So it looks like the Olympic games are in Japan this year. Not many people know this,
but Medieval Japan was supposed to host the Olympics once,
but the International Olympic Committee cancelled it due to fears of Buddhist monks dominating the gymnastics events.
This was after they saw the mental gymnastics that medieval Japanese monks
performed when justifying why they kept breaking their vows against having seks.
Medieval Japanese temples had these child assistants called
chigo 稚児, or acolyte. They were like altar boys.
Influential families often sent their sons to Buddhist monasteries to study.
They did it for the same reason that people today send their kids to boarding schools:
parenting is easier when done by other people. You can always trust priests to take care of your boy.
Chigo families were pretty well off. They included mid to upper tier families,
families of temple administrators, and families of workers for important government figures.
Temples had a whole hierarchy of acolytes. Chigo were pretty high up there, second from the top,
right beneath the sons of elite aristocratic families.
Becoming a chigo automatically gave you high status, sometimes even higher than the family you came from.
The monastery gave these boys a top-tier education. They were taught the arts like singing,
dancing, playing instruments, literature, and poetry.
Everything they needed to be classy aristocrats that normal people looked up to and wished to rob.
They also made political connections and mined karma coins that they could cash out after death.
They actually gained plenty of benefits, and all they had to give up in return
were their bodies, which we’ll talk about later.
These boys were usually 12 to 19 years old.
The chigo stage of monastery life only lasted 4 to 5 years, after which they either left to start a family,
or became adult monks and maybe acquired a chigo of their own.
So why did families ship their sons off to temples?
If you asked a father this back then, he would look at you funny and say,
“Why the hell not?” before turning around and sleeping with his servant.
Why not, indeed. Large Buddhist temples had connections to all the elites,
and drained these connections into massive pools of influence.
Plus, get on their bad side and they’ll pray your army away like they did the Mongols.
A family that wanted to tap into these pools, to suckle on the fluid of influence, would arrange to
have their son enter a temple to serve some monk.
Like how a political marriage brings two families together,
a chigo-master relationship brought a family and a temple together.
Closer, at least.
This was a win-win-win. The chigo got an elite education and political connections,
the family gained favor with the temple, and the temple obtained some prestige plus a new servant.
And so powerful parents from across the land told their sons,
“Have fun at monastery school, I’ll pick you up in 5 years,”
then turned around and slept with their servants.
Acolytes had 2 main duties:
to dance and perform in religious ceremonies, and to serve their masters in every way, including seksually.
The first duty was important too, but this is a video about the second. Monks were really into that second duty.
Chigo had this androgynous beauty, a little feminine, a little masculine.
For some reason, Japan has a history of liking this kind of bi-gender beauty.
For example, shirabyōshi dancers were popular female performers in medieval Japan who dressed like men.
Alright, check out this piece of art. Is this a woman or a chigo?
Hard to tell right? Don’t worry, you’re not dumb. I assume.
Even historians have a hard time. In fact, one old story trope was the Seksually Confused Monk,
where a monk would be confused as to whether the beauty he had just met was a woman or a chigo.
This one’s actually a chigo. You can tell because he’s not wearing women’s clothing,
and because the artwork is from a collection called Booklet of Chigo,
which is this explicit adult/comedy booklet that we will peruse in a bit.
So go ahead and burn your Bible and get ready.
The first thing you’ll notice about a chigo is his long, voluptuous ponytail.
Children also wore their hair long, sometimes in loops.
When children became adults, they cut their hair into that symbol of adulthood called the topknot.
For chigo, keeping their long hair meant extending their childhood,
or delaying their adulthood.
Acolytes lived at the Mexican border between childhood and adulthood.
Acolytes also wore white makeup and fancy clothes.
They definitely looked different from the usual monks with no fashion sense.
Those robes are absolutely last century.
The relationship between a chigo and his master was often arranged
by the chigo’s family and the temple.
The chigo’s job was to learn from his master, but also to serve his master.
He was expected to be obedient, even in the bedroom.
The samurai actually liked this chigo system so much that they kind of copied it to create the shudō tradition,
where samurai had seks with their young male underlings.
In the monastery world, chigo-master relationships were seen as normal and mutually beneficial, totally not abusive.
Now these boys did come from influential families,
so monks would have thought twice before forcing their acolytes into seks.
But sometimes thinking twice only makes you doubly wrong.
Abuse must have happened once in a while, though we don’t have much direct evidence of it.
There’s no diary entry where a monk holds down his chigo and forces
him to do something monstrous like watching hentai or something.
We haven’t seen that.
We can only guess that abuse did happen sometimes because there are a million
fictional stories about chigo abuse and suicide.
But in general, the chigo and his master seemed like normal lovers,
except the master was much older and had huge power over his partner.
So like normal Hollywood lovers. Husbands back then had similar power over their wives.
Medieval Japan was all about that power imbalance in relationships.
Male-male seks was okay if there was a big difference in age or power.
It was frowned upon when the relationship was between 2 equals. Like, he’s not your boss? That’s weird bro.
Male nobles of equal rank had to keep their affairs secret
because doing it openly would have gotten them kicked out of the weekly emo poetry jam.
This was why when the chigo became an adult, older priests were no longer interested.
Sometimes this ended in tragedy. In one case, a chigo grew up,
but continued serving his master as an adult.
Sadly, his master was no longer attracted to such an old young man, leading the young man to kill himself from grief.
These relationships were supposed to be monogamous,
but monogamy breaks under the unstoppable force of a tight rear end.
Cheating was rampant.
Whenever you have priests and boys in such close proximity, some snakes are bound to crawl into the wrong hole.
Sometimes, couples took vows to strengthen their relationships,
making it worse when the vows were broken.
Masters were more likely than their acolytes to seek other temporary partners.
Monks were party animals. They went to festivals and religious ceremonies,
great places to meet new boys, because acolytes performed at these events.
They would send endless poems to their love interests.
Sappy love poems were the most common way to attract a chigo.
It also works in the modern day.
Go ahead and hand a poem to that girl at the bar. It’ll work I promise.
When a chigo became old enough, his master could choose to keep him or let him go,
like he was some kind of sexy salmon.
When the boy could leave was up to his master.
Sometimes the boy did want to stay longer, but of course this whole thing was ripe for abuse.
His master could choose to keep him in chigo status forever.
In practice though, his family would not appreciate a temple
keeping their son prisoner forever.
Most chigo became adults after 4 or 5 years of service.
Rampant kinky seks is not the first thing you picture when you think about Buddhist monks.
I’m gonna change that.
Temple writings were surprisingly explicit, and used creative euphemisms.
Like the Flower of Dharma Nature meant the butthole, and the Fire of Ignorance meant the penis.
This is how you know monks were top tier writers,
they made seks sound like you’re on a quest to destroy the one ring.
Sauron’s Flower of Dharma Nature will be wrecked by your Fire of Ignorance.
There were instructions to train acolytes on how to perform and behave in bed.
Monks were supposed to make acolytes understand the importance of regular seks.
The fact that they had to remind chigo this is some evidence that not all chigo were willing partners.
In extreme cases, low class chigo were passed around to
other monks and regular people, but that wasn’t the norm.
The norm was that chigo were willing to do their duties and didn’t feel particularly abused.
They had more seksual power over their elders, and they enjoyed their high status in the temple.
Alright let’s look at some illustrations from the Book of Acolytes, because I love you.
Sadly, most of them are graphic, so I gotta blur almost everything.
If you really want to see them uncensored, check the description box below and
become a member of the channel or of the Patreon.
Here, a chigo is asking this monk to come visit him.
The monk’s like, “Seriously??”
The chigo breaks the monk’s prayer beads and they spill all over the ground.
He’s about to spill something else all over the ground too. Prayer beads had a seksual connotation back then,
which makes no sense to me but I bet it was for some perverted reason.
The other two monks are irritated that the chigo invited their colleague and not them.
They’re like, “I’m so jealous. That’s heartless. Let’s just leave.”
Here, the monk can’t believe this is happening.
He has wanted the chigo for so long but thought the chigo didn’t like him.
The chigo says he’s sorry for being so cold to the monk before, and he’s glad the monk hasn’t forgotten him.
They’re also doing it right next to another boy, who’s sleeping.
The chigo tells the monk to be quiet, it’s so scandalous.
In this one, the monk is washing the chigo’s feet with one hand, but his other hand
accidentally slips into the chigo’s copper mine.
The chigo, who planned the whole thing, says,
“Where are you touching? That’s not my foot, silly.”
And the monk goes, “My old eyes can’t see well, don’t mind me.”
Then they get it on while confessing their love.
Look this is some masterful writing right here, I need you guys to recognize that.
Here we have a chigo and his servant.
The servant’s sword is so weary due to daily hand oiling that it no longer works.
And so he uses a wooden sword with the chigo instead.
And here, the servant lubricates the chigo and puts a heater under him.
The chigo endures all this to loosen up his rear gate.
His master is old and has an arrow no longer sharp enough to penetrate its target.
The dutiful chigo hopes that his target is now big enough for his master to enjoy archery with.
Now from this lake of lewdness arose a question: weren’t they breaking the rules?
Good question, my child.
It’s true, Buddhist priests were banned from having any seks with anyone, at all.
So it seems like they were violating the rules. How did they justify it?
Listen, if there’s one thing humans are good at, it’s justifying seks.
Let’s talk about 2 big reasons why chigo love came about.
One. Breaking rules didn’t make you a rule breaker.
A monk had a lot of rules to follow, a lot of moral precepts,
like you couldn’t eat meat or you couldn’t have seks
or you couldn’t check your phone while talking to someone.
You know, things that a decent person just shouldn’t do.
But in the Heian Period, some edgy monks started playing around with this idea
that these moral precepts were not just rules, they had substance.
They were things in the world. They were like invisible powers that you could transfer to people.
Here’s how it worked. When someone became a monk,
he went through a ritual where his elders read him a list of precepts that he was supposed to follow.
This ritual transferred the precepts into the new monk, becoming a part of him forever.
And having these precepts was enough for salvation.
If you violated a precept, say you checked your phone while in conversation,
it was okay because you still had the no-phone-checking precept in you.
Even though your actions violated the precept, your person still sort of followed it just by having it in you.
It was still bad to break the rules, but a rule-breaker who had the rules in them was
still better than someone who had never received the rules in the first place.
Now you may ask, wait wouldn’t this have caused monks to stop following the precepts?
The answer is yes.
Over time, monks became less disciplined. Actions became less important.
Temples started deciding which rules to enforce, and which rules they could turn a blind eye towards.
Naturally, blind eyes started turning towards the celibacy rule.
Celibacy became a bit less common. Some priests even took wives and had families.
But the problem with male-female seks was that it could result in a lifetime of consequences.
Whereas male-male seks at most resulted in you not being able to sit for a week.
Also, there wasn’t much access to women in monasteries. A lot of pp’s but not a lot of vv’s.
And so temple administrators started tolerating male-male seks more.
Male-male seks became like speeding, a minor violation with the possibility of facing a dick.
Which brings us to Reason Number Two for how chigo love came about:
Sleeping with a god doesn’t count.
Let me explain.
Traditionally in Japan, people thought children were close to the gods.
Paintings of Buddhist gods often have children hanging around.
Kids were seen as morally pure. Nowadays we know better.
Monks who liked pp-2-pp seks started training for the Olympic mental gymnastics events.
They knew that seks with people was wrong, but chigo were so close to the gods
they could barely be considered people.
Over time, chigo seks became more common.
These mental gymnasts even created a ritual that turned a child into a god.
To become a chigo, a boy had to go through a one-week initiation ritual.
After days of chanting and reading, the ritual ends with the chigo’s master
putting makeup on him, plucking his eyebrows, tying his hair into a ponytail,
dressing him in a pretty robe, and putting a crown on his head.
The ritual spiritually transformed the boy’s body into
a Buddha, a bodhisattva, and a Shinto god.
The boy is reborn into a godlike being, something between human and god.
What exactly does it mean to transform your body into these gods?
I don’t really know and I’m not thirsty enough to understand, but I’m giving it a 16.2.
Afterwards, if they wanted, the master could sleep with the newly divine chigo.
Chigo seks became a religious experience.
They were not sleeping with humans, but with god-things.
Sleeping with chigo pulled monks closer to the divine.
Regular chigo seks was required to maintain holiness.
It was no longer a violation of the rules that people tolerated.
It became a part of temple culture from the Heian through the Edo Period.
A tiny tiny piece of the chigo system survives today in the
o-chigo-san お稚児さん, which are children who are part of religious festivals.
For more Japanese seksuality videos, check these out.
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Alright I love you, and spread the knowledge.