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by Jonathan Margolis

  Chang extracts from the Ancient Chinese texts specific instructions for better sex, four of which involve men learning how to arouse their female partner.

  He must know how to feel his woman’s nine erotic zones.

  He must know how to appreciate his woman’s five beautiful

  qualities.

  He must know how to arouse her so he can benefit from her

  flooding secretions.

  He should drink her saliva, and then his ching [semen] and her

  chi [breath] will be in harmony.

  Chang also details ten signs of female desire that men ought to be able to recognise:

  She holds the man tight with both her hands. It indicates that

  she wishes closer body contact.

  She raises her legs. It indicates that she wishes closer friction of her clitoris.

  She extends her abdomen. It indicates that she wishes shallower thrusts.

  Her thighs are moving. It indicates that she is greatly pleased.

  She uses her feet… to pull the man. It indicates that she wishes deeper thrusts

  She crosses her legs over his back. It indicates that she is anxious for more.

  She is shaking from side to side. It indicates that she wishes deep thrusts on both the left and right.

  She lifts her body, pressing him. It indicates that she is enjoying it extremely.

  She relaxes her body. It indicates that the body and limbs are pacified.

  Her vulva is flooding. Her tide of yin has come. The man can see for himself that his woman is happy.

  The age of China’s distinctive blend of sexual frankness and poetic lucidity did not come to a close with the end of the Han dynasty. In Yufang Bijue (Secret Instructions of the Jade Chamber), a Taoist text of several hundred years after Han, we can read of a technique for coitus obstructus: ‘When, during the sexual act, the man feels he is about to ejaculate, he should quickly and firmly, using the fore and middle fingers of the left hand, put pressure on the spot between scrotum and anus, simultaneously inhaling deeply and gnashing his teeth scores of times, without holding his breath. Then the semen will be activated but not yet emitted. It returns from the Jade Stalk and enters the brain.’ (Taoist masters would charge eager pupils vast sums for revealing the precise location of that key pressure point between the scrotum and the anus; it is sometimes described in translation as ‘the million-dollar point’.)

  Reay Tannahill, in her book Sex in History, paraphrases another typically juicy section from the seventh-century Yek Tê-hui, a sex manual by Master Tung-hsuan, a physician of the time: ‘The Jade Stalk, he said, should hover lightly around the precious entrance of the Cinnabar Gate while its owner kissed the woman lovingly or allowed his eyes to linger over her body or look down to her Golden Cleft. He should stroke her stomach and breasts and caress her Jewel Terrace. As her desire increases, he should begin to move his Positive Peak more decisively, back and forward, bringing it now into direct contact with the Golden Cleft and the Jade Veins, playing from side to side of the Examination Hall, and finally bringing it to rest at one side of the Jewel Terrace. Then, when the Cinnabar Cleft was in flood, it was time for the Vigorous Peak to thrust inward.’ Tung-hsuan, Tannahill adds, recommended the use of a penis ring, both to keep the Jade Stalk erect but also to stimulate the woman’s Jewel Terrace during intercourse.

  How sexually developed in antiquity, it may be wondered in the light of such advanced sexual material from China, was that civilisation’s neighbour and great rival Japan? Given the more obscure, inward-looking and secretive Nature of ancient Edo compared to China, it is of little surprise that there is far less material on the sex life of the Ancient Japanese.

  The most marked feature of the earliest religion of Japan, the Shinto cult, was animal worship, but evidence from various surviving erotic paintings show that even thousands of years before the geisha was heard of it, Shinto was profoundly hedonistic, as much so as the contemporary Greek culture. While early Chinese sexual manuals were mainly written for the health of male, old Japanese sexual texts centre more on the playful spirit required by both parties to enjoy sex.

  Sexuality in Ancient Japan was celebrated through gods such as Izanagi, ‘the male who invites’; and Izanami, ‘the female who invites’. The deity Kunado was represented by a penis. Worship of the ‘Heavenly Root’ – the penis – was universal, with wooden and stone phallic symbols commonplace in town and country. They were thought to possess powerful healing and revivifying properties.

  One custom was to dedicate beautiful young girls to the service of Kwan-Non, the Japanese Venus. The great temple of Asakusa was dedicated to her. Sacred prostitutes, in effect, they belonged to a religious order of nuns called Bikuni. It was a privilege to become a member of the Bikuni, girls being selected for their beauty and lovemaking prowess from all classes, including those employed in the more commercial brothels. Shinto temples, additionally, were the scenes of sexual orgies easily rivalling ancient Roman Bacchanalia.

  Then there is the question of Japan’s most famous contribution to the history of the orgasm, the egregious Ben Wa (‘Joy’) balls allegedly invented by a Japanese courtesan of unknown vintage, but called Rino-Tama and responsible for one of the staples of the modern sex shop. Rino-Tama it was who discovered that placing two marble-sized balls of suitable design inside the vagina could for a woman be like having a permanent portable vibrator in place. Hours spent moving about with Ben Wa balls installed could supposedly culminate in a subtle and discreet, yet impressive, mini-orgasm.

  The earliest ‘love beads’, also known later as geisha balls, are believed to have been egg-shaped hollow balls carved from ivory. Subsequently, the casing would be made of gold or silver with a small weight – mercury in very ancient times – placed in the centre to roll around, creating rotating sensations within the vagina and sensitive surrounding tissue that could be orgasmic for practised women. The balls can be held low in the vagina or directly behind the G-spot. In the modern context, they are said to help to tighten and strengthen the pubococcygeal (PC) muscles, giving a better ‘grip’ during intercourse, as well as controlling the bladder and preventing incontinence with advancing age.

  Some Ben Wa users swore by a specialised trick of the trade, which was to make just one of the balls hollow, the other ball solid. By their rubbing together in the vagina, a special kind of ‘ringing’ vibration would be set up, said to be still more conducive to a sly dose of orgasmic bliss on-the-hoof. Other women in Ancient Japan and later times have also enjoyed using Ben Wa balls for intercourse, and say their male partners enjoy encountering the smooth spheres during penetration.

  Although the Chinese were the first Eastern people to bring advanced sexual knowledge into the public sphere with explicit sex manuals for the common man and woman, the original body of specialised, esoteric knowledge about sex, the Tantra, which later appears in Hinduism, Buddhism and Taoism, seems to have begun its development in Ancient India.

  It is in the Hindu world, rather than in China, that the pursuit of the ultimate orgasm, irrespective of reproductive considerations, was revered as something close to a religious quest. The Ancient Hindus were more explicit than the hedonistic Greeks about pleasure. They considered earthly life had three distinct and equal purposes: religious piety (dharma), material prosperity (artha), and sexual pleasure (kama).

  Every inquisitive schoolboy in the West in the twentieth century learned at some stage of the Kamasutra, and knew that in it the penis is called the lingam and the vulva, the yoni. But the Kamasutra is a relatively recent, third-century AD text – 200 years more modern, for instance, than Ovid’s Ars Amatoria. The Kamasutra’s most distant roots, however, can be traced to around 4,000 BC among the Harrapan tribe, which inhabited the area of present-day Sahiwal in the Pakistani Punjab.

  The Harrapan worshipped femininity. Their goddess Shakti was represented in the form of a yoni. Sex was a way of combining male and female energies. Women were respected as well
as revered, and rape was punishable by death. The growing sexual cult required males to do everything in their power to cherish and satisfy their wives. Impoliteness to women was banned, and neither could females be bought or sold.

  The Tantric movement proper did not reach its height until about 700 AD, by which time the word had spread, suitably adapted by Tantric missionaries, to China. By this time Tantrism was embodied in a series of Tantra scriptures and had been colonised by Hindu sects, Shaktis, which venerated everything feminine. They were opposed by Lingayatis, who worshipped male gods. Tantrists came mostly from the middle castes, but their belief system was later appropriated by elite Brahmins. Isolated Tantric sects continued almost to the present day; one was studied in Bengal as late as 1980.

  As in China, the most basic principle of Tantrism, drawn, it appears, from the folkloric belief in the super-carnal desires of women, was that men and women are like positive and negative in electricity – that energy flows via sexual intercourse from women to men. Shiva, the male god was thus often shown ‘plugged in’, in perpetual flagrante with the goddess Shakti.

  Tantra defines orgasm as the blissful and indescribable result of interaction between the sexual potential of the two lovers, producing a polarisation of the bio-electric energies in the form of an ecstatic tension release similar to thunder. The orgasm produces in each of the lovers, separately or simultaneously, a profound feeling of contentment that has synchronous echoes in each plane of their being.

  So fundamental to a healthy life and spiritual advancement was orgasm that some Tantric sub-sects required their monks and nuns to have sex as a religious duty. Temples dedicated to the goddess of love, Kama, were erected to celebrate Shiva and Shakti’s lovemaking sessions. The inner sancta of such temples would be built to represent Shakti’s yoni and kept permanently moist by a natural spring.

  The femininity of the Tantra, as well as many of the sacred books of Hinduism, cannot be overstated; there is a real sense that the Hindu culture places as central to sex the woman’s desire for safety, confidence, commitment and luxuriously extended physical fulfilment. Andre Van Lysebeth, a respected teacher of Tantric sex who spent decades studying in India, explains in his book Tantra: The Cult of the Feminine: Tor Tantra, each and every woman incarnates the Goddess, is the Goddess, Absolute Woman, the Cosmic Mother … A Tantrist worships the cosmic goddess Shakti in all women. In all women: fat or thin, young or old, able-bodied or disabled.’

  The male Tantrist, for Van Lysebeth (and it is significant before getting too excited about the cult, that nobody mentions there being any female adherents), ‘is able to “feminise” his sexual experience. To the ordinary male, sex is a convergent experience both in time and space – revolving around his sex organs and becoming progressively narrower in space and time. When the spasm is over … men’s desire vanishes and men turn away from women, wounding their self-esteem.’

  The Tantrist, however, ‘does not make love to a vagina, but to a human being as a whole, i.e., the physical, psychic and cosmic woman, the incarnation of the cosmic Shakti … He intensely shares the Shakti’s ultimate sexual emotion when she experiences a deep orgasm. This makes him aware of the sacred part of the woman, without trying to appropriate her body or her sex life. He does not think nor say, “This is my wife, her vagina is my property, I own her sensuality.” He perceives sex as the manifestation of cosmic creative power, which is suprapersonal.’

  The Hindu/Tantric tradition fostered an open attitude towards sex, as would ultimately be exemplified by the Kamasutra. But a great liberality, bordering on licentiousness, was in evidence long before that. Much of the continuing racy reputation of Tantric sex has its foundation in the practical eroticism of Ancient India. It is curious that Ancient China, with its equally sexy reality, has tended to be remembered in modern times more in terms of its martial arts and fireworks.

  Precise directions are given by Tantric sex masters – part of the reason, perhaps, why male adherents in the modern era are often derided as the kind of men who like to read instruction books in bed. Sex must only take place when a woman is sexually excited. The goal is, for some, not ejaculating at all; for others, not ejaculating until the woman had one or more orgasms. As in Taoism, the longer the male can stay in some sense inside the woman, even if his penis is not erect, the more female energy he will absorb for his own benefit. This practice of coitus reservatus or askanda is sometimes portrayed in Hindu art by images of a flaccid or ‘pendulous’ penis.

  As to what methods should be used to delay or block ejaculation altogether (coitus obstructus), Tantrists were advised to use meditation, self-discipline and manual intervention via ‘the million-dollar point’. To avoid premature ejaculation, Tung-hsuan is at one with Indian thinking when he advises that at the last moment, ‘the man closes his eyes and concentrates his thoughts: he presses his tongue against the roof of his mouth, bends his back, and stretches his neck. He opens his nostril wide and squares his shoulders, closes his mouth, and sucks in his breath. Then he will not ejaculate and the semen will ascend inward on its own account.’

  It is not clear whether Tantrism was the tail or the dog in the sexual foment of Ancient India. A sect that utilises sex as a means to spiritual development sounds a little avant-garde by the standard of most societies, yet in India it is striking how almost every form of orgasmic attainment conceivable was venerated in antiquity by one sect or another. Fellatio, cunnilingus, prostitution, masturbation, anal sex, voyeurism, incest, transvesticism, masochism, coprophilia, bestiality and even, in rare cases, cannibalism, were acceptable to the holy men of some cult somewhere. Necrophilia was quite common; there are many images in Hindu art of the goddess Kali making love to the corpse of Shiva, and resuscitating him through orgasm. Tantric sex seems quite a tame interest against such a colourful background

  It does not rule out gay sexuality, which is considered sacred and divinely ordained by many Tantric adherents. What harm, after all, if two males agree to share their sexual pleasure? They may not gain the essential feminine energy from the experience, but so long as they are bisexual they will not suffer lasting damage. The male’s sacred spot in some Hindu scriptures lies between testicles and the anus, and is best invoked by a thrust of lingum in the anus. Many Tantrists aver that this gives a thousand times more pleasure than penetrating i yoni. Married women who indulged in lesbianism, however, were not tolerated by the early Tantric cultists. They were supposed to be punished by being shaved bald, having the two relevant fingers cut off and being led through their town on an ass.

  Tantric sex is not necessarily synonymous with love and affection. In some ways Tantric sex is sex for its own sake. Removal of self is the central tenet of the Tantra, not devotion to any one other person. The important thing is that at the point of orgasm, the Tantric practitioner rises above ‘self’, the consciousness of one’s own being. This is why ritual intercourse is an important part of Tantric sex for many practitioners. The term Chakrapuja (circle worship) refers to the basic religious ceremony of early Tantrism. The guru conducting the ceremony was charged with preventing it from becoming an orgy, but the event was still essentially about sex with strangers.

  Such evenings were lubricated by wine or hashish, after which the small group of couples moved forward to feasting and then lengthy, promiscuous intercourse. For the truly dedicated Tantrist, the next step towards enlightenment was a ceremony that culminated in ritual intercourse with specially trained women known as dakinis. The ultimate orgasmic bliss on this continuum, the closest approximation to union with the divine, was described, as ‘intercourse with oneself, in which the same feeling as sex with a woman could be reproduced as a soloist. This was the entrance to a new state of bliss in which the male Tantric practitioner, though a man and therefore weak and spineless, could be freed from dependence on women.

  Heterosexual, mainstream and recommended for married couples, the Kamasutra – it means, ‘treatise on sexual pleasure’ – was very much the l
ate-to-market, mass-consumption version of India’s lubricious culture. It is, nevertheless, the most famous sex book of all time. It is astonishing that the World Wide Web contained nearly a million references to the Kamasutra in 2003, as opposed to less than a hundred for the equally explicit Chinese pillow books of the same period.

  The Kamasutra is an edited collection of Indian writings, both spiritual and practical, going back hundreds of years from the time of the author, one Mallanaga Vatsyayana, about whom nothing is known other than that he lived in the city of Benares on the Ganges, he was upper-middle-class, and assumed his readers similarly had servants – and took himself a little too seriously; he states at the end of the Kamasutra that he wrote the work ‘in a state of mental concentration and chastity’.

  The Kamasutra was composed in Sanskrit for precisely the same people as Dr Alex Comfort would aim at in The Joy Of Sex 1,700 years later – young, educated, broad-minded urbanites, known in Vatsyayana’s India as Nagaraka. Despite the highly detailed illustrations with which the book is generally published, it was not a sex manual, unless you were a Yogic contortionist – athletic, often implausible, sexual positions are what the Kamasutra is most famous for. Neither was it a work of pornography. Graphic sexual paintings were common in Indian culture; wealthy Hindu husbands would commission pictures of themselves having sex with their wives as routinely as eighteenth-century Europeans had themselves painted in formal poses with their hunting hounds.

  Unless one was a Sanskrit scholar, it has only been possible very recently to read the Kamasutra free from the androcentric language and prejudices of Victorian England. The standard translation has always been that published in 1883 by Sir Richard Burton, a daring progressive in his time, but very much of that time when, broadly speaking, only male sexual desire was acknowledged.

  In 2002 a new translation appeared which had almost the same clarifying effect on our view of the sexual life of long ago as when astronomers saw the first images from the Hubble space telescope. The new translation by Wendy Doniger, Professor of the History of Religions at the University of Chicago, and Sudhir Kakar, a leading Indian psychoanalyst and a senior fellow at Center for Study of World Religions at Harvard, both flatters the sexual democracy of Ancient India – and lays bare its sometimes shocking male prejudice.