This book is an attempt to explain what it means to "meet Buddhism." In the author"s thought and experience, to meet Buddhism is to meet the Truth, face to face. The face-to-face encounter with the Truth is not a matter of intellectual understanding. It is not something remote or unattainable, but something direct and immediate, something we can all discover and experience within the context of our day-to-day lives. To do so we must know where to look and what to do. We need some sort of guide. This is the purpose of Buddhist theory. Buddhist masters of the past have explained the relationship between theory and the Truth by way of a simple metaphor. The Truth, they way, is like the distant moon. Ideas, theories, and explanations are merely fingers pointing at that far-away goal. They are not, and can never be, the moon itself. So this book is one such finger, a finger pointing at the moon. It can show the way to the moon, but the moon itself can be touched by you alone.