Why is it that when I read the original commentators like Bodhidharma or Hui-neng or Dogen or even the poets I understand Buddhism, but when I read modern Western commentators (Steven Batchelor comes to mind), I don’t. The question is rhetorical, of course. There is more Nietzsche and Sartre in the Westerners than Buddha. They seem to write in a late forties-early fifties fog, an imperialist nausea. They are not interested in the perennial, or in whatever smacks of spirituality, being in permanent revolt against culture.