The Raft and the Shore

In this Wednesday Night Dharma Talk, Sensei Fushin takes us through the currents of the Buddha’s raft metaphor — where practice becomes binding together grass, twigs, and branches to cross from a shore that is dangerous and fearful to one that is safe. Drawing on Dogen’s Uji (Being-Time), Fushin challenges the notion of completion, suggesting there is actually no shore to rest on: “There’s no shore to reach, and there’s no clean sequence of this crossing and this river and this arrival.” Blending the relative and absolute, Fushin turns us away from the notion of a distant destination: “The raft and the shore aren’t two different places. They never were.” Through stories of a dying chemistry professor’s unguarded joy, a crisis counselor named Janice whose presence asked nothing, a climbing partner’s quiet word at a frozen moment, and his grandmother’s overcooked roast served as pure love, Fushin traces how we become rafts for each other without knowing it. “Sometimes we build the raft, sometimes we’re carried by it, and sometimes we’re someone else’s raft without even knowing it.”