Is Novel Erotic Fiction?

Is Daughter of the Dance a curiosa, erotica, erotic fiction, or literotica? In answering the question, in a roundabout manner, indulge the author’s under girding reason for dealing with sex as she did while seeking to tell the story.

There was a curious moment the author had about twenty years ago at a Buddhist retreat when a young man went before the lama, asking if he has to visualize himself as a deity with his consort in union. When he was told that it was essential to visualize them in union, the young man was alarmed and left feeling frightened by the prospect. It was apparent among those who understood the practice that the young man was experiencing a strong aversion to it. Curiosity left the author wondering what had just happened, for she was a novice on Buddhism, especially Tibetan Buddhism. She felt compelled to meet the author of The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying when, what she read, rang true to her core. Beforehand, she did have an understanding of tantra, the art and skill of sexual bliss whose mystery, unfortunately, is lost by many because sex is still considered taboo with a titter or disgust or hypocrisy.

 

Tantra is highly misunderstood because the energy surrounding it is subtle but also powerful. In ancient Sanskrit, the term means “to weave energy” that makes a web. The definition seems to rise to the level of the quantum realm of the Unified Quantum Theory. In practice, to be in union is to weave the energy in such a way that the bliss experienced transcends both the sexual and spiritual planes without attachment in particular. It becomes deeply meditative, spontaneous, and intimate. As such, the couple is engaged in immeasurable sex in a tunneling vortex. Ancient Sanskrit defines it as Maithuna, the Grand Ritual of Tantra, not to be confused with ritualized sex or the Grand Unified Theory (the duality of the fields into a single physical field).  Our quantum physicists and neuroscientists have catch-up to do to understand how spirit (consciousness) and matter work together to bring harmony when the couple become “excellent or divine.” For cultures which did not consider that sex is the original sin, the minds of their scientific sages explored what, how, why, where, when, and how the sexual energy of attraction is weaved to recreate matter into a wave or to transcend its dualistic material away from the samsara realms of matter.

So, why did the author deal with human sexuality as she did? Was it for shock value? Perhaps. The historical nature and romance of the novel are counterpointed by the sexual relationships of love and rape, dignity and humiliation, partnership and slavery, pleasure and pain, reciprocity and domination. It is blatant as well as clever. The tension and drama sadly comes from one person dominating another.

When romance novelist Judith Krantz introduced her winning formula of mixing sand and shopping, she opened the door for other genre novelists to deal only with sexual and sensual subject matter. The author of Daughters of the Dance takes dancers of a spiritual tradition made erotic for the sole purpose of sexual arousal within the historical contexts from the 19th and 20th centuries. Five women are featured whose sexual struggles with high-powered men give a new dimension on how to heal sexually. But more importantly, the novel intends to arouse sexual desire to drive home how important, without substantially deal with the subject matter, it is to weave its energy that will break the wheel of birth-death-rebirth-death back into dualism that divides the sexes from knowing true harmony and bliss. The answer comes from the tantric Guru Rinpoche, a master of Buddhism during the 8th century. The union of his “divine parents” he described as “My father is the intrinsic awareness, Samantabhadra; and my mother is the ultimate sphere of reality Samantabhadri of non-duality of the sphere of awareness. I am from the unborn sphere of all phenomena and act in the way of the Buddhas of the three times.” The act once mastered breaks the chain of dualistic realms of rebirth.

Daughters of the Dance is not erotic fiction; it merely expresses sex in explicit language to prove a point and a goal–have neither attachment nor aversion toward the healthy sexual act.

Read the “Afterword” with understanding.