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assignations with one or other of his mistresses, were marked with a mysterious red sign and were the subject of a furtive and unofficial veneration.
    The story runs that the Dalai Lama was on one of the upper terraces of his palace. He was being subjected to the reproaches of his advisers, who found his sexual immorality little to their taste.
    “Yes, it is true that I have women”, he admitted “but you who find fault with me also have them, and copulation for me is not the same thing as it is for you.”
    He then walked to the edge of the terrace and urinated over it. With the force of gravity the stream of urine flowed down from terrace to terrace, finally reaching the base of the palace. Then, miraculously, it re-ascended the terraces, approached the Dalai Lama, and re-entered the bladder from whence it had come.
    Triumphantly he turned to those who had been abusing him: “Unless you can do the same”, he said, “you must realise that my sexual relations are different from yours.”
    The inner meaning of this curious tale is illustrated by another story, this time told of Marpa, who flourished in the eleventh century A.D. and was the teacher of Tibet’s great yogi Milarepa. Marpa wished to ensure that a married disciple of his should become the father of a child intended to be the physical vehicle of incarnation of a great lamaisticteacher. To this end Marpa first gave a special initiation to both the disciple and his wife, following which the couple retired, separately, for a prolonged religious retreat during which various rituals were conducted and the Bodhisattvas were invoked and asked to give their blessing to the operation.
    At the end of the retreat a further initiation was given to the two, after which they retired into the private oratory of Marpa. Here Marpas at on a throne with his own wife, the semi-divine Dagmedma, by his side, and at his feet lay the newly-initiated couple, writhing in silent copulation. When orgasm had been achieved the sperm was received by Marpa into a shallow bone dish, the brain-pan of a human skull—a type of bowl still used in certain Tibetan rites—and mixed with certain magical herbs, following which it was drunk by the disciple and his wife.
    Both these stories reflect the sexo-yogic practices of Buddhist Tantricism and they also illustrate the major non-theological difference between Buddhist Tantricism on the one hand, and Hindu and Jaina Tantricism on the other. For while ritual sexual intercourse (in either actual or symbolic form) is the central religious act in all Tantric cults, there is one considerable variation between Hindu and Buddhist technique; in Hindu rites the sexual act ends in the male practitioner ejaculating his semen into the vagina of the female, while in Buddhist rites the semen is retained by the male and no ejaculation takes place. Thus one Buddhist text instructs the adept that he should “place the
Vajra
in the
padma
but should retain the
bodhicitta
”. This sentence is a good example of the code in which most sexo-yogic treatises are written; the literal meaning of
vajra
is thunderbolt, that of
padma
is lotus, and
bodhicitta
means mind of enlightenment, but here the words mean, respectively, penis, vagina and semen. A variation of this technique of seminal retention has sometimes been used. In this variation ejaculation did take place but the semen was then re-absorbed by the male through the urethra. To the western reader such a practice may seem to have been physiologically impossible, but there is some evidence that this improbable feat has been achieved and certainly the technique was taught in several treatises on hatha-yoga, the novice being instructed to learn the required muscular control by sucking either water or milk up his urethral canal. It is, of course, true that semen re-absorbed in this way would have entered the bladder and not, as at least some Tantric adepts seem to have believed, the testicles. It seems likely that the