Knowing Without Entering

On Buddhism, Partial Digestion, and Psychoanalytic Prerequisites

Written in Palimpsest — A studio for long-form thinking

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.