For a long time, I have been looking for a book that I would like to share with the meditation group, particularly at the end of the sharing, which is based on very basic meditation teachings from Master Sheng Yen. This morning, I came across an early 1993 edition of Master Sheng Yen's Zen Wisdom, and I start to realize how it seems the perfect book which serves this kind of purpose of explaining the down-to-earth essentials of meditation and Buddhism, without going too deeply into theories. While I was having dinner tonight, I even started to envision how I might subdivide each session of the Saturday meditation sharing by particularly delineated paragraphs and sections.
This process seems rather over-controlling in a sense, and the present can hardly be predicted in this way. I once heard a similar expression: "Humans plan, God laughs". Yet, somehow, I derive a certain kind of comfort in the book, as though it were a transitional object that allows me to better relate to others and provide them with something that might be useful to them. Is that going to be how others' experience the same situation? I am afraid that even this is not so knowable.
Searching for the perfect book is a good metaphor for trying to find the right way to create a social situation where everyone learns and benefits. But it's not possible, because all meetings are intertwined subjectivity which is both similar and different. It doesn't even make sense to imagine that one can find certainty just by reading a book and commenting on it, yet that illusion is very much alive in a lot of educational theories. Sometimes, I do wonder if it's better to simply be present with others, without having to provide an intermediary form. Could this not also be a meditative practice of sorts?
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