In November 2025, I published an essay called “Shame That Protects, Shame That Destroys.” In it, I made a claim I believed deeply at the time: that psychoanalysis functions, for those who need it, as a kind of preliminary practice for Buddhism. The argument went like this: Buddhist teachings on ethical discernment—惭愧, confession, the whole 闻思修 path—presuppose a self coherent enough to receive them. People carrying severe developmental trauma don’t have that coherence. Their shame attacks being, not behavior. The Dharma can’t land because the ground isn’t there. So psychoanalysis prepares the ground. Buddhism comes after.

I want to develop that claim. Not discard it—what I described was real. I’ve sat with patients for whom Buddhist teachings became weapons of self-persecution, for whom “no-self” felt like confirmation of what their early environment already told them: that they shouldn’t exist. That clinical observation still holds.

But the framework I built around it was incomplete. And the incompleteness reveals something important—not just about my own thinking, but about how Buddhism gets encountered by every system of thought that touches it.

The Partial Digestion Problem

Here is what I’ve come to notice: every framework that encounters Buddhism digests the parts it can metabolize and expels the rest.

Western therapeutic culture encountered Buddhism and produced mindfulness. Extracted from its ethical, relational, and cosmological context, mindfulness became a self-regulation technique—something you do for twenty minutes to lower cortisol. The retreat industry, the apps, the corporate wellness programs: all of these metabolized Buddhism’s attentional training and discarded everything else. The precepts, the teacher-student relationship, the vows, the confession practices, the community structure—none of this survived the extraction.

Chinese culture encountered Buddhism over two millennia and produced something more complicated than partial digestion. I find what happened genuinely painful to look at.

Buddhism has been in Chinese culture so long that most people feel they already understand it. That familiarity is the obstacle. At the folk level, karma became cosmic accounting—do good, get good. Temples became sites of petition. The Buddha became a figure you ask things of. The rigorous practice traditions, the philosophical sophistication of Yogācāra or Madhyamaka—these receded into monasteries while popular Buddhism became, for most people, a vague sense that the universe keeps score.

And in contemporary China, the situation has worsened. The political environment has tightened: communities shut down, practice spaces restricted, the conditions for serious practice made harder in ways that have nothing to do with the Dharma. Scandals involving institutions—some verified, some rumored, all corrosive—have eroded what trust remained. In many Chinese families, mentioning Buddhism invites associations with scams and superstition, not with a living tradition. People who might otherwise encounter Buddhism as a system of transformation never get the chance.

When I say that many contemporary Chinese people don’t know what Buddhism is—especially those whose contact with the tradition has been mediated through folk practice, institutional scandal, family suspicion, and political restriction—I don’t mean it as an insult. I mean it as a structural observation about what happens when familiarity replaces encounter. You think you know what’s in the temple because you’ve walked past it your whole life. But walking past is not walking in.

I am not exempt from this. I took refuge in 2012—years before I entered psychoanalytic training. Buddhism came first. But when I later trained as a psychoanalyst, I began to see Buddhist practice through the lens of developmental prerequisites: ego strength, self-cohesion, the capacity for self-reflection. From inside that lens, Buddhism looked like a system that works beautifully—if you’re already relatively intact. Its highest teachings require a stable subject. Therefore, for traumatized people, something must come first.

The pattern is the same in each case. The encountering framework determines what gets seen. What doesn’t fit the framework’s logic gets classified as either irrelevant or inaccessible. Mindfulness culture sees technique, discards ethics. Folk religion sees petition, discards practice. Psychoanalysis sees developmental prerequisites, discards the gates that don’t require them.

None of these encounters are wrong, exactly. They each captured something real. But none of them met Buddhism as a complete system. They met the slice of Buddhism their own categories could hold. This is the condition I want to name: knowing without entering—the confidence that you understand something you have never actually encountered whole.

What Changed

When I wrote the shame essay, the sequential framework felt confirmed by experience: psychoanalytic work had cleared ground, and Buddhist teachings that previously bounced off me started landing. The sequence seemed to hold.

But I was telling myself an incomplete story—and the incompleteness was not just intellectual. Buddhism didn’t enter my life through psychoanalysis. It was there first. I took refuge in 2012. When I later entered analytic training, the resonances between the two traditions were immediate, and I gravitated toward them. Some Buddhist concepts that had felt distant—about the structure of suffering, about how the mind deceives itself—became more graspable through the psychoanalytic lens. I took this as evidence that psychoanalysis was preparing me for Buddhism.

What I didn’t see was that the two were becoming entangled in my thinking. Concepts that looked similar but were doing different things in their respective systems started blurring together. The entanglement itself produced the sequential conclusion: if psychoanalysis makes Buddhist ideas more accessible, then psychoanalysis must come first. But accessibility is not the same as priority. I was weaving two identities together, and in the weave, I mistook one thread’s proximity for the other’s prerequisite.

Meanwhile, my practice life had fractured. The community where I had taken refuge went through upheaval, and the broader environment for Buddhist practice in China tightened through the 2010s in ways that had nothing to do with the Dharma. What I lost was not just one community but the sense that there was stable ground to practice on.

For years, my practice was intermittent. I carried a fantasy that organized my avoidance without my noticing it: when I finish analysis, then I’ll return to practice properly. Buddhism became the place I was always going back to, but never quite arriving at. The entanglement gave this deferral an intellectual alibi—I wasn’t avoiding practice; I was doing the prerequisite work.

The turning point wasn’t an insight. It was a decision. I was already a Buddhist. The question was whether I would act like one—not after analysis, not after the conditions improved, but now.

I established a daily practice—morning and evening, every day. And this year, I began building a Buddhist practice app, designed first for myself. The design forced me to think systematically about what Buddhist practice actually contains—not as philosophy or meditation technique, but as a complete architecture for daily life. That question led me back to my earlier claims about CPTSD and prerequisites.

What I discovered surprised me. The morning vows weren’t meditation—they were orientation. The evening confession wasn’t self-attack—it had a completion mechanism. The study wasn’t intellectual—it was metabolic, small quantities digested daily rather than large quantities admired from a distance. The whole structure functioned as a container. Not a container for people who are already stable. A container, period.

The CPTSD Question Revisited

Here is where my earlier framework breaks down.

I argued that severely traumatized people cannot access Buddhist practice because: (1) they can’t do mindfulness—it triggers flooding or dissociation; (2) they can’t do meditation—the stillness activates terror; (3) “no-self” threatens an already fragmented self. Each of these observations is clinically accurate. But notice what they have in common: they all assume Buddhist practice means meditation and doctrinal realization.

The app project forced a practical question: what would a trauma-informed Buddhist practice actually look like? Not Buddhist-adjacent therapy. Not mindfulness extracted from Buddhism. Actual Buddhist practice, for people whose nervous systems are dysregulated.

The research I’ve been doing on this question—particularly on Buddhism and the nervous system, on how contemplative practices interact with trauma physiology—pointed me somewhere I hadn’t expected. The Buddhist tradition already contains what trauma-informed care calls for. It just doesn’t advertise it in the language contemporary psychology recognizes.

Consider what CPTSD most urgently requires: external structure, grounding, predictable rhythm, behavioral anchoring. Now consider what I actually do in my daily practice—not meditation, but everything around it.

Every morning I rise, take refuge, generate bodhicitta. Every evening I study a passage of Dharma, review the day, confess, dedicate merit. The regularity is the point. 戒—often translated as “precepts,” as if it were about moral restriction—is actually the creation of a container through rhythm. In the traditional formulation: 戒 generates 定 (stability), 定 generates 慧 (clarity). You don’t start with insight. You start with structure. For someone whose nervous system is dysregulated, this is not a spiritual luxury. It is what the body needs.

When I chant, I am not performing devotion. I am regulating my breathing, entraining my nervous system, connecting to lineage even when physically alone. On days when dissociation pulls me away, chanting provides a sensory anchor that doesn’t require the cognitive overhead of “paying attention to your breath.”

The evening confession—四力忏悔—is a structured process, not an emotional state. I acknowledge what happened (追悔力). I re-anchor in my refuge (依止力). I apply a counteracting practice (对治力). I set an intention for tomorrow (防护力). The circuit closes. Compare this to clinical shame: there is no completion mechanism. The accusation is permanent. The four powers are designed to move through, not to lodge in.

And prostrations—full-body, physical, repeated. The thinking mind cannot dominate when the body is in motion. For someone trapped in rumination, prostrations bring you back without requiring you to “sit with” your experience—which, for a traumatized person, may be precisely what they cannot do.

None of these required me to be whole first. They required me to show up.

When I look at this inventory—structure, rhythm, chanting, confession with completion, physical practice, community, ethical framework—I see what my earlier essay missed. I was right that meditation and “no-self” teachings can be destabilizing for traumatized people. I was wrong to treat those as representative of Buddhist practice as a whole. The tradition has eighty-four thousand dharma gates, the teaching goes, because beings have eighty-four thousand afflictions. The gates aren’t metaphorical. They are the many doors of a system designed so that no one needs to be turned away.

What “Complete System” Actually Means

My master once described Buddhism as “a complete system of life education” (完整系统的生命教育). For years I understood this as a claim about scope—Buddhism addresses everything from daily behavior to ultimate liberation. True, but insufficient.

What I understand now is that “complete” means something more specific—and I should say what I don’t mean by it. I do not mean flawless, self-sufficient, or immune to institutional failure. I mean structurally capacious: the system does not expel anyone based on their starting condition. It doesn’t say: you must be this psychologically healthy to enter. It says: wherever you are, there is a gate.

This is fundamentally different from how psychoanalysis positions itself. Psychoanalytic treatment has inclusion criteria. Not everyone is “analyzable.” The capacity for self-reflection, for tolerating frustration, for forming a therapeutic alliance—these are assessed. People who can’t meet them are referred elsewhere, to “supportive” therapy or medication management or behavioral interventions. The framework is honest about its limits.

Buddhism’s claim is more radical. Not that everyone will reach the same place, or at the same pace, or through the same gate. But that the system contains a gate for everyone. 应机 (yìngjī)—matching the teaching to the student’s capacity—is not an afterthought. It is a core pedagogical principle. A teacher who teaches emptiness to someone who needs behavioral structure has failed, not because the teaching is wrong but because it’s the wrong gate.

The challenge, of course, is that this principle requires teachers who can actually see what each student needs. And in practice, many Buddhist communities default to one-size-fits-all instruction—which is how meditation gets treated as the entirety of Buddhist practice, and how people for whom meditation is destabilizing get effectively expelled. The principle of inclusion is there. The implementation often isn’t. But the failure is pedagogical, not structural.

Where Psychoanalysis Stands Now

If Buddhism doesn’t need psychoanalysis as a prerequisite, then what is psychoanalysis in relation to Buddhist practice?

I no longer think the answer is sequential. I think it’s dialogical.

By dialogical I mean this: psychoanalysis and Buddhism are each complete systems with their own maps of the mind, their own understanding of suffering, their own methods of transformation. Neither needs to be translated into the other’s language to be valid. When you place them side by side, what emerges is not synthesis but mutual illumination—each system makes visible what the other doesn’t see, and each system has blind spots that the other can name.

In my earlier essay, I examined Buddhist 惭愧 (ethical self-correction) alongside psychoanalytic shame. That comparison revealed something neither system fully articulates alone: that 惭愧 is a capacity requiring developmental conditions, while shame is a structure that forecloses the capacity. Buddhism describes the functioning version. Psychoanalysis describes what goes wrong. Neither account is complete without the other.

This is the method I want to pursue. The Yogācāra tradition—specifically the Hundred Dharmas Treatise (百法明门论) attributed to Vasubandhu—offers a systematic classification of mental factors (心所). Fifty-one categories, organized by function: wholesome, unwholesome, afflictive, indeterminate. This is not a metaphysical speculation. It is a phenomenology of mind developed through centuries of contemplative observation, designed for practitioners who need to understand what is happening in their own experience, moment by moment.

Psychoanalysis has its own phenomenology—of affects, defenses, relational patterns, unconscious processes. Developed through a different method (the clinical encounter rather than contemplative observation), with different assumptions (the centrality of the unconscious, the formative role of early relationships), arriving at different maps.

My project, beginning with this essay and continuing through a series to follow, is to place these maps side by side. Not to prove that “Buddhism already knew what psychoanalysis discovered” (it didn’t—they’re looking at different things). Not to claim that “psychoanalysis is more precise” (it isn’t—precision depends on what you’re trying to see). But to let two complete systems speak, each in its own voice, and to see what becomes visible in the space between them.

On my WeChat public account, I’ve been writing a “Psychoanalytic Emotion Museum”—literature reviews of how psychoanalysis understands specific affects: anger, shame, guilt, envy. The series that follows this essay will bring each of these into dialogue with the corresponding mental factors in the Hundred Dharmas. Not as translation. As conversation between two systems that have each spent centuries watching the human mind—from different seats, with different instruments, seeing different things.

I started my daily practice not because I had resolved my traumas or achieved sufficient ego strength or completed some prerequisite curriculum. I started because the Dharma was still there after everything else had fallen away—after the community, the institution, my master’s physical presence, the sense of belonging. The structure of morning vows and evening confession didn’t require me to be whole. It required me to show up.

That experience—of being held by a system rather than a community, by practice rather than institution—is what convinced me that my earlier framework was incomplete. Buddhism didn’t need me to be ready. It needed me to begin.

This essay opens a conversation I expect to continue for years. The next pieces will get specific: one mental factor, one psychoanalytic concept, placed side by side. But the ground needed to be laid first. And the ground is this: Buddhism is not mindfulness. It is not folk karma. It is not a system that works only for the psychologically intact. It is a complete architecture for human life—complete not in the sense of having all the answers, but in the sense of having a door for everyone who is willing to walk through one.

The question for psychoanalysis is not whether Buddhism needs it as a prerequisite. The question is whether psychoanalysis is willing to sit across from Buddhism as an equal—to be illuminated, and not only to illuminate.

That conversation starts now.

I studied Buddhism for years before I entered psychoanalytic training. During that time, I often felt a kind of resistance in my practice—something that wouldn’t move, wouldn’t open. I understood this as karma, as obscurations accumulated over lifetimes. My teachers spoke of purification, and I tried.

It wasn’t until I began my own analysis that I found a different language for what was stuck. What I had experienced as spiritual obstacle turned out to be, in large part, developmental trauma—early experiences that had lodged in my body and psyche long before I encountered the Dharma. And as I worked through this material analytically, something shifted in my Buddhist practice too. Teachings I had heard many times suddenly became clear. The subtle emotional textures I couldn’t see before became visible.

This essay comes from that crossing. I want to think about why certain people can receive Buddhist teachings on ethical discernment, and why others—despite sincere effort, despite correct understanding—cannot. The distinction I’ll draw is between 惭愧 (cánkuì), a capacity for ethical self-correction that Buddhist psychology considers wholesome, and shame as psychoanalysis encounters it clinically: a self-attacking structure that forecloses the very correction it demands.

When the Dharma Becomes a Weapon

A Buddhist patient tells me: “I know I have so much karmic obstruction. I should be repenting, I should be chanting sutras. But I haven’t been chanting. And that just adds to my karmic debt.”

The way she says it—eyes down, voice flat. I recognize it immediately. It’s the same structure I hear from patients who haven’t been studying hard enough, haven’t been good enough daughters, haven’t been productive enough. The content is Buddhist, but the logic is something else: an endless loop where every failure to perform adds to the original crime of being insufficient.

She knows what the Dharma says. She can articulate the teachings on confession and purification with precision. But this knowing doesn’t help her. If anything, it makes things worse—now she has one more standard she’s failing, one more proof of her fundamental inadequacy.

Listening to her, I feel tired. Not bored—tired. There’s something exhausting about watching Buddhism become a weapon. The Dharma that’s meant to liberate, turned into another harsh judge.

In Buddhist terms, we might say the Dharma hasn’t “entered her heart” (法没有入心). The traditional path is 闻思修: hearing, contemplating, practicing. She has heard. But the contemplation that would transform hearing into conviction, and the practice that would make conviction embodied—these haven’t happened. Why not?

The usual answer is insufficient effort or wrong conditions. But I think something else is going on. The Dharma hasn’t entered because there’s no stable ground for it to land on. The force of her early trauma is stronger than the force of the teaching.

The Translation Problem

When I first studied Yogacara, I assumed 惭愧 was Buddhism’s version of shame and guilt. The Hundred Dharmas Treatise (百法明門論) lists 惭 and 愧 among the eleven wholesome mental factors. They stop wrongdoing and orient toward good. Simple enough: healthy shame.

But the more I sat with these texts and with patients, the more this translation felt wrong. Not imprecise—actively misleading.

惭 arises from “the power of Dharma itself” (依自法力): an internal recognition that one’s action doesn’t align with what one understands to be true. 愧 arises from “the power of the world” (依世間力): awareness that one’s action affects others, that one is accountable to a moral community. Both are oriented toward action—this behavior needs adjustment. And both have a completion mechanism: 懺悔 (confession-repentance). You see clearly, you confess, you commit to change, you’re purified. The circuit closes.

Shame as I encounter it clinically works nothing like this. It attacks being, not action. It says: you are defective, wrong at the core. And there’s no completion. The superego is never satisfied. No confession resolves the charge, because what’s being judged isn’t what you did—it’s what you are.

My Buddhist patient isn’t experiencing 惭愧. She’s experiencing shame. The difference: “I did something that needs correction” versus “I am something that needs correction.”

恶作 and the Absence of Completion

There’s a Yogacara concept that comes closer to what I see clinically: 恶作 (èzuò), usually translated as “regret” or “remorse.” Unlike 惭愧, which is wholesome, 恶作 is classified as “indeterminate”—it can be wholesome (regretting harm), unwholesome (regretting good), or neutral.

What strikes me about 恶作 is its quality of obsessive rumination. It cycles endlessly: “I shouldn’t have done that—but maybe I should have—but no, I shouldn’t have—but what if...” Back and forth, back and forth. There’s no resolution because the function isn’t discernment; it’s repetition. The mind is caught in a loop, not moving toward clarity but spinning in place.

Compare this to 惭愧, which has a clear arc: recognition → confession → commitment → purification → completion. The process ends. You move forward. 恶作 never ends because it’s not trying to complete anything. It’s a stuck pattern, not a corrective process.

This distinction illuminates what’s happening with my patient. She’s not in 惭愧—she’s in 恶作. The endless rumination (”I should have chanted, I didn’t chant, now my karma is worse, I should chant more, but I can’t...”) doesn’t move toward confession and release. It just loops. And the loop itself becomes more evidence of her inadequacy: she can’t even repent correctly.

Buddhist psychology describes 恶作 as a phenomenon—something that arises and passes—not as an identity. This is its strength: no mental state is essentialized. But for some people, this obsessive structure has become so embedded that it doesn’t feel like a passing state. It feels like what they are.

Why Trauma Produces Shame

Where does this self-attacking structure come from?

Fairbairn saw it clearly. When a child grows up in an environment that is neglectful, violent, or rejecting—when their existence is treated as too much, as burden, as wrong—they face an impossible situation. If the environment is bad, then they’re helpless; there’s nothing they can do. But if they are bad, then at least there’s hope. They can try to be different, try to be less, try to earn the love that isn’t coming.

So the child turns passive into active. They internalize the badness. “It’s not that my parents are abusive; it’s that I’m too much.” “It’s not that my needs are being ignored; it’s that my needs are shameful.” This is a survival strategy—it preserves the possibility of attachment, of hope. But it installs shame at the foundation of the self. Not shame about what you do, but shame about what you are.

Once this structure is in place, every ethical demand gets filtered through it. “You should do X” becomes “You are bad for not doing X” becomes “You are bad.” The precepts, the Dharma, the teachings on confession—all of it becomes more evidence for the prosecution. Buddhism doesn’t cause this; it gets captured by a pre-existing structure.

惭愧 as Capacity

Here is my core claim: 惭愧 is not an emotion. It is a capacity. And like all capacities, it requires developmental conditions to form.

惭愧 presupposes a basic sense of self-security: “I am okay; my behavior may need adjustment.” This isn’t arrogance. It’s the foundational safety that allows you to look at your actions honestly without being destroyed by what you see. If you can tolerate seeing that you’ve caused harm, you can do something about it—confess, repair, change. But if seeing harm triggers self-annihilation (”I’m worthless, I shouldn’t exist”), then you can’t actually look. You defend, deny, dissociate.

The capacity for ethical discernment requires a self secure enough to withstand the discernment.

When early experience communicates “your existence is the problem,” this security doesn’t develop. Shame becomes structural, not situational. And 惭愧—which requires distinguishing between “I did something harmful” and “I am harmful”—cannot form. In its place: the endless loop of 恶作 that looks like conscience but functions as persecution.

Buddhism and Its Limits

I want to say something that might be controversial: I think Buddhism, as traditionally taught, is more accessible to those who are already psychologically relatively intact.

The Lamrim (菩提道次第广论) begins with the “lower scope” (下士道)—teachings on precious human rebirth, impermanence, karma, and refuge. But even these entry-level teachings presuppose a coherent self that can reflect on its situation, evaluate its actions, and orient toward change. What about those whose self never cohered in the first place? Who can’t distinguish between “I did something harmful” and “I am harmful”?

And if we’re talking about the higher teachings—selflessness, emptiness—the problem becomes sharper. How do you teach “no-self” to someone whose self is already fragmented? The point of anātman is to release grasping at a solid, defended self. But if what you have isn’t a defended self but a shattered one, the teaching lands differently. It can become another attack: “See, you shouldn’t even exist.”

This doesn’t mean Buddhism is incomplete. My teacher said Buddhism is a complete system of life education—and I believe this is true. The tradition contains eighty-four thousand dharma gates (八万四千法门), methods suited to every disposition and condition. The problem isn’t that the right gate doesn’t exist; it’s that we don’t always find the gate that fits us. 应机 (yìngjī)—matching the teaching to the student’s capacity—is a traditional principle, but its application requires a teacher who can see what the student actually needs.

And here’s what I observe: traumatized people often gravitate toward religious communities. I’ve seen this in Buddhist sanghas—people carrying tremendous early wounds who seek refuge in the Dharma. Their seeking is genuine. But a religious community is not a trauma treatment setting. The container isn’t designed for that work. And when many traumatized individuals gather in one place, the group dynamics become extremely complex. Projections fly. Old patterns get enacted. The very thing people came to heal from starts reproducing itself within the community.

I don’t think this is Buddhism’s fault. I think it’s a mismatch between what’s needed and what’s offered. The Dharma can liberate, but only if it can land. And for it to land, certain ground must already be prepared.

A Sequence, Not a Competition

So what’s the relationship between psychoanalysis and Buddhist practice?

I’ve come to think of it as sequential. In Tibetan Buddhism, there’s a concept of “preliminary practices” (前行, ngöndro)—preparations that create the conditions for deeper teaching to land. I think of psychoanalysis, for those who need it, as a kind of preliminary practice. Not because analysis is Buddhist, but because it addresses what needs to be addressed before Buddhist teaching can do its work.

I want to be clear: I’m not saying psychoanalysis sees something Buddhism doesn’t. Buddhism’s “seeing clearly” isn’t mere intellectual insight—it’s embodied understanding developed through the full 闻思修 path: hearing, contemplating, and practicing until realization becomes lived. This is far more than cognitive recognition. When Buddhist practitioners speak of directly perceiving impermanence or emptiness, they mean something that transforms body and mind, not just a thought you have.

The question is whether certain people can access this path at all. Psychoanalysis works with the pre-ethical layer: the damaged self-structure, the internalized persecutor, the shame that attacks being. It tries to establish that you’re allowed to exist, that your needs aren’t shameful, that you can make mistakes without being obliterated. This isn’t the same as Buddhist realization—but it may be necessary before Buddhist realization becomes possible.

My Buddhist patient doesn’t need more Dharma. She needs the developmental work that makes Dharma usable. She needs to discover that her existence isn’t the problem—and this discovery can’t come from teaching alone. It has to be experienced in a relationship that doesn’t confirm her worst fears about herself.

Returning

In the temple, when I made mistakes, my teacher would point them out. But the frame was different from what I knew growing up. The correction wasn’t “you are wrong”; it was “this action arose from these conditions, and different conditions will produce different action.” Everything is interdependent arising. My mistake was causes and conditions, not essence.

There’s a strange thing about Buddhas and Bodhisattvas: they don’t forgive. Not because they’re harsh—but because the whole framework of forgiveness doesn’t apply. Forgiveness implies someone who committed an offense against someone who was offended. But if there’s no fixed self on either side, what is there to forgive? The action happened, the karma unfolds, the path continues.

After confession in the temple, I felt clean. Light. My body could move forward. This is what 惭愧 feels like when it works. It doesn’t burden; it releases.

But I could receive that lightness because something in me was ready—not perfectly, but enough. The analytic work had cleared some ground. The shame that said my existence was wrong had loosened its grip. I could hear “this action needs adjustment” without hearing “you need adjustment.”

Coda

I don’t know if ancient Indians experienced shame the way my patients do. I don’t know if there’s a “healthy” Western shame that functions like 惭愧. These are honest limits of my knowledge.

What I do know is what I see in the room: people trapped in 恶作, in self-attack that wears the clothes of conscience. And what I know from my own path: that 惭愧—the capacity to see clearly, confess honestly, and move forward unburdened—is possible. But it isn’t where we start. For some of us, we start further back, in the territory where existing itself feels like a crime.

The work there is slower, quieter, less about insight than about presence. Someone who doesn’t recoil. A relationship that can hold what you are without demanding you be different.

Only then does the Dharma have ground to land on.

Only then can seeing clearly set you free.

From Buddhist Devotion to Psychoanalytic Exploration

My connection to Buddhism began long before I formally took refuge in 2012. In the years leading up to that, I spent a significant amount of time as a volunteer at Buddhist temples, engaging deeply with Buddhist scriptures and teachings. I was immersed in a routine of weekly study and practice, which laid the foundation for my spiritual path.

Then, in 2018, I encountered psychoanalysis. At the time, I was working on a project that sought to integrate gaming, Buddhist psychology, and psychoanalysis. This project was my initial entry point into psychoanalytic thinking, but interestingly, it was through Buddhism that I arrived at this new perspective. The organization I was working with had a department dedicated to the intersection of Buddhism and psychology, and even though our engagement with these ideas was relatively introductory, it planted the seeds for a much deeper inquiry.

As I transitioned into practicing as a psychotherapist, I continued to work in Buddhist settings, including a Buddhist charity that integrated psychological support with spiritual care. This allowed me to work with clients who came from Buddhist backgrounds, further reinforcing my understanding of how these two traditions intersect.

Psychoanalysis as a Preparation for Buddhist Practice

Looking back, I see that psychoanalysis has functioned as a powerful preliminary practice (前行) for my Buddhist path. Through years of psychoanalytic training and personal analysis, I experienced significant inner changes that transformed the way I approached Buddhist study and practice.

Buddhism teaches that receiving the Dharma requires a receptive mind, often likened to a cup that must be intact, clean, and open. If the cup is cracked, dirty, or covered, it cannot hold the teachings. Similarly, when our mental structures are rigid or dominated by early psychological wounds, it becomes difficult to truly absorb the Dharma. In my own experience, as well as in my clinical work with Buddhist clients, I have observed how psychoanalysis can help loosen these defenses, making authentic spiritual transformation more accessible.

For instance, in early psychological development, when the mind operates primarily in the paranoid-schizoid position (to use psychoanalytic terminology), Buddhist precepts can easily become rigid superego demands rather than sources of liberation. Instead of serving as a fluid and nourishing guide, Dharma teachings may be misinterpreted as harsh moral injunctions. This realization has reshaped both my Buddhist practice and my approach as a therapist.

Buddhism as a Comprehensive System of Transformation

While psychoanalysis has been invaluable, I have come to see Buddhism as a more encompassing framework. My master described Buddhism as a “complete system of life education,” containing within it various therapeutic methods, including cognitive-behavioral strategies, mindfulness practices, and even insights that resonate with psychoanalysis.

One of Buddhism’s core principles is non-duality, which urges us to transcend binary thinking. This aligns with psychoanalytic concepts of ambivalence and the integration of the unconscious. Furthermore, the Buddhist understanding of mental afflictions maps closely onto psychoanalytic theory. The three poisons—greed (tanha), hatred (dosa), and ignorance (moha)—bear striking resemblance to psychoanalytic concepts like libido (desire), the death drive (aggression), and unconscious fantasy. Similarly, the Buddhist concept of karma has strong parallels with the psychoanalytic notion of unconscious repetition.

My own work has been an ongoing exploration of these intersections. For example, I am currently developing a project that organizes psychoanalytic literature around different emotional states, much like the Buddhist Abhidharma texts, such as The Hundred Dharmas by Vasubandhu, which categorizes various mental and emotional phenomena. This kind of comparative study continues to deepen my appreciation of how these two traditions speak to one another.

Commitment to This Path

Before working with clients, I often recite the Four Great Vows:

Sentient beings are numberless; I vow to liberate them.

Afflictions are inexhaustible; I vow to extinguish them.

Dharma gates are boundless; I vow to enter them.

The Buddha way is unsurpassable; I vow to fulfill it.

These vows align seamlessly with my role as a psychoanalyst. My work is not just about helping clients alleviate symptoms—it is about accompanying them in their deeper psychological and existential journeys.

This year, I have begun a new chapter in my Buddhist studies, engaging in Ngöndro training at the Buddhist Studies Institute. My years of psychoanalytic training have made it possible for me to approach these teachings with greater openness and depth than before. Additionally, I am planning an independent study on Buddhism and psychoanalysis with my colleagues, which will allow for further exploration and dialogue.

To facilitate ongoing discussions on these themes, I have launched a section inside this Substack dedicated to Buddhism and psychoanalysis. If this resonates with you, I invite you to subscribe and join the conversation.

This journey is still unfolding, and I look forward to continuing to share and learn together.