The menu is not the meal.

A description of something is never the thing itself, however accurate or beautiful it may be. A menu lists dishes, prices and perhaps a poetic line about roasted figs, but you cannot taste, smell or be nourished by it. Alan Watts used the image to point at how easily people mistake words, concepts and symbols for the living reality they stand for.

The idea rests on Watts's lifelong interest in Zen and Taoism, which treat language as a finger pointing at the moon rather than the moon itself. It also echoes Alfred Korzybski's well-known line that the map is not the territory. Watts, who introduced much Eastern thought to Western readers, often argued that we live too much inside our descriptions, such as labels, ideas about happiness and theories of love, and not enough inside experience.

Suppose you have read a shelf of books about meditation but never actually sat still. You might close the books and spend ten quiet minutes simply breathing, untidy and distracted as you are. The reading isn't worthless, since a menu does help you choose. But at some point the point is to eat.