"When the student is ready, the teacher will appear." (Zen Buddhism, Proverb)
True, false, good, bad, useful, not so useful, etc.? Discuss.
My thoughts:
Feels a little predestinationish, doesn't it?
But Buddhism in general, and Zen even more so, is kind of tricky when it comes to the usual distinguishing feature of a religion, theism, and the saying might just as easily be treated as epistemological rather than metaphysical.
At the individual level, even pre-Internet, it's always seemed to me that if I became interested in something, it was easy to find people who were also interested in that thing, knew more about it than me, and were happy to share what they knew. And that has included interest in particular schools of religion, philosophy, etc.
So perhaps the Zen proverb is metaphysical and is pointing out an observable, if not particularly explicable, feature of reality.
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