The Zennist

You are biological robots with no soul

My retrospective survey of the Buddhist chat rooms I have been connected with since the 1990s leads me to one conclusion, many Buddhists assume that the Buddha, if he were alive today, would teach that we are biological robots with no soul.  This, as we might expect is not the way Buddhists in India, Vietnam or Thailand see Buddhism.  This, for the most part, is a Western belief grounded on materialism which has little or nothing to do with Buddhism of the discourses.

Secular Buddhists are in the vanguard of this materialistic view, namely, that we are essentially biological robots with no soul or âtman.  They are followed by skeptical Buddhists and Cartesian dualist Buddhists (mind/body duality).  When we extract the essence of this modern form of Buddhism it is redolent with the fumes of materialism. 

But what then does this kind of Buddhism mean for such people?  How do they actually practice it?  Do they walk around pretending to be biological robots?  How is a biological Buddhist robot supposed to act?  Next, we might ask, what is nirvana for these people?  What is rebirth, and so on?    

Maybe I should ask, does life have any meaning for this kind of Buddhist?  Maybe what they propose is to live for each fleeting, brief moment as it comes.  Or maybe they propose that life doesn’t need meaning or purpose at all.  In other words, who needs a purpose-filled life?  A Buddhist materialist should just accept the suffering of life, after all death is the end of life.  It is nature’s nirvana.  There is nothing more to worry about after we crap out.  

I suspect the Buddhist who believes that we are biological robots without a soul has a unique form of meditation.  Permit me to guess.  It is to sit cross-legged on a cushion then center on the inner part of the biological robot being attentive to the flux of what is observed, understanding that everything beheld, which is always impermanent, cannot be a refuge.  From this it is realized that suffering emerges from expecting more than this.  The desire to run from the polarity of biological birth and death is the very cause of suffering.  If we just accept our fate, that is, accept our doom, life will be so much better.  Only then does life reveal itself.  It’s almost like having one day left to live after learning that the Earth is going to be destroyed.  Think of all the fun things you might do.  

Such Buddhism, which is devoid of any teleology, is the antithesis of Buddhism found in the discourses.  It is not the Buddhism which teaches that all beings have the potential to become Buddhas.  Obviously, not.  The Buddhism found in the discourses is far more hopeful.  Ultimately, we are centers of meaning and action because we are self-organizing entities which are spiritual—not material.  We can either become Buddhas or hell born beings.  Mind leads the way  It is always in the future.  What follows it at the polar opposite is the effect, i.e., what is manomaya.

“All mental phenomena are preceded by mind (manas). Mind is their master, they are made by mind (manomaya).  If somebody speaks or acts with a corrupted mind, suffering follows him, even as the wheel follows the foot of the bearing animal” (Dhammapada, 1).

It is spirit or mind upon which the universe depends.  In us, it leads the way.  It is always in the future while today—the now—is the result.  Given this, how can Western Buddhists be so naive when it comes to spirit or mind.? They have given away their power over suffering just to follow and accept a corporeal body which the Buddha calls old karma.

Materialism: The enemy of science and Zen Buddhism

The Western delusion believes that it already understands the nature of reality with the help of its crystal ball of materialism. As for the typical, run-of-the-mill Westerner, he believes that he has a good eye for determining what is true and what is not true about reality.  He will agree that matter is unconscious, the mind is created in the brain and psychic phenomena such as NDEs are delusional. But this is all part of the grand scheme of materialism which should not be confused with science which according to the Oxford English Dictionary is: 

“The state or fact of knowing; knowledge or cognizance of something specified or implied; also, with wider reference, knowledge (more or less extensive) as a personal attribute.”  

The dogma of materialism, which is not science based, believes that only matter exists (how does it know this?).  And when asked what is matter? it has no satisfactory answer, except perhaps, matter is resistance. But this answer is metaphysical.  It no longer belongs to matter.  Resistance is immaterial.

For hundreds of years the West has embraced what is known as mind/body dualism.  This is the belief that mind or spirit is distinct from material bodies that are mechanical in operation which is part of the material universe.  The most recent attempt to get rid of the dualism is to ignore, completely, the right and place of spirit.  This leaves us with a new kind of atheism, one that wages war against spirit, in short, against all of religion.   

In light of the above, it should not be surprising that Zen Buddhism is still little understood today because of the pervasiveness of materialism. The spiritual meaning of Mind, presented under different names in Zen, seems to have few Western scholarly takers who are willing to unpack its enormous spiritual history. 

Putting aside materialism, we have to engage with science which is the state or fact of knowing.  Akin to this, Zen Buddhism’s science is to realize Mind by transcending all thoughts so that we might directly behold Mind which is the essence of thought.  Thoughts only serve to hide Mind’s immaculate essence.  Mind’s importance becomes clear in this passage from old documents found in Tun Huang which also inform us what Zen is about. 

HUIKE ASKED: If there are people intent on seeking the Path of Enlightenment, what method should they practice, what method is most essential and concise?

Bodhidharma answered:  Let him just contemplate mind—this one method takes in all practices, and is indeed essential and concise.

Huike asked: How can one method take in all practices?

Bodhidharma answered: Mind is the root of the myriad phenomena.  All phenomena are born from mind.  If you can completely comprehend mind, the myriad practices are complete.  It is like a great tree: all the branches and flowers and fruits grow based on the root.  The tree grows only if the root survives.  If the root is cut, the tree is sure to die.  If you cultivate the Path by comprehending mind, you save effort and success is easy.  If you cultivate the Path without comprehending mind then you waste effort and there is no benefit.  Thus we know that all good and evil come from one’s own mind.  If you seek outside of mind, it is impossible” (Cleary, Zen Dawn, p. 81-2).

As long as we adhere to materialism the entrance to Zen Buddhism remains shut.  There is no possible way to understand it if one has not been sufficiently weaned from materialism.  As long as the West continues brainwashing everyone with materialism, conflating it with science, it is doomed.  Not only is religion a victim but so is science.  

A walk on the animative side

Q: If you were to modernize Zen and for that matter Buddhism, how might you go about it?

A:  I have been asking that question for a long time.  Surprisingly, I have discovered some ways based on my own long journey to the beyond.  We have to remember that the Buddha’s teaching had the Buddha around.  You might walk up to him and be surprised by the outpouring of spiritual light that is coming from him even though he is silent.  This means that you just entered the current or sotapanna.  You are an ariyan.  Others wouldn’t sense his light at all.  And why?  They ain’t got good karma.  In this sense, good karma determines whether or not you are going to awaken.

Q:  So what accounts for this spiritual light as you call it?

A:  Here is the important point that helps me to modernize Buddhism.  The animative side of us is who we really are.  It is interfaced with the animated side.  The animated side is our psychophysical body, or the same, the Five Aggregates.  These two sides can also be thought of as the unconditioned, the animative, and the conditioned, the animated—nirvana and samsara.  When the animative side turns to itself, this being samadhi, Wow!  We just met who we really are.  This animative side is immortal—it’s nirvana.  It is intrinsically free of the animated like the clay of a clay pot is intrinsically free of the pot form.  If the pot breaks, the clay is unaffected.  In the Buddha’s case he has been doing samadhi for a long time.  As he goes more to the animative, the animated, conditioned side, and all it stands for, begins to look illusory—it loses its sting.  The power of the animative begins to influence others who are in accord with it.

Q:  That is very interesting and original.  But how is it that we don’t see the animative?

A:  This is where desire comes in.  Let’s get real.  As humans we crave the animated side. Having sex, getting high, partying all night, we desire this.  The more we do this the more the animative side gets lost.  We can’t re-member it.  We are entrapped in the transcendental illusion.  We love it here.  By craving the animated side we automatically open up ourselves to the other side of pleasure which is suffering.  One day you will be an old fart and that beautiful woman you married won’t look any better.  You have the grim reaper to look forward to—the sudden shock of your death.  

Q:  Okay, what do we do about it?

A:  What Will Rogers said applies: “If you find yourself in a hole, the first thing to do is stop digging.”  A gradual increase in craving for the animated side of us is digging—always digging.  So you stop.  The smart ones try to go into retreat, in order to try to back off from digging.  We have to stop digging sufficient to enable the animative side of us to come through.  However, there is another way.  You become so interested in discovering the animative side that you forget to dig! Then you see it.

Q:  But what if a person can’t stop digging?

A:  It is sort of spiritual suicide by digging.  There is not much you can do, especially if you yourself are digging, as these people generally get secondary gain by having other people give them attention night and day.

Q:  But how do we know that this animative, unconditioned side is real? 

A:  Unfortunately, we live in a culture in which knowledge by way of our conditioned senses dominates.  If you can’t see it, it doesn’t exist.  This makes it much more difficult to go on a spiritual path which seeks to connect or samadhi with our animative side.  How do I convince a hardcore skeptic who is resisting everything I say?  The Buddha faced the same thing.  He didn’t convince the materialists and skeptics of his day in the unconditioned.  And not everyone who met the Buddha won the current or sotapanna.  Not all people are the same.  There are sometimes huge differences between people—and some are on the same wavelength so to speak.

Q:  Could you say the animative side that doesn’t realize itself can get stuck in rebirth for a long time?

A:  Yes, that’s right.  Being under the habit and desire for the animated, conditioned side, because of ignorance or avidya, gets us caught up in another birth in some animated form from that of a god to a lower being.  This is what the 12-Nidanas are all about: always reconnecting with the animated, conditioned side—the birth-death cycle of samsara. 

The darkness is spreading

Zen has been in deep doo-doo for a long time.  Holmes Welch’s study of Chinese Buddhism in China from 1900 to 1950 paints a not so good picture.  Along with the decline of Buddhism in China was likewise the decline of Zen.  This doesn’t mean that there aren’t enlightened masters.  What I am concerned about is the fact that we are losing sight of what Zen and for that matter Buddhism is really about.

In my last blog I made a small case for what Zen is about, which is the realization of pure Mind which comports nicely with Mahayana Buddhism which commences with bodhicittotpada (generating the Mind that is bodhi).  This knowledge, including the knowledge of Mahayana Buddhism, is being overshadowed by other forms of Buddhism.  

When I look at Buddhism which relies on the Pali Nikayas and its brother the Chinese Agama Sutras I see too much emphasis on anâtman (lit., not the self) and not enough emphasis on the positive, namely, nirvana and how to get there from the here of samsara.  Making matters even worse is the lack of understanding of how the Buddha meant anâtman to be used which is not a denial of the âtman but rather a call for us to reject what is not the âtman such as the Five Aggregates which make up the temporal body which is synonymous with suffering or duhkha.

Long ago, Zen master Huang-po, appeared to be aware of the problem of anâtman and the Theravadins (Blofeld, The Zen Teaching of Huang Po, p. 109).  Zennists like Huang-po, from what I can gather, saw the Theravadin’s interpretation of anâtman to be an covert attack on the One Mind, if not Mahayana Buddhism in general.  All that we might hope to learn, intellectually, about the One Mind can be found in the Mahayanasraddhotpadasastra (The Awakening of Faith Treatise) attributed to Asvaghosha.  This is not something, even today, that gets much play in modern Zen.

Modern Zen Buddhism in the West seems mesmerized by the practice of zazen, and to a lesser extent by Nagarjuna’s doctrine of emptiness, and Theravada no-self Buddhism.  Zen, in other words, has become a new form of self-help therapy for depressed and troubled Westerners suffering from the affliction of nihilism.  This is not to say there are no alternatives, there are.  They are in the form of Tibetan Buddhism, Pure Land and Nichiren.  As far as Zen is concerned one might have to go to either China, Taiwan or South Korea to find something like traditional Zen in which the notion of One Mind is still alive.

I never cease being amazed by the fact that Chinese Buddhism, which includes Zen, is a perfect example of Asian mysticism which, in a number of ways, seems to go beyond anything the West offers—and, remarkably, doesn’t require a God.  While Western mysticism is for the most part to be found in library bookshelves, Buddhist mysticism, especially as found in Zen, it still alive, although on its deathbed in the West.  In this regard, when Zen came to the West, Westerners had no idea what was being handed to them.  In the Buddha’s words, “Those who are afflicted with passion will not see it (i.e., the Way); they are enveloped by a heavy darkness” (Catusparisat Sutra 8:12).

This darkness is spreading.  Zen in the West has not demonstrated enough light to push back this darkness. Because of such darkness, on the Internet I have become Peck’s Bad Boy, the guy some Buddhists love to hate for trying to bring them a Bic lighter’s worth of Mahayana light.  Personally, I can accept the demise of Zen Buddhism in the West.  I have tremendous faith that there will aways be Black Dragons in every Buddhist country who keep the clouds away from the eternal light of nirvana.  

What is Zen Buddhism about?

This might be a difficult question for someone to answer if they are guessing that Zen is Asia’s answer to self-help therapy.  Just sit still and everything will get better.  Again, the question of what is Zen Buddhism about? might be difficult to answer if someone believes that Zen is about recovering the experience of being alive or learning how to live in the now.  There are many such answers to this question.  Some are way off the mark while others are close such as Zen Buddhism is about seeing into one’s original nature.

If we look at the traditional literature of Zen Buddhism we start to get the picture that Zen Buddhism is looking hard at what mind is, in particular, our all-too-human mind emptied of its distortions such that its immaculate nature is seen for the first time.  This mind is the Buddha Mind and many other names such as the One Mind, the pure Mind, the unborn Mind, the true Mind, the essence of Mind, etc.  It is this Mind, as a Zen fable goes, that was transmitted by the Buddha to Mahakasyapa who then became the First Patriarch of Zen.  In time it was Bodhidharma, the first Chinese Patriarch, who transmitted this same Mind to  his closest disciple Hui-k’o.  He told Hui-k’o that, “This is the Mind substance realized by Buddhas.”  Then Hui-neng became the Sixth Patriarch of Zen by realizing the Essence of Mind.

Jakushitsu (1290–1367), the last Japanese Zen master to go to China said that “the investigation of Zen is for realizing the nature of Mind.”  The great master Bassui (1326–1387) said that “the way to become enlightened is to realize your own Mind.”

This is only the tip of the iceberg about realizing Mind this being at the heart of Zen Buddhism.  Studying what Zen means is not about having one’s own personal opinions about Zen.  Zen Buddhism only tolerates one meaning, realizing absolute Mind, such a Mind being devoid of distortions and adventitious defilements as the Buddha taught.  This Mind is the esoteric meaning of emptiness because it is fundamentally empty of all dependent originations which accounts for its utter purity.  Because of this emptiness, it transcends birth and death.  Nor can Mind be found in the 12-Nidanas beginning with ignorance (avidya) and ending with old age and death (jarâmârana). In fact, all dependent originations depend on the One Mind which is independent.  This is why realizing Mind is so important and why true Zen Buddhism, not the false Zen of today, speaks so much about realizing pure Mind.

 

The imagination of science

Western Buddhists seem to want Buddhism to embrace their religion called “scientism” which is the belief that empirical science constitutes the most authoritative world view.  For the life of me I can’t figure out why.  I don’t think scientists see themselves as a new kind of clergy.  They know that science is just educated guessing which makes plenty of mistakes.  For those who take scientism as a religion of sorts, most scientists find them ridiculous. 

These Western Buddhists don’t seem to understand that science, when you boil it all down, is just a huge kettle of metaphors which still can’t answer, “What is the universe made of?”  One such metaphor is the universe is like an encyclopedia of mathematics.  But the universe doesn’t speak mathematically.  The general theory of relativity doesn’t speak about a universe that we can observe.  Another metaphor concerns light.  Is it like a particle or is it like a wave?  Particle and wave are just metaphors.  The help us to understand light, but at the same time, they also hide the real nature of light.   Particle and wave are also fictions being limited in that respect.  There is scarcely any difference between metaphors and fictions.  Both can be apt and very useful—both are, undeniably, fabrications of the mind.  

When we compare old religions with modern science they are no different when looked at through the notion of metaphor.  In one extensive metaphor, God creates heaven and earth.  In a more modern one there is a big bang.  God, a creator-builder, is a metaphor for the mystery of creation.  The big band is an explosion metaphor for the mystery of creation.  Both are also fictional which means they are both artful fabrications of the human mind.  Religions of the past and modern science by their metaphors help us to make the unknown seem less unknown which is a form of delusion.  Believe in God or science, we still do not know the mystery of creation.  And as I mentioned earlier, we have no idea what the universe is made of.  

Buddhism seeks to eclipse as much as it can the world of metaphors.  It is not interested in realizing truth by way of metaphors and other grand fictions, although they can be useful.  The Buddha points beyond all fabrications of the mind.  We must come to realize what is most primordial; not straightway begin with our imagination as a given coming up metaphors like God and the big bang.  The realization of what is most primordial; which is beyond all fabrications of mind is a very real, realization.  It just defies naming.  The scaffolding of our imagination cannot rest against it, neither can science.

Zen and Buddhism

I don’t think it is uncommon for beginners to separate Zen from Buddhism and by doing so create two, so to speak, separate, distinct piles.  There is one for their personal experiences and opinions which revolve around zazen.  Let's call this Zen.  And there is another pile for the Buddha’s discourses.  But this is a mistake.  The T’ang Dynasty Zen master Tsung-mi might have thought it also a mistake.

“The scriptures are the Buddha’s words and Ch’an (J., Zen) is the Buddha’s intent.  The minds and mouths of the Buddha certainly cannot be contradictory.” (trans. Peter N. Gregory.)

Separating Zen from Buddhism is easy for a beginner to do who just bought Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind or the late Joko Beck’s book, Everyday Zen.  These books are made for beginners who want to keep Zen and Buddhism separate; who plan just to concentrate on the practice of zazen.  These books are not intended for the serious student of Zen Buddhism.

I am guessing, but more than often the beginner’s interest in Zen, alone, stems from a psychological reason.  They want to get their life together.  Sitting in zazen sounds like it might help.  One can surmise that they are not interested in reading the Samyutta-Nikaya of the Pali canon or the Lankavatara Sutra.  This material is, perhaps, too heady for them.  Learning to sit Zen style seems like a much better approach.  However, what emerges from this approach is a distorted false Zen.

Finding real Zen Buddhism, in which Zen and Buddhism haven’t been separated, is in the academic world and in Asia.  This is not to say that westernized Zen is not completely without Zen Buddhism, but it is overshadowed by zazen which makes the separation of Zen from Buddhism much more likely. 

Questions about the afterlife

Q:  What is the Buddhist view on the afterlife?

A:  Let me answer your question this way.  Death is not final in Buddhism.  Consciousness continues on bearing particular karmic impressions somewhat like a radio signal.  This consciousness is capable of enveloping itself into another body.  This is stated in the Maharatnakuta Sutra.  Hardly mentioned, we come across discourses in Pali Nikayas in which the Buddha is instructing his disciples—the more advanced guys—how to produce a kind of astral body called a rupim manomayam complete in all its limbs and members including transcendental faculties.  I don’t get the impression reading the discourses of the Buddha that he was a materialist who believed consciousness or spirit comes from a 3 pound organ called the brain.

Q:  I am Asian as you can tell.  Most Asians believe in the afterlife.  We ask the monks to help our relatives to get into the Western Paradise and stuff like that.  We believe in ghosts, too.  My wife and her sisters see ghosts.  What gets me are Western Buddhists. They probably think Asian Buddhists are weird because we don’t doubt the afterlife.  So the question I have is why are Western Buddhists so skeptical of rebirth?

A:  I was hoping you might tell me!  I have real problems with Western Buddhists some of whom find the idea of life after death repugnant.  They will pretend that they have an open mind but they remain hardcore skeptics.  This means the don’t seem to understand samsara insofar as samsara is all about rebirth.  It’s the cycle of birth and death.  This also means they don’t understand the 12-Nidanas, either.  It is about the incarnation of consciousness if you read the Madhyanta-vibhanga.  A lot of Buddhism hinges on rebirth.  If it didn’t then why did the Buddha say things like this?

“he has abandoned the production of renewed existence, the future bed of the womb; when he has cut it off at the root, made it like a palm stump, obliterated it so that it is not more subject to future arising” (A. iv. 175–6).

Bit by bit some Western Buddhists are getting rid of the basic tenets of Buddhism.  It’s rebirth, then karma, followed by samsara and the 12-Nidanas.  Stephen Batchelor got rid of nirvana and pure Mind.  Why not just take the canon and burn it for all it’s worth to some Western Buddhists?  But I don’t think the majority of Western Buddhists are skeptical of rebirth.  Some of the popular Buddhists, who appear to set the tone for pop Buddhism, seem to me to be the problem.  They need to be eliminated, their views crushed.

Q:  How do you do that?

A:  One way is you do it through Near Death Experiences (NDEs) and Out of Body Experiences (OBEs).  There is a lot of research that has been done in this field.  It gets closest to the Buddhist idea that consciousness is independent of the physical body in death.  Internet Buddhist chat rooms, I discovered, hold their nose when the subject appears.  One forum put the subject into their “Danger Zone” which only registered discussants can read.  Clearly, a little censorship going on.  If you don’t wish to get banned from Western Buddhist chat rooms, you don’t want to post anything by Dr. Pim van Lommel, especially, his research published in The Lancet 2001, “Near-death experience in survivors of cardiac arrest; a prospective study in the Netherlands”.  In his lectures on YouTube he points out that current scientific models cannot explain the phenomenon.  As I read the explanations of the skeptics most amount to unproven hypotheses and in some cases outright lies.  I mean how do you explain no EEG waves while the supposedly dead person is in another world or floating above their body?

Q:  But won’t it just piss of these Buddhists rather than change their minds?

A:  I suppose it will.  No matter what I say or others say, they are not going to go gentle into that good night.  But maybe they don’t need to be in Buddhism, especially, when they don’t care to read the Buddha’s discourses except, perhaps, to revise them.  I mean they are like the proverbial dog in the cow’s manger.  What is their purpose in studying Buddhism in the first place?  To completely undermine it?  That is something a psychopath would do.

Q:  Why did they choose to come to Buddhism?

A:  My opinion?  Somewhere they got the stupid idea that Buddhism denied a soul and with such a denial also denied the idea of rebirth since there is no soul that transmigrates from one life to another.  This mainly appeals to materialists.  But the Buddha never actually denied the soul or âtman.  But this is beside the point.  The Buddha said it is consciousness, that is, samsaric consciousness that transmigrates from one life to the next because consciousness is conditioned.

Confession on an irreligionist

Stephen Batchelor’s book, Confession of a Buddhist Atheist is not a dull book; it is very interesting.  For me it is an irreligious autobiography.  From a Buddhist perspective, it is about a Westerner who can’t seem to understand what pure Mind is in Buddhism; who seems unwilling to even except the possibility that Mind is intuitable and transcendent.  This is evinced in chapter 6, Great Doubt, when Batchelor goes off to South Korea to study Zen in a monastery called Sanggwangsa where a group of Western monks and nuns were studying under Zen master Kusan Sunim.

Batchelor, now a Zen monk, was given a simple koan, “What is this” referring to absolute Mind shorn of its disturbances.  He had trouble with the aim of this koan and the underlying philosophy of Zen master Kusan Sunim who wanted the student to awaken to the transcendent Mind.  For Zen monk Batchelor such a mind could only mean “disembodied spirit” something he could not agree with.  Moreover, the Tibetan tradition he was previously associated with, Gelug, rejected the Mind-only teaching.  To make a long story short, Mr. Batchelor ended his life as a Zen monk to enter the life of a lay Buddhist, still remaining totally clueless as to what Mind is and the fact that it is intuitable and transcendent.

Anyone who tries to frame this as the inscrutable East vs the rational and scientific West, as represented by Stephen Batchelor, doesn’t know that much about either the East or the West.  Westerners I know are very open to the Buddhist notion of absolute Mind; who don’t think the notion came from another star system.  

Stepping into our time machine going back to the 19th century, it was the English mathematician and philosopher William Kingdon Clifford (1845–1879) who coined the term "mind-stuff" in 1878.  Clifford writes: 

“The universe, then, consists entirely of mind-stuff.  Some of this is woven into the complex form of human minds containing imperfect representations of the mind-stuff outside of them, and of themselves also, as a mirror reflects its own image in another mirror, ad infinitum.  Such an imperfect representation is called a material universe.  It is a picture in man's mind of the real universe of mind-stuff” (http://goo.gl/CEhocI).

This is pretty awesome stuff—and it is Western!  A Buddhist like Dharmakirti whom Batchelor discusses in his book, would have enjoyed meeting with William, and so might many Zen masters.

Another Westerner I am sure Batchelor would probably think is suffering from the vapours is Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington who said:

"To put the conclusion crudely—the stuff of the world is mind-stuff...and the substratum of everything is of a mental character...Consciousness is not sharply defined, but fades into subconsciousness: and beyond that we must postulate something indefinite but yet continuous with our mental nature.  This I take to be the world-stuff.” 

Personally, I think Batchelor is suffering from a bad case of close-mindedness.  His views on Zen are not shared by many Zennists especially by anyone who has read Zen literature, extensively.  There is always mention of Mind is some form or other like unborn Mind or pure Mind.  Speaking for myself, I have personally realized this pure Mind.  I have also attained the light of Mahayana which was an extraordinary event in my life eclipsing everything I thought I understood about Buddhism.  I know that Buddhism is truly a cosmic religion—one that Batchelor and those like him will never understand or eventually come to know.  Such people are self-doomed by their close-mindedness.  

Are nirvana and samsara about the same?

I think it is pretty well established in Buddhist circles that nirvana is unconstructed (asamskrita).  It falls on the side of the unconditioned whereas, by contrast, the world of samsara (birth-death cycle) falls on the conditioned side which is to say that all things are impermanent or anitya. 

Odd to me, in Nagarjuna’s Mulamadhyamakakrika (hereafter MMK) we find this karika of his.

“Samsara (i.e., the empirical life-death cycle) is nothing essentially different from nirvana.  Nirvana is nothing essentially different from samsara” (MMK XXV, 19, trans. K.K. Inada).

Put another way, Nagarjuna is saying conditionality is essentially nothing different from unconditionality.  Unconditionality is nothing essentially different from conditionality.

Maybe at a strictly linguistic level we can get by with this insofar as both terms are merely signs that point to abstract concepts.  But for one, like the Buddha, who has realized actual nirvana and for one who is still entangled in samsara, there is considerable difference.  The monk who is freed from desire and attachment; who has attained the immortal, the tranquil and deathless state of Nibbana (cp. Sutta-Nipâta 204) there is a huge difference from the monk who has not.  

Adding this up, it is not true that there is nothing essentially different from the deathless state of nirvana and the birth-death cycle of samsara.  The difference is a spiritual difference as far as actual realization is concerned.  I hasten to add this, but some of what Nagarjuna said, the Buddha never said.  Incidentally, this is why I stress reading the Nikayas/Agamas first.