The Raft

The Buddha compared the practice to a raft that you take across a river to safety on the other side. The raft is something you have to put together yourself; you can’t wait for the nibbāna yacht to come from the other side to pick you up and take you over. You make a raft from the things you have right here: all the different fabrications in the body and mind.

You’ve got the breath. That’s a part of the body, part of “form.” Then there are feelings: the feelings of pleasure you try to create by the way that you look at the breath. There are perceptions—saññā—the images you have in the mind about how the breath comes into the body, where it comes in, where it goes out, where you would like it to come in, go out, where you would like it to go in the body. Then there are fabrications: directed thoughts and evaluations, the way you talk to yourself about the breath. You can ask yourself “Is the breath comfortable right now?” You watch it for a while and then you try changing it to see which type of breathing is more comfortable: the old way or the new. You have to have something to compare in order to have this conversation. So you compare different ways of breathing: deep, shallow, heavy, light, fast, slow. See what feels best right now. When you’ve found something good, you hold on to it. And then there’s consciousness, which knows all these things.

So you’re taking these five aggregates and are turning them into your raft to cross the river, making it from things that are on this side of the river and using it to cross over the flood to the other side.

One of the big floods in the river, the Buddha said, is the flood of views. But part of the raft is composed of right views. So you have to be very selective: when to let go, when to hold on. As you’re crossing the river, things will come passing along with the currents and you’ll have to learn how not to hold on to those things because they could pull you away down to the whirlpools and waterfalls. You want to stay safe with your raft. So the Buddha’s lessons in letting go, in developing dispassion, are all selective.

As Ajaan Lee said, when we’re practicing concentration, we’re actually going against the three characteristics. We think about the three characteristics or the three perceptions to give rise to a sense of dispassion. While you’re in concentration, you use them, you apply them, to your distractions. Anything that would pull you away right now, you try to see how it’s inconstant, how it’s stressful, and how it’s really not worth taking on as ‘you’ or ‘yours.’ But as for the concentration, you’re trying to make that constant and easeful and under your control. So you don’t apply the three perceptions there quite yet.

In other words, you’re working on developing. Ajaan Fuang once mentioned this point to me when I first went to Thailand. Back in those days, I didn’t think there were any controversies in Buddhism. Yet he noted that there are some people who say that the practice is simply one of letting go, letting go, but that’s not the case. There’s a lot that you have to develop, too.

Look in the Buddha’s own instructions: He talks of the customs of noble ones, and one of them is to delight in letting go and delight in developing. We let go of unskillful qualities and develop skillful ones. We let go selectively. Then we get to the other side. That’s when we get off the raft and get onto the shore.

Here again, there are people who say that the whole purpose of the path is to arrive at right view, but that’s like saying the whole purpose of the raft is to get on the raft, which is not the case. Even right view is something you have to let go: It will be there when you need it, but it doesn’t form the essence of the awakened mind.

Think about the Buddha after gaining awakening. He still used all the factors of the path but, as he said, there was nothing that he was attached to. He picked up the raft when he needed it, and he put it down. But we’re not there yet. We’re still in the process of crossing over. So you hold on tight. As you’re here in concentration, hold on to the object of your concentration. Hold on to the breath, follow it all the way in, all the way out. If you have a center in the body where you feel comfortable, maintain your center there. Hold on firmly to that. Don’t let anything pull you away.

This way, you’re learning some manners in how you let go. People without manners just let go of everything—good, bad, indifferent. Throw things away. As a result, they make a mess. They don’t get the benefits that come from good things and they don’t have any path. The Buddha taught that the path is something that’s fabricated, something you have to put together. It leads to something unfabricated, something unconditioned. But you’ve got to get the fabrications right for them to take you there. So hold on to your breath for the time being, because it is your path.

Luang Pu Waen used to say, “Make Buddho the path of your mind.” This is what he meant. Our mind ordinarily follows paths to all kinds of things. Sometimes it follows the path to heaven; sometimes the path to human rebirth; sometimes the path to hell; sometimes the path to an animal rebirth. It goes around and around. But we can make up our minds to turn it into a path that goes one place—a safe place, a good place. Which means that we take these different aggregates that we use usually to make ourselves suffer and put them to a new and better purpose.

That’s what the Buddha meant when he said that you take the twigs and the branches and the leaves on this side of the river and you make them into a raft. You take what you’ve got. In that way, what you’ve got, if you put it together right, will take you to something much better. It’ll take you where you want to go.