>The Buddha said that it would be better to stick your prick
>into the mouth of a snake or into a bed of hot coals than put it in a
>woman... shall I go on?
You remind me of a conversation I had with a couple of Laotian Buddhist monks attending my ESL school. One of them, the junior monk, is in my class. He's been there for a bit over a year, but he never really caught my attention with this until the other day.
He'd been talking with an older woman from Iran about answering some question in English. After they both made some headway in it, she made to high-five him and he almost fell off his chair trying to avoid touching her.
He tried to explain but was a bit flustered, so it fell to a member of his congregation to explain: he isn't allowed to, literally, touch women. Anywhere. Even a handshake is verboten. He's a bit of a shy sort, so I'd previously just passed it off as shyness, but I was surprised and a bit intrigued by the whole thing. Both of the monks ride home on my bus, so I asked the senior monk why they're not allowed to touch women. He's in a more advanced class, so I thought I'd get a fairly sophisticated answer from him as to why they're not allowed to touch women. But he just repeated what I'd been told and seemed to hint almost as though it were a matter of the monk's personal integrity, as if their congregation might distrust a monk who'd touched a woman's hand on the chance that it wasn't only her hand he'd touched.
Todd
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