Reading this, It seems that the problem lies in the fact that venerable Thanissaro thinks that you can emit semen without any lust, i.e. without lobhamula cittas, as if it is some rupa-only process. In fact, semen is cittaja (mind-born) rupa of lobhamula cittas (sensual lust), and a male cannot ejaculate without any previous lobhamula cittas. I.e., even if somebody decides to ejaculate "for the sake of [insert any line of the list of Vibhanga], the ejaculation itself will come only through [mental sexual] “enjoyment”, not otherwise. Abhidhamma would have helpled here, but alas. It should be mentioned, that, in general, the venerable, owing to the particular disbalance in Indriyas, clearly has inclination to cast a negative light on “non-EBT texts” (not a secret though), which results in various distortions in his translations of the atthakatha portions, mainly not in the field of bare meaning of words, but in the field of further interpretations of them (here he follows thai Vinaya-Mukkha, it seems). An notorious example from BMC - “sugata controversy”, of which he concludes that “The Commentary states that the Buddha’s cubit—the distance from his bent elbow to the tips of his fingers—was three times that of a normal man”, but the commentary itself only states that sugata span consist of “3 spans of majjhimapurisa”, which means the standart definition of span (the distance from the tip of the thumb to the tip of the little finger, which is, by the way, always contextual and depends on the hands of a concrete person measuring, as well as all such units) of vedic literature (vastu shastra?) ((this is what “of majjhimapurisa” really should mean here, i.e. “of accepted system of those times”)), but x3; he eventually decided to set up some fixed figures of always contextual units as “the sugata cubit = 50 cm …” and so on (I imagine, for example, arahant Bhaddiya with dwarfism utilizing a civara of such fixed measurements as ven. Thanissaro is giving; it’s a mere extrapolation of the western metric system). I.e. nothing in the Commentary is said about the concrete reason of why we get x3 multiplication, but it hardly has something to do with the size of the Buddha’s body, rather with something else, which is more “abstract”, and might not have been connected with the meaning of “sugata” as a Buddha’s epithet, but with more general sense of “standart measure”. I mean, really, why would Buddha set up strictly-fixed units based on his own body [!] amongst the culture which had only contextual units [!]. And, by the way, the bare measurements of the Commentary, if we mind the above considerations (especially that you have to measure with your own body), perfectly fit (in terms of suitability) any things to be measured by a bhikkhu. And so on. Eventually, we can conclude that even Vinaya is to be analysed with sound Abhidhamma knowledge, otherwise you can get some “surprises”, so to speak.
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