The Western difficultly with rightly understanding Mind is illustrated by Stephen Batchelor’s tenure as a Korean Zen monk with Zen master Kusan Sunim which is found in his new book, Confession of a Buddhist Atheist (I enjoyed the book by the way even though I am of the opinion that Batchelor is a whacko). The koan he was given by Sunim, viz., “What is this?” so that he might crack through his intellectual prejudices and hopefully gain an insight into pure Mind, was something Batchelor couldn’t buy from the start. He fundamentally rejected the idea of a transcendent Mind even though he acknowledged that the “purpose of Zen meditation is to awaken to the Mind” (p. 68). Here Batchelor reveals his contempt for the Buddhist notion of Mind.

“Once again, I found myself confronted by the specter of a disembodied spirit. The logic of Kusan Sunim’s argument failed to convince me. It rested on the assumption that there was “something” (i.e., Mind) that rules the body, which was beyond the reach of concepts and language. At the same time, this “something” was also my true original nature, my face before I was born, which somehow animated me. This sounded suspiciously like the Atman (Self/God) of Indian tradition that the Buddha had rejected” (p. 68).

Batchelor is not without a lot of support—Western that is. The Western Zen community is basically turned towards the practice and promotion of a special kind of subtle egocentricity which rests upon the psychophysical (skandha) order; which also includes the paradoxical belief in the impossibility of knowing anything outside of this order. This would include Zen master Kusan Sunim’s transcendent Mind which is clearly out of the reach of the psychophysical order, that is, the Five Aggregates.

Batchelor, like most Westerners of his kind, almost expected Sunim to present pure Mind to him as if it might be laid out on a surgeon’s table for his inspection. If Sunim can’t do this, then the rule is, question and doubt even though Westerners I know, including myself, have penetrated into pure Mind and find the entire history of Chinese Zen and Korean Zen to be totally consistent with Mind; this includes the Tibetan traditions as well.

Where this is all going to end up is in a kind of intense spiritual civil war in which the victory will eventually be for those who hold that Mind is the absolute; it is the very substance of this marvelous universe. The losers can still continue to take up new prisons cells, otherwise called, samsara. These are cells they will build with their deluded will in defiance of the Buddha.