you start to seriously practice it, it will make a lot more sense to you... you'll feel the difference in your health and well-being."

The different nature of male and female orgasm is reflected in the various slang terms to describe that magic moment in both the Chinese and Western languages.

The most common Chinese term for female orgasm is gao-chao, literally 'high tide', a graphic and poetic image drawn from nature.

But when man ejaculates, the Chinese say that he has 'lost his essence, 'thrown it away', 'leaked semen', or 'surrendered'. If a man ejaculates before his partner reaches orgasm, the Chinese say that she has 'killed' him. The French refer to ejaculation as 'petite mort', or 'little death'.

By patterning their sexual relations on the models of Heaven and Earth and conforming to the nature of Yin & Yang, men may derive life-giving benefits from the sexual forces, rather than being forever at their mercy.

Instead of depleting precious stores of essence and energy, sex may be used to replenish them.

Classically, appropriate analogies were drawn between human nature and Mother Nature, which illuminated the basic qualities of man and woman. Appropriate principles drawn from those analogies were then applied to regulate human sexual relations. As the Han Dynasty adept Wu Hsien put it:

"The male belongs to Yang. Yang's nature is such that the male is easily aroused but also quick to retreat.
The female belongs to Yin. Yin's nature is such that the female is slow to be aroused and also slow to be satiated."

Throughout the animal and insect world, nature has fashioned the female as a superior specimen uniquely equipped for the survival and propagation of the species.

According to the 'law of the jungle', the male exists only to provide the seed for future generations and to protect the nest while the female nurses the young to maturity. Sexual intercourse occurs seasonally, and while all females 'in heat' get fertilized, only a small fraction the strongest males perform the task. Even among primates, only the strong, dominant males are permitted to fertilize the females, while weaker male specimens are either discarded or kept at a distance from the herd.

Among many orders of insect, such as black widow and praying mantis, nature gives the male even shorter shrift: the moment he deposits his seed in the female, she promptly kills and devours him as a post-coital snack.

Only humans (and a few higher primates such as orangutans) engage in sexual intercourse all year long, day and night, in any season or weather, and only humans do it primarily for pleasure rather than procreation. Yet the human male, despite his inflated ego, is subject to the same inherent limitations that nature has imposed on his gender in all species.

Matriarchy is a social acknowledgment of female superiority and is therefore a natural pattern for the human species to follow. China's prehistoric matriarchy is still reflected in Chinese language and thought. The single most common word in the Chinese language is hao, which means 'good' in all its various senses.

The ideogram for 'good' consists of the symbol for 'women' placed next to that for 'child', indicating that the highest good is the generative relationship between mother (not father) and child. The ideogram that denotes the word 'surname' in Chinese consists of the symbols for 'woman' and 'birth' clearly indicating that family decent in prehistoric China was traced through the mother's line, just as it was in ancient Hebrew tradition prior to patriarchy.

In all the ancient Chinese sex manuals, woman is always depicted as the guardian of sexual arcana and the supreme source of life-sustaining essence and energy. In these texts the woman plays the role of the great initiator and teacher of sex, while the man is described as a sexually ignorant bumbler.

Because of her sexual potency, woman was regarded as possessor of great stores of Teh (power). The contemporary Taoist Jolan Chang, in his book The Tao of the Loving Couple, quotes some conclusions by Mary Jane Sherfey regarding the power of female sexuality:

"All relevant data from the 12000 to 8000 BC period indicate that precivilized woman enjoyed full sexual freedom and was often totally incapable of controlling her sexual drive. Therefore, I propose that one of the reasons for the long delay between the earliest development of agriculture (c. 12000 BC) and the rise of urban life and the beginning of recorded knowledge (c. 8000-5000 BC) was the ungovernable cyclic sexual drive of women. Not until these drives were gradually brought under control by rigidly enforced social codes could family life become the stabilizing and creative crucible from which modern civilized man could emerge."

Although man took control of the family, village, economy, religion and state, he still found himself at woman's mercy in bed. No amount of human artifice can mask or alter the fundamental facts of Tao. Hence, there arose a deep contradiction between man's artificial social superiority and his genuine sexual inferiority is-a-is woman, and this gave rise to the battle of the sexes that still rages in most boudoirs today.

It also explains the deep fear and resentment that many men harbor toward women, despite women's supposed 'inferiority'.

'Macho' men simply cannot face the fact that women are sexually superior, nor do they dare admit the realities of their own inherent sexual weakness.

This sad state of affairs is due primarily to sexual ignorance. Any man open-minded enough to take a serious look at the Tao of Yin and Yang- and self disciplined enough to practice it- will find that the Tao completely eliminates the fundamental inequity between male and female sexual potency.

The Tao enables the male member to become an all-weather instrument of equal competence to that of its female counterpart and permits man and woman to 'make love not war', while at the same time protecting the health and prolonging the lives of both partners.

In the Western world, artists and athletes have so far been the only people who truly realize the debilitating nature of male ejaculation. In his autobiography, Charlie Chaplin wrote, 'Like Balzac, who believed that a night of sex meant the loss of a good page of his novel, so I believed that it meant the loss of a good day's work at the studio.'

On a more contemporary note, let's listen in on an interview with jazz musician Miles Davis which appeared in the April 1975 issue of Playboy magazine:

Davis: You can't come, then fight or play. You can't do it. When I get ready to come, I come. But I do not come and play.

Interviewer: Explain that in layman's terms.

Davis: Ask Muhammad Ali. If he comes, he can't fight two minutes. Shit, he couldn't even whip me.

Interviewer: Would you fight Muhammad Ali under those conditions, to prove your point?

Davis: You're goddam right I'd fight him. But he's got to promise to fuck first. If he ain't going to fuck, I ain't going to fight. You give up all your energy when you come. I mean, you give up all of it! So, if you're going to fuck before a gig, how are you going to give something when it's time to hit?

What neither Davis nor Ali realize is that sexual intercourse without ejaculation prior to a fight or gig would improve their performances even more than if they abstained altogether.

Artists and athletes rely on optimum levels of physical and mental vitality in order to perform, which is why they are more sensitive to the loss of semen and vital energy through ejaculation. However, other men suffer just as severely from such loss, albeit they remain fairly unconscious of it. For example, the male tendency to fall sound asleep after ejaculation is a prime indicator of complete exhaustion. If orgasm itself were so exhausting, then women would feel the same effects from it, but they don't. It is the physical ejection of semen from the body- not orgasm per se- that harms man.

The depressing phenomenon of 'post-coital blues' that follows conventional intercourse does not occur at all when men retain semen. Taoist sex is a barter arrangement between Yin and Yang: the man sacrifices a small measure of short-term pleasure in return for the long-term benefits of health and longevity, while the woman enjoys complete unrestricted sexual pleasure in exchange for a measure of her abundant supplies of life-prolonging essence and energy.

The contrasting nature of male and female orgasm has important implications for two types of sexual activity that have aroused a lot of controversy over the ages and appear to be gaining in popularity today: masturbation and homosexuality.

Viewed from the angle of Yin and Yang, the results of these two activities are very different indeed for men and women.

For men, masturbation represents an irretrievable and uncompensated loss of Yang semen-essence. While healthy males between the ages of 16 and 21 are veritable 'fountains of semen' for whom masturbation is relatively harmless, by the time they reach 25 or so, all the old shibboleths regarding males masturbation come true: weakness in thighs and knees, numbness in lumbar region, loss of vitality, depression, etc.

By the time they reach 30, men should entirely give up this self-defeating habit and start conserving semen exclusively for intercourse with women. Men who continue masturbating habitually into their 30's, 40's and 50's rob themselves of the very essence and energy that fuels their lives and protects their health.

A woman, by contrast, may masturbate to her heart's content without damaging her stores of essence and energy. In the polygamous households of ancient China, female masturbation and sapphism served important social and psychological functions in the harems of sexually beleaguered gentlemen. And since women do not reach their peak of sexual potency until their mid-30's (unlike men who 'peak out' after 18), masturbation is likely to become even more important as they grow older since so many men begin losing their potency just as women 'hit stride' around age 35.

The same point applies to homosexual relations: they are harmless for women but highly detrimental to men, both physiologically and psychologically.

Nature has made Yin passive and yielding, and two passive forces do not conflict. The Chinese refer to sapphic love as 'polishing mirrors', a term that reflects the fact that female homosexual practices are largely limited to the rubbing together of similar parts, rather than actual penetration of the body. And even when the body is penetrated with a surrogate phallus, it is done through the orifice intended for that purpose. Like masturbation, sapphism was a common practice in the household harems of wealthy Chinese families, where up to a dozen women might find themselves completely cut off from male company for months at a time when the man of the house was off on official business.

Taoist physicians regarded homosexuality among men, on the other hand as a dangerous practice- for several reasons. First of all, Yang is by nature an active, aggressive force, and, when two aggressive forces meet, a fundamental conflict of energies and intentions result. Male homosexuality requires that one partner yield to the other by adopting the female role, both physically and psychologically, and when this practice becomes a habit it completely undermines the fundamental role of Yang in the order of nature. Looking at this situation of Yang conflict at a microscopic scientific level, when sperm from two different men are mixed together and observed under magnification, they may clearly be observed fighting one another in a desperate struggle for supremacy.

Psychology aside, the greatest threat posed to men by homosexual practices are physiological.

Anal penetration, the mutual exchange of Yang sexual fluids, and frequent uncontrolled ejaculations are the culprits. Ancient Taoist physicians noted a pathological condition called 'Dragon Yang Syndrome' which occurred exclusively among promiscuous male homosexuals. 'Dragon Yang' (lung-yang) is a common Chinese euphemism for male homosexuality, equivalent to the English word 'gay'. Symptoms of this ailment included weakness and fatigue, skin ulcers and boils, low immunity, and impotence.

The foregoing observations on the nature of Yin & Yang make it clear that man and woman are not created equal.

Yin is abundant and enduring, while Yang is limited and vulnerable, and this is reflected in the fact that throughout the world women tend to outlive men by a factor of five to ten years.

The key to redressing this inequity is properly regulated relations between 'fire' and 'water'. As the Taoist alchemist Ko Hung wrote in the fourth century AD:

"Both fire and water can kill,
yet both may also bestow life.

It depends entirely on whether one knows Tao.
If a man knows Tao, then the more he makes love,
the better becomes his health.

If he ignorant of Tao, just one woman
is sufficient to hasten his journey to the grave."

"Lest male readers further hasten their journeys to the grave due to ignorance of Tao, let us now get down to the crux of the matter- the Way of Yin and Yang- a way that shows us how to use sex to pave a path to health and longevity rather than to perdition."

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