The challenge
“Interdependence” is often evoked as a Buddhist term, but it is also frequently misappropriated in terms of “relational realism” or interconnected webs of beings. Buddhist theories of interdependence or “codependent arising,” on the other hand, are epistemic workouts aimed at not reifying or ontologizing, and not being attached to constructions of self or other. One of the foundational premises of Buddhism is that attachment to these false constructions is the cause of suffering, dukkha. Not-constructing and not being attached to constructions takes years of effort to practice, yet recognizing the epistemic, affective, and physical challenge of acting with/as codependent arising is said to be always accessible through analytic contemplation and moments of insight. The opposite—not being aware of constructing and grasping—is the basis of ongoing afflictive effects. Karma, for Buddhists, denotes intentional mental or physical acts. Intentional acts based on delusion shape ongoing false configurations of “self versus other.” Reifications of intentional acts that are inflected with attachment or rejection based on construction of “self versus other” are reproduced in the continuum of consciousness-moments. The reproductive effects of past and ongoing delusions are usually said to be subliminal, not accessible to ordinary consciousness. However, intentional practice of awareness of construction and attachment are said to gradually undo the long-term bindings of delusion.
In Mahāyāna Buddhism, the goal is to become a buddha (awakened one) in order to help others see through their self-and-other reifying habits and overcome attachment to these ultimately unreal constructions. Beings on the way to buddhahood are called bodhisattvas. The bodhisattvic turn is the pivot away from a sense of self, seeking a “reality” experience and trying to stabilize it, toward bodhicitta, compassionately recognizing that our common existential lack of essence and our common suffering is effected through infinite afflictive as well as aspirational acts.
Buddhist fables extol the power of meritorious actions, especially sacrificing our own interests to care for others and recognizing personal responsibility for one’s own fate. Yet the notion that a person’s actions create their conditions can be and has been used to naturalize social and gender inequities.
A “traditional” example
The Vimalakīrti Sutra (ca. 100 CE; McRae, trans., 2004: 124–131) is a Mahāyāna classic that illustrates both “emptiness” or codependent arising as the bodhisattva’s practice on the path to buddhahood, and the absurdities of clinging to constructions of social and gender roles.
The Vimalakīrti Sutra’s Chapter 7 opens with the core challenge of “perfection of wisdom” (prajñāpāramitā) literature: sentient beings are empty of intrinsic existence (poetically compared to many evanescent and nonexistent things), so how does an aspirational bodhisattva work to save beings and practice sympathy (maitri) for what does not exist?
Then a cascade of paraconsistent pairings yoke the nonexistence of obstacles with their remedy in a nondual “sudden” manner (for example, “practice the sympathy of wisdom, because of the absence of any time of non-understanding” [130]). This is followed by a conventional litany of gradual developmental disciplines. The chapter then pivots to a dramatic enactment of nonduality.
A goddess who has been listening to all the mansplaining suddenly appears in the room of the protagonist, the merchant Vimalakīrti. Vimalakīrti is a lay buddha who offers the balm of the Dharma to karmic unfortunates like prostitutes, thieves, and the handmaidens of Mara (the Buddhist version of the Tempter). The friendly goddess hanging out in his room scatters flowers on the audience, and the upright and uptight monk Śāriputra objects when her gifts stick, because monks are not supposed to be decorated in this frivolous manner. She points out that the flowers haven’t adhered to the bodhisattvas because they, unlike the monks, do not discriminate. She says: “For example, when a person is afraid, nonhuman [beings] are able to control him. Thus, since the disciples fear samsara, then forms, sounds, smells, tastes, and tangibles control you. None of the five desires can affect those who have transcended fear” (130).
The goddess playfully teases Śāriputra about his constructed and constricted notions of the Dharma and presents “perfection of wisdom” antidotes. He finally asks why, if she is so advanced, does she not transform her inferior female body? She then compassionately but a little sadistically overturns his gender-binary delusions by switching their forms. He is astonished and disturbed, but when she changes him back into his male body, he has been jolted out of his Dharma-binary delusions and begins to spontaneously spout “perfection of wisdom” logic: “The characteristic of form of the female body is without occurrence and without nonoccurrence.”
This demonstration of ultimate nonduality inseparable from social-conventional forms becomes a well-known motif in Mahāyāna literature. Yet Buddhist modernists have rightfully challenged the naive claim that Buddhism eschews gender and class hierarchies. Extraordinary fictional female exemplars scattered throughout Buddhist literature only reinforce the bindings of everyday social hierarchies.
Let us turn now to a modern treatment of the “bindings” of fear and social constructions that control us, from a work that is not overtly Buddhist but has insights analogous to Buddhist understandings of the nature of attachment and its undoing.
A risky intervention
Avgi Saketopoulou points out in Sexuality beyond Consent: Risk, Race, and Traumatophilia that a common therapeutic “healing” paradigm posits a telos based on the false idea of trauma as a “piece of shrapnel to be removed,” which closes off opportunities to become vulnerable to constitutive “enigma.” In contrast with standard therapeutic approaches, Saketopoulou does not favor amelioration. I see parallels between Buddhist insights and hers, but I am also attuned to incommensurabilities. Saketopoulou is a psychoanalyst and academic who works with sophisticated theoretical makeovers of Freudian and gender theories; she also grapples with the colonialist legacy of her birthplace, Cyprus. I appreciate her writing—it is nuanced, shocking, unafraid, yet confesses to vulnerability.
Briefly, she works with Jean Laplanche’s model of a constitutive “enigma” that is implanted in an infant’s consciousness by awareness of subtle messages carried in caregivers’ responses, like touch and tone of voice. These carry a “charge” of unconscious adult sexuality, usually in the form of a taboo, which cannot be interpreted by the infant. An infant then grasps anything in the environment that they can use to “translate” around the enigma, which can never be explained because it is the unreachable impetus for grasping itself. Translation of its effects draws from whatever social materials are available, and they become naturalized even before language and its subjugating/empowering efficacies come into play. Translations and appropriations are wrapped into a binding around the enigma. The enigma is not a “self,” and neither are the “bindings” or accretions of meaning, but their centripetal-centrifugal tension (my “translation” of the dynamic) generates the project of “ego” and agency.
As with the Buddhist recognition of dukkha, we all carry some degree of existential unease but some may be in a social matrix whose symbols do not grate or wound when they are taken up. The wound that Saketopoulou painfully probes is that while abuse and deprivation can generate individual afflictive “translations,” the most challenging convulsive collective wound is that multigenerational structural translations are not “in the past,” they are now. Saketopoulou’s central focus is the lasting trauma of Antebellum slavery, as conveyed through her obsession with Jeremy O. Harris’s controversial Slave Play as well as the work of her own patients undergoing analysis.
Sexual “kink” and repetitions or replays of traumatic dynamics are the media of her exploration of provocative ideas: “limit consent,” “overwhelm,” “pure experience,” and “exigent sadism.” I cannot do justice to her careful handling of explosive material. What I sketch here are my impressions of Buddhist analogues.
Limit consent is a different model for interaction than affirmative consent that defines in advance a script for reciprocity. Limit consent involves the recognition that any attempt to render an encounter “safe” may also preclude the opportunity to learn from vulnerability. Vulnerability conveys the possibility of “overwhelm” that temporarily breaks through the ossifications of translations around a formative enigma, allowing for “retranslation” that may be less binding. Saketopoulou warns repeatedly that this is risky.
For limit consent, what is required is openness to unexpected “overwhelm” and confrontation with “perverse” spontaneous reactions. Especially important is commitment by participants to stay with the process of understanding. This brings in “exigent sadism,” whereby a person takes on the role of speaking truth—not abstract truth, but hard-won knowledge of themselves and deep care for the other—while holding the other as close as possible to their limits. This can go badly wrong for both. Her models for this are psychoanalyst and patient and committed sexual partners. Overwhelm enables the loosening of bindings but it can also be dangerous.
She mentions in passing that being pushed into “overwhelm” can occur through other means than sexuality, though she aligns with Georges Bataille in seeing sexual drives as uniquely powerful enough to break through ossifications. She brushes past “meditation and ascetic experiences” as sites of “overwhelm.” However, as a Buddhist academic and practitioner, I see parallels in some of the experiences scripted and staged in various forms of Buddhist practice, where the practitioner may be pushed past the limits of their comfort zone. This is balanced by the commitment to mutual support, staying with the process, that is repetitively scripted through communal vows, offerings, and prayers.
Importantly, unbinding in Saketopoulou’s model is temporary, but it creates openings for “pure experience” that although impermanent is timeless and transformative. She describes her own transformative experience. The enigma is never resolved, but it engenders creativity and compassion.
I grew up by the sea, so this is my reverie: I, karma, am the chaos of foam dancing in advance of the all-swallowing tunnel of a powerful ocean wave. The wave centers around an empty core and thunders to absorption of force and foam against the shore but has never left the ocean. (I owe the “wave’s empty core” image to my colleague Tinu Ruparell.)
What appears as if given is a sense of self as essential core, with actions oscillating around it. A Buddhistic default is the opposite: a momentary intentional act is this, generating identification with what emerges. Diffracting rings of ripples extending around each and every conceptual and physical intentional act are subliminally represented as subject-object relations. There is also the option in every moment to mind the gap between act and representation—to experience volitional action and what is grasped as co-constituting, codependently arising, nondual.