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ZEN BUDDHISM says the very thing that drives the hearer's mind into a worse confusion". How right he is: Zen vision, he fully appreciates, is not that something different is seen, but that one sees differently; hence the impossibility of describing such a purely subjective experience. To him the fascination of Zen seems to be its lack of supposition, that is, of pre-dispositions of thought or belief. The Buddhist assumes nothing, neither a First Cause nor a Personal God nor a "soul”, but the koan is designed to empty the mind of the suppositions or thought-deposits which clog the machinery of flow. For it is one thing to agree intellectually that one should have no suppositions; quite another to keep the mind so fluid that none form. Nothing, no-thing, no single thing, not even beautiful abstractions like Duty, Honour, or Playing the Game, must remain in the mind when Zen is born. For these are but forms of life, whether "good", "bad", or "indifferent, and Zen is beyond all forms. When Zen is allowed to flood the mind to the exclusion of all else, these earlier loves may return, for never again will they stand between the observer and the sun. For the koan, or some other means of im-mediate awareness, will have wrought such a transformation in the mind that the various modes of perceiving consciousness, whether labelled the "self" or "id" or "ego" or "soul”, will have fallen into place and produced, from a chaos of opposing forces, an ordered plan.
This, however, is but half the battle. There is still unconscious supposition, the unperceived psychological predisposition" which equates to some degree with the sankháras of Pali Buddhism. "What the unconscious nature of the student opposes to the teacher or to the
