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Maybe, but I've never really used books very much as part of my practice. I find books about Buddhism and meditation interesting intellectually but not always useful for progressing actual practice. The ones I enjoyed the best are probably the more semi-biographical ones were other people share their experiences and details of their practice. There are certain predictable milestones as well as potential stumbling blocks that almost all life-long meditators eventually encounter. Some of these I would also categorize as real dangers. An experienced teacher is indispensable for navigating this and I don't find books or writing to be a functional ersatz. I imagine you could probably do ok with instruction over the internet though. Still, there a few books I've enjoyed that stick out. Anything by DT Suzuki is pretty good, though he is a major figure in modern pop-Buddhism that's not really his fault; the hippies became somewhat obsessed with him in the 60s. Alan Watts is also quite good, though I prefer his more academic audio lectures where he explains the basics of Indian philosophy. His other stuff in general is quite syncretic and personally idiosyncratic to his own practice and not really what I'd call standard or traditional, and the hippies got ahold of him too. Another author I enjoy is Taitetsu Unno who writes in English about, and is a minister in, Jodo Shinshu Pure Land Buddhism. There is much less interest in the west for Pure Land, despite it being the overwhelming majority of Buddhists in China and Japan. I learned to meditate at a Jodo Shinshu temple when I was young. Meditation is actually not a core practice of Shin Buddhists at all, most never do it at all, though it does exist in the tradition and is more common in the clergy. The underlying philosophy of Pure Land doesn't really require it as part of the practice, they are mostly chanters; their path to liberation is entirely different from the more well known types like Zen or Tibetan traditions. However this temple shared a facility with a Rinzai Zen sensei who held twice weekly sessions. Shin and Zen have a good and fairly long relationship in Japan so this wasn't that strange to the natives at the temple. I feel like speaking or writing about the experience of meditation is always something of a farce. Its a category of experience I find often beyond my ability to communicate about. At its core is meditation practice. I do a mixture of sitting and walking/working meditation as well as chanting, mostly the nembutsu. I think I understand the aversion to pop-Buddhism though. I learned at a temple of Japanese immigrants and their decedents. They were extremely sensitive to the idea of their religion being a caricature and their non-Japanese visitors being any sort of cultural/religious "tourists". Many of them were quite militant about resisting anything that felt like being exoticized and were very clear that they'd prefer that no non-Japanese were allowed in the services at all, ever. One thing the Shinshu in the USA does that I really like is translate the majority of their teachings into plain English, borrowing many terms from Christianity. Their organization is even called the Buddhist Churches of America. Many of these changes were made post WWII in an effort to integrate more fully into American culture. The temple I attended was founded by former internment camp prisoners who left their old communities en masse after the war and founded entirely new communities in American cities that had little or no Japanese presence before the war. I think that my introduction to the practice coming from this group was very helpful for avoiding a common trend I often see in western Buddhists of what I can only really describe unkindly as LARPing. I have over the years learned a great deal of Japanese and Sanskrit/Pali terminology out of academic interest and as part of deepening the practice. Some of these terms are very useful for describing concepts that sometimes require an entire sentence in English to convey, but I don't think a successful meditation practice requires learning any foreign languages at all, nor adopting the cultural practices of a different people.
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