If you were told that you could purchase a book entitled Instructions for the Zen Cook, you'd probably assume it was a fairly recent work, perhaps by someone from California. In fact, the work is about eight hundred years old. Nor is it a book of recipes; rather than being about how to cook, it's about how to be a cook -- how to cook mindfully.

However, like every other cook book, it's a set of instructions. A recipe for a cake is a set of instructions which -- if followed -- will result in a cake. The recipe will tell us what we need before we start, and then what to do.

What would we think if someone said, "I have acquired the cook book, and I have read the recipe for cake several times, but no cake has yet appeared"? We'd suspect that they'd misunderstood what a cook book is supposed to do. Reading the recipe changes nothing -- except that we now know what to do in order to create a cake. But reading the recipe of itself creates no cake. We have to do that.

Many of us read our meditation books each morning -- but why? Are we assuming that reading the books is a substitute for action? Do we think that reading the books can make us wiser? Or are we seeking instructions, so that we can better practice Steps 10, 11 and 12 on a daily basis?

Poor old us. We have to read the recipe, and then we have to bake the cake -- no one else can do it for us. Baking the cake will take the rest of our lives, and even then we'll still remain quite ordinary. As the author of Instructions for the Zen Cook wrote all those centuries ago, "No matter how many years you [meditate], you will never become anything special."