Ghosh 1

Béla Ghosh

Contemporary Masochism and Ritual Transgression in Tantra

1. Introduction

The swirling image of tantra has been largely shrouded by misconception and

exaggeration, historically finding a home in controversial figures such as Aleister Crowley as the

“Great Beast 666” and now as an eroticized form of meditation that characterizes the Western

commercial perspective of tantra. (1) Most reactionary fascination and horror regarding tantra

stems from its “left-handed” nature, or traditional role of inverting social convention as a means

of conjuring enlightenment. The tantric “left-hand path” in reality, however, uses the seemingly

omnipotent power of social roles to dissolve themselves, often by reversing roles played and

forcing the practitioner into areas of discomfort or impropriety within their cultural surround.

The “left-” and “right-hand” paths operate on the dichotomy of heterodoxy and orthodoxy, where

the “right-hand” practices act in accordance with what is natural in status quo and the religious

tradition in question. In what could be perceived as the use of manufactured shock, these “left-

hand” practices communicate ontological truths through ritual about non-dualism. One element

of “left-hand” practice that resonates in modernity is the blending of pleasure, pain, desire, and

disgust, appearing as a ritual equivalent of masochistic sexual practices. As tantric rituals employ

the material of masochism in aims to dissolve any boundaries existing between these feelings,

analysis of sexual masochism as a medium for the non-duality that Buddhist, Taoist and Hindu

texts champion becomes a question of the spiritual utility of ritual and subverting roles as a

whole.

While it is difficult to determine the actual population of people who regularly practice

any form of masochismi, the popularity and visibility in popular culture, media, and public
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vocabulary indicates that masochism is not culturally insignificant. Often studied under a

psychiatric lens, the conversation surrounding masochism is largely saturated with language of

disorder and disease as a reaction typically to sexual abnormality. Rather than a sexual sickness

or perversion, placing masochism under the lens of spirituality and specifically non-dualism may

reveal masochistic practices as a practice of liberatingly transgressive rituals with a capacity to

heal craving. Is the contemporary masochistic connection between pleasure and pain a step

towards dissolution of both and embrace of equanimity, or is it a deeper craving for misguided

sensual satisfaction and extension of pleasure and suffering that is aspiritual compared to tantra?

Within this question is the analysis of tantric or transgressive activities as compared to

contemporary BDSM practices to locating if there is a departure from spiritual utility,

deciphering if the actual preformed substance of rituals induces awakening or if the procedures

and role reversal is meaningless in isolation. Analyzing intentionality and transgression in this

intersection between hedonistic pleasure and pointed tantric practice allows one to question if

non-dualism will always induce equanimity and detachment. By creating the site of analysis as

similarities in literal actions of tantra practitioners and Western BDSM community members the

focus will not be the scandalized or sensationalized deeds in relative cultures, but the truth and

efficacy within ritual. (1)

In this essay I will begin by defining masochism, tantra, and transgression for their use

within the context of both intersectionality being understood fully within the distinct disciplines

of religion or sociology. Secondly, I will introduce Western philosophical interpretations of

transgressive sexuality that underpins the discussion of power or role and sex through Foucault’s

History of Sexuality, and desire and repulsion in Bataille’s erotic fiction and essays on sexuality.

Understanding, then, the more abstract purpose of transgression and inversion of status quo, I
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will demonstrate the non-dual congruencies in actual practice within both contemporary

masochism and “left-hand” tantra ritual, examining each example in relation to attainment of a

higher spiritual state. This section analyzes lived experiences and actualized behaviors within

pleasure-seeking and enlightenment-seeking practices, specifically in order to examine how

intentionality relates to impact within ritual. The essay will conclude by asserting the validity of

masochism a transformative and spiritually latent ritual, while simultaneously upholding the use

of instruments of craving or pleasure in dissolving attachment to the underlying sensual and

emotional tethers that lead to these same vices.

2. Understanding Masochism and Tantra

Beginning with masochism, Richard Krafft-Ebing first defined masochism in his book

“Psychopathia Sexulais” as “the wish to suffer pain and be subjected to force” noting also that

“the common element in [all cases of masochism] is the fact that the sexual instinct is directed to

ideas of subjugation and abuse by the opposite sex” (89). This book is recognized as being the

first to place masochism within a clinical lens, and termed after Leopold van Sacher-Masoch’s

novella Venus in Furs for its novel provision of connective tissue between submission and

pleasureii. In American psychology, the definition for masochism has evolved in the Diagnostic

and Statistical Manual of the American Psychiatric Association from simply “coitus performed

under bizarre circumstances” in the second edition published in 1968 to “intense sexual arousal

from the act of being humiliated, beaten, bound, or otherwise made to suffer” in the fifth edition

published in 2013. The DSM-5 also separates individuals who report “psychosocial difficulties”

as a result of the aforementioned behaviors as suffering from “sexual masochism disorder”

which rather than simply a masochistic “preference.” Within this diagnosis is the categorization

of all masochistic behavior, whether assessed as a disorder or otherwise, under the umbrella of
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paraphilia. Encompassing all sexual activities that are extreme or atypical, the definition of

paraphilia is inseparable from relativism to conventional behavior, solidifying the idea of a

transgression as contingent on these normsiii. While the context of sexual pleasure can be easily

expanded and understood in relation to non-sexual pain infliction, it is important that most

dictionaries including the Merriam-Webster, Brittanica, and Oxford dictionaries include a

definition that interprets masochism as applied to all experiences of pleasure and enjoyment of

pain. For the purposes of this essay, I will use the working definition of masochism at its

broadest scale, encompassing all forms of pleasure and enjoyment mental or physical as they are

derived from any form of suffering, pain, disgust, fear, extremity, shock, or discomfort.

(2) Defining tantra on the other hand, provides an even more convoluted history drenched

in conflicting interpretations of doctrinal and practiced traditions. David Gordon White, in his

book Tantra in Practice explains that a cohesive definition of tantra is hindered by three ideas:

that a broadsides category of “Tantrism” was imposed upon incongruent religious traditions by

Western scholars, that scholastic interpretation has focused on a “right-handed” and more

philosophical interpretation expunged of transgression or sexuality, and finally the degradation

that followed contemporary wave of commercial eroticized tantric sex. With these considerations

he presents two definitions, the first borrowed from André Padoux, a French researcher, that

defines tantra as “an attempt to place kâma, desire, in every sense of the word, in the service of

liberation . . . not to sacrifice this world for liberation's sake, but to reinstate it, in varying ways,

within the perspective of salvation. This use of kâma and of all aspects of this world to gain both

worldly and supernatural enjoyments (bhuktï) and powers (siddhis), and to obtain liberation in

this life” (White 8). White provides his own working definition of the nature of tantra: “Tantra is

that Asian body of beliefs and practices which, working from the principle that the universe we
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experience is nothing other than the concrete manifestation of the divine energy of the godhead

that creates and maintains that universe, seeks to ritually appropriate and channel that energy,

within the human microcosm, in creative and emancipatory ways” (8).

Understanding these two definitions as parts of the tantric mechanism, the defining traits

of tantra lie in the use of desire and ritual to attain a definitive emancipation or liberation. This

practice is also defined as just that, something that can be acted out or visualized as an

intentioned methodology for gaining spiritual progress through actions rooted in our physical

world and understanding of it. Made clearer by the language of these definitions, tantra is a

prescription for the human audience through an action within the social world that humans

inhabit that promises a transcendence beyond these socially human parts. In testing the idea of a

liberating masochism within these bounds, the lived human experience of tantra permits an

interpretation of human action such as sexual deviance as tantric only when it aims to dissolve

both sexuality and deviancy. The utility of this definition in an analysis of masochism, however,

is located in the goal that both White and Padoux view all tantric traditions to be motivated by –

some form of soteriologyiv. While operating with the tools of desire and “creative” ritual ways,

the goal is never to engulf one’s self in kama regularly or find divinity within these traditions,

but to catalyze access to an existence in which the tools that are influenced a shift in

understanding are no longer influential in any way.

3. Defining “left-hand” tantra in context

Equally, however, these definitions and understandings of tantra that are exceedingly

broad, and in the scope of this essay, needlessly encapsulate practices of mysticism and

multitudes of ritual processes that relate to the world and desire, without explicitly incorporating

transgressive or taboo behavior. Narrowing the focus on acts of transgression and reversing
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socialized assumed reactions, this paper narrows to examine in the “left-hand” path of tantra that

exists within both Hindu tantra and Buddhist Vajrayana. As defined by Hinduism scholars James

G. Lochtefeld and Narendra Nath Bhattacharyyav, the practice deviates from other forms of

tantra in the central practice of “consciously violating taboos” to induce powerful spiritual

consequences (Lochtefeld 389). Hinduism houses the practice within the term vamachara that

focuses on forbidden activities such as consuming intoxicants and nonvegetarian food, as well as

illicit sexuality as internally relative to Hindu doctrines belief in the divine within all things.

Lochtefeld explains that these rituals “provide a ritual means for breaking down duality … in a

conscious effort to sacralize what is normally forbidden,” forcing confrontation on the polarity of

negative and positive social categories of proprietary to detach any exclusivity from the idea of

holy. In Buddhist scholarship, the “left-hand” path does not solidify as succinctly but exists

throughout emphasized transgression rather than asceticism. Bernard Faure defines the allocation

for transgression in Buddhism, “one may kill, steal, and have sex to the extent that one realizes

that everything is empty,” the goals of emptiness and oneness congruent to the primary

differences between Buddhist and Hindu non-dualism (CITATION dumbass).

Equally congruent is the proportional polarity as related to internal religious rules

especially reversing asceticism, as the “left-hand” path in each tradition reverses renunciant

practices for productively indulgent or profane practices. Monastic orders following the Vinaya

order their practice under the restraint of 227 rules, the first of the most punishable 4 pārājikas

being “*xx*do not have sexual intercourse,” and encompassing almost all slight transgressions

as microscopic as “treading on plants” or “tickling” (Vinyaya citation). This practice

characterized by abstinence and self-denial in order to produce discipline and ultimately spiritual

attainment, creating an opposition of the avoidance within asceticism and wrathful embrace
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within “left-hand” tantra. Simultaneously however, this relates to the earlier dimension of “left-”

and “right-hand” practice, in perhaps another understanding of asceticism as an orthodox

approach to non-dualism in denouncing all forms of indulgence to become detached, whereas

“left-hand” tantra acts as the heterodoxic embrace through oversaturation of indulgence and

confrontation of pain to produce the same ends. The common goal of release from pleasure and

pain as a whole shows the most important element of defining “left-hand” tantra, in which the

ultimate use of both pleasure and pain is to demonstrate their innate uselessness and mutability,

not to entreat them with higher spiritual value.

Notably, the prescription that these traditions cannot exist in harmony is largely a

Western linguistic imposition of “left” and “right,” while in textual traditions “left-handed”

practice and transgressive rites are often situated within orthodoxy, the Guhyasamaja Tantra

acting as a prominent example. The Guhyasamaja dictates both practice of “taking the flesh of

dogs or horses or human flesh according to the rite, [and] eating it from the skull with the ritual

of union” while also being the text largely used by Buddhists to convert to Buddhism and take

refuge in the Three Jewels, securing it’s place in orthodoxy as well as containing explicit “left-

hand” rituals (Fremantle 100, Gray 59). This notion is fundamentally non-dualist as are both

motivations for the “left-” and “right-hand” paths that are housed within the blend of hetero and

orthodoxy, yet the divide between the two practices remains valuable within the context of

isolated ritual analysis. Given this overarching inclusion of transgression within conventional

canonical texts and common goal of non-dual attainment, the use of social role or norm upheaval

can still exist without the purpose of scandalizing or rejecting discipline and traditional practice.

4. Western Thought on Sexuality and Transgression

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An important element of this discourse, however, is Michel Foucault’s problematization

of the use of repression to drive meaning within sexuality in his book The History of Sexuality.

To place this within the context of transgression begetting spiritual progress or gain, Foucault

might argue that placing significance on breaking norms and acting out against socially

manufactured propriety is no more artificial than claiming benefits from acting with social

accordance. “What led us to show, ostentatiously, that sex is something we hide, to say it is

something we silence? And we do all this by formulating the matter in the most explicit terms,

by trying to reveal it in its most naked reality, by affirming it in the positivity of its power and its

effects?” (Foucault 9). Ritual in this sense becomes the illogical process of attempting to reveal

this “naked reality” or truths by using the tools that and framework of understanding the world

that practitioners are trying to undo.

While Foucault critiques the segregation of forbidden and allowed, tantra deals with

issues of enjoying and suffering, both equally shaped by social conditioning. I assert, however,

that Foucault’s theory of repression and the idea of seeking importance in transgression—a

concept that receives its power from its foil—are not mutually exclusive. The paradox of the

“Sexual Revolution” that Foucault critiques aims for sexual freedom rather than freedom from

craving sexuality, in which the goal of these processes and rituals is to move beyond their

importance or ability to be shocking. Rather than attaining a higher self through relishing the

forbidden fruit or repressed behavior, the “left-hand” path aspires to uncovering the reality of the

emptiness in both the fruit and the characterization of forbidden.

As Foucault challenges the paradoxical relevance that a practice can hold when deriving

importance from social relativism, the internal substance of sensuality, attraction, and aversion is

questioned by Bataille. Bataille’s erotic visualizations invoke extremism in the exact parallel to
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tantra, stretching fascination with sexual yearning to its absolute augmented end and confronting

these same feelings with repulsion and aversion. In congruency with this understanding of

emptiness challenging Foucault and the core assertion that beyond extreme tantric juxtaposition

lies equanimity, Bataille contextualizes this even further in the context of human behavior and

the condition of “wanting.” His work serves as vital connective tissue between

5. Examining Masochistic Practices in conversation with Tantra

The most common trope of masochism comes with the role reversal of a dualistic gender

system, typically inverting the historical patrilineage of male domination and female submission.

Amy D. Lykins and James M. Cantor bring up the idea of sexual difference as a driving social

convention within masochism, citing Roy Baumeister’s book Masochism and the Self and his

findings that “degradation, status loss, and humiliation were more often reported by male than

female masochists, which he argued was partially a reaction to (or means of escape from) the

social power endemic to men’s social roles” (Lykins & Cantor 185). Male masochists appear to

be deconstructing their own gender within the use of exaggerated role reversal through the form

of sexual physical submission to women, indicating a liberation beyond sensual pleasure but

rooted in the truth of gender as empty. One adjacent example of this arises in Hindu tantric

traditions of the highly tantric goddess Kalika who serves as the goddess of destruction. Kalika is

often portrayed in iconography standing with her foot placed on Shiva, her lover and creator

deity in Hinduism, as “jihva-lalana-bisana” or “the one who is ‘terrifying’ with her ‘tongue’

‘lolling’” (Tull 303). Kalika’s iconographic outstretched tongue stands as a microcosm for the

non-dualism she represents specifically for women’s wrathful unconstrained power and the

orthodox position of “ordinary” and largely submissive housewife realities. As Herman Tull

explores in his essay “Kali’s Tongue: Shame, Disgust, and the Rejection of Blood and Violence
 Ghosh 10

in Vedic and Hindu Thought,” articulates a specifically gendered conflict “between the

constrained world of social propriety and the unconstrained primal world” that belongs within

this all-powerful representation of femininity (304). Transgressive Kalika Tantra or Kali

practice, as outlined within the Kalika Purana works directly against the “nearly universal

construction of women the second sex,” according to Loriliai Biernacki in her chapter of

Renowned Goddess of Desire. Kali practice is a crucial part of “left-hand” tantra within exposing

the emptiness of constrictive gender duality, as the central rite of sexual union “Māyā Tantra”

instructs practitioners to partake in an orgy in which the female participants get drunk and have

sex outside of marital bounds, all while being venerated as goddesses. Adhering to the criterion

of the definition of tantra, the goals of Kali practice stretch farther than female pleasure or

momentary respect, but award women power that is for once not connected to “their sexuality or

to their capacity to be faithful to their husband,” expanding or abolishing the relative role women

are so often constrained to in Indian societyvi.

Baumeister’s ideas lend themselves to this exact idea of reinvention, as he is “focused on

the idea of masochistic behavior acting as a means of transformation into a new identity, which

would typically result in a loss of dignity and personhood” for men, just as Kali practice builds

up to equal personhood. Within both practices the traditional roles of men and women are

reversed and then highly inflated until gender itself is obscured, showing that any role played is

illogical. The point of equilibrium within each practice, either women in Kali practice celebrated

wholly or male identities demolished in female domination, becomes not bliss within feelings

rarely attained but a point of nothingness where there once was gender. The roles of gender here

are primary mechanism for the ritual or submission, yet by trespassing gender barriers and

exaggerating role adherence in these inverse positions, the value of gender is negated
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completely. Within this case visualization, ritual facilitates its precise purpose of the energy of

gender has been channeled and then abandoned, as practitioners are emancipated by the

transgressive process.

Another prominent example that aligns within masochistic and tantric canons is the

evocative blurring of desire and disgust as a vehicle for detachment entirely. (3) Within Tibetan

Buddhist tradition the practice of targeting desire in order to cultivate equanimity is enacted by

emptying the specifically sensual and psychological barriers between attractiveness and

repulsion. Monks would confront these boundaries by meditating on one’s favorite meal and a

bowl of human excrement, hoping to achieve a state in which neither manifested as more or less

appetizing to their senses. As the desired food stands in as a form of decadence, craving, and

gratification, the bowl of feces represents the foil through contamination and repulsion. The goal

of this exercise was not to foster a hunger for conventionally disgusting objects, but to dissolve

and neutralize the attraction and attachment that holds control over human behavior by steering

and diverting through aversion. Similarly, George Bataille exercises a similar ritual meditation

on his readers and characters in his erotic novella Blue of Noon, as well as his reflections in

Death and Sensualityvii. In Blue of Noon Bataille creates a vast landscape of death and disgust

within an erotic novella, characterizing the main character’s interest on a female character named

Dirty who personifies excrement, sexual desire, and transgression as a whole. While the novella

is erotica, most of the author’s messaging and overarching themes are existential, largely as a

result of the constant and unending bombardment of sex coupled with the horrid and disgusting.

The main character Henri Troppmann, much like the monks in the exercise of shit and ice cream,

is also making a choice between the female characters: Dorothea—nicknamed Dirty—

representing transgression and the intersection between aversion and attraction, and Lazare an
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uptight Christian who is repulsive in attitude yet extremely sterile and tranquil. However, the

driving transgression for Troppman’s character was an act of necrophilia with his dead mother,

driving him to seek “now horrors to fill the emptiness” with Dirty, yet experiencing impotency

with Lazare as he was “incapable of wanting anything” after his misdeed (Bataille 20, 40). The

sex in this book is not meant to be pornographic but seeks to express a greater unrest with want

and abhorrence, in Bataille’s case a specifically political nihilist enlightenment about how to

conceive of life within a period of war and rampant death.

The ritualistic component to these two examples serves to singlehandedly power spiritual

process, as the desire/disgust boundary is dissolved only through a bombardment and confusion

of the senses when ritually removed from comfort and habit. Popular analysis of Bataille extends

this idea of the erotic text being viewed as conditioning ritual practices in its separation from

canonical erotica, as it is not meant to titillate but punish the readers by the emptiness that

Troppmann feels by deeply visualizing his guilt and ultimately draining sexual wants. As the

meaning and purity is drained from any visualization of sex, particularly by allowing necrophilia

to synthesize sex and death, satisfaction escapes Troppmann through repeated exposure to the

shocking rituals he appears to put himself through. This is something that both the readers of

Bataille and Tibetan meditators must engage in, procedurally entering into discomfort to dissolve

the control which desire imposes on their actions. While the monastic practice has set intentions

of emptiness, the interchangeable material content of the rituals appear to induce nihilism or

emptiness within Troppmann, showing the power of transgression in detaching desire from not

only the objects but the practitioner.

A final exploration into masochism and paraphilia comes as a reaction to Chöd practice

in Tibetian Buddhism, a set of Buddhist ritual practices that instructs terrifying and dangerous
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meditation visualizations of the practitioner as a tantric feast. As outlined in Machig Labdrön’s

Autobiography as translated by Sarah Harding, not only would practitioners venture to burial

grounds and haunted mountains to “induce fear or anxiety … to confront impermanence and

their own attachment,” they would offer their flesh as “charity of the body” to be devoured be

hungry spirits (Harding 43, 48). This primary focus on relinquishing the body for gruesome

destruction within the philosophies of Chöd practice is aimed at the destruction of ego, in which

one is ignorant in perceiving the self as inherently central to existence and suffers due to this

artificial belongingviii. As explained by the prominent Tibetan Buddhist figure Milarepa recorded

in the 100,000 Songs of Milarepa, the point of the practice is not to live in fear or obsessive

visualization of being eaten, but to sever the tethers one holds to the idea of self and become

liberated. While based on admittedly literal understandings of the practices, vorarephilia, or the

desire to be eaten or eat a partner as a sexual fetish, relates closely on the operative level to Chöd

practices. Returning to the article examining “Masochism and Erotic Consumption” by Lykins &

Cantor, the authors examine individual cases of actualized and visualized sexual cannibalism or

vorarephilia. In the relationships the describe the submissive or masochistic role is played by the

individual desiring consumption, importantly becoming willing participants of cannibalism.

Armin Meiwes and Jeffrey Dahmer are two famously sexually motivated cannibals, both of

whom expressed that they acted partially on loneliness motivated by what they viewed as a final

unity between themselves and victims, aligning with ideas of non-dualism. This interpretation,

however, relates to Hindu ideas of the ultimately united self, rather than a Buddhist which might

be expressed through desire to be absolved of personhood through consumption, as theorized

about Meiwes’ victim Bernd Jürgen Armando Brandes. As is considered with all other examples
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prior, the ability for the masochistic practice to catalyze spiritual progress rather than simply

sensual satisfaction defines the tantric utility of these transgressive actions.

The act of transgression and role playing here acts as a matter of understanding the role

of one’s body and impermanence as important or sacred, rather than a forbidden act. Chöd

practitioners use a ritual of fear to deconstruct clinging to the body, revealing a truth through

organized confrontation with spaces and feelings that typically inspire avoidance. This

comparison becomes slightly complex as the desire to be subjected to a fearful experience, as

Armando Brandes exemplifies by consensually seeking the consumption of his body by others, is

self-selected as an exercise of pleasure. This desire might have been motivated by a recognition

of the liberation that destruction of self has and been used as a ritual to destroy self, but many

psychologists suggest that Armando Brandes may have developed negative self-image that

attracted him to ideas of separation from physical form or belonging to an identityix. Despite

these motivations, the act of visualization or ritual as a means of actualization of this detachment

are upheld as people are drawn to the practice of vorarephilia to achieve an alteration of the role

of self.

6. Conclusion

These case studies act to illuminate the value in using tools that tether humans to worldly

suffering and ignorance, and simultaneously the “left-handed” tactic of inverting convention, to

evoke the underlying illogic within these roles. Masochism in its substantive similarity to

transgressive tantric practices undermines the idea that an explicit spiritual intention is the sole

force supplying spiritual progress, emphasizing instead the ability for ritual alone to provide

emancipation. With this understanding, the use of transgression and intentional inversion of roles

within both tantra and BDSM can be viewed within the same productive connotation, rather than
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understood as deviant or hedonistic. This incorporates the ideas of Foucault, but also the essence

of using the tools of dualism to invoke non-dualism, in that social convention or traditional

spirituality drives transgression yet only to the goal of being overcome. Isolating masochism

within the contemporary Western context and applying this logic, the act can only be defined as

separate from tantra in intentionality, but considering the intrinsic link with paraphilia and non-

dual extremes still hold potential to invoke liberation from dualism within the practitioner. As

the utility of ritual and social role effects not only confined spiritual processes but actions driven

by popular desire of social escapism, the overarching existence of soteriological gains unites

“left-hand” tantra and masochism to be assessed as valid emancipatory traditions.

(4)

i
Consult DSM-5 section “Prevalence” within the entry on “Sexual Masochism Disorder” citing several studies that
point to the an absence of data on this topic.
ii
See Kraft-Ebbings 88-137 for extensive coverage on masochism within Psychopathia Sexualis
iii
Paraphilia is explained in the introduction to the section titled “Paraphilic Disorders” of the DSM-5
iv
See page 17 of White for his explicit convergence on the same conclusion in sexual tantra
v
See Bhattacharya’s The History of Sakta Religion for a more in-depth exploration within the Hindu left-hand
traditions
vi
See section “Women and their Mantras” of Biernacki
vii
Part 1 of Bataille’s Death and Sensuality coincide with this positive analysis of taboo
viii
A comprehensive look at Chöd can be found in Machik’s Complete Explanation an autobiography of Machik
Lapdrön as translated by Sarah Harding
ix
Sheila Jefferys cites Keith Ashcroft specifically regarding vorarephilia in self-obliteration in Armando Brandes in
her section “Self-mutilation and social status” of her book Beauty and Misogyny: Harmful cultural practices in the
West