The following talk was given at the Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, California.

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So I'd like to talk a little bit about the simile of the raft.

We find this in Majum-Manakaya 22.

Some of you are familiar with this.

It's said very often it's not an uncommon simile of the raft.

I'm going to abbreviate it a little bit for the purpose of tonight's teaching,

and this abbreviated form shows up in the Semuta, but I can't

remember where exactly.

So this is the Buddha.

He's giving this teaching to his monastics, and he says,

imagine a person in the course of a journey arrives at a great expanse of water.

And the near shore is dubious and perilous, and the far shore is a sanctuary, free of peril.

But there is no ferry boat or bridge to take them across the water, so the person thinks.

What if I collected grass and twigs and branches and leaves and bound them together as a raft?

And then supported by the raft and paddling with my hands and feet, I should then be able to reach the far shore.

So this idea of you find yourself with this great expanse of water, we could say this is

like a flood, you know, something that's just big and going to take you away. This journey that the Buddha's point to, we could say

this is just one's life, just, you know, what we experience in just living this human life. And

then we encounter something that feels like it's in our way.

And it's only a problem, because we could just stay where we are, right?

We're on dry land, and then we just see in front of us this water.

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