Tualatin River, September 22, 1999

On Friday I sold my canoe. The last time we had it in the water was the summer of, maybe, 2005. Since then it’s been in the backyard, covered with a decaying plastic tarp. It needed some minor repairs to make it usable and a lot of work to bring it back to its original luster.

Each spring I’d think, This year I’m going to fix it up and take it out on the water, but it never happened. I had neither the room nor the inclination. It was a beautiful boat, and I enjoyed the looks I’d get while driving down the road with it lashed to the top of my car. And I really enjoyed it when people would ask where I got it and I was able to say I built it myself.

It took me a year and a half to build (not straight through, there were weeks when I didn’t touch it). I finished it in the early fall of 1999. I took the picture on September 22, the first time it touched water. Up until that moment, I had my doubts it would float.

I built it for two reasons. I had another canoe, also one that I’d built, but it was much heavier. It took two people to get it on and off the car. A solitary person, I liked, at the time, going out alone. This was before I’d met Robin, whose company I’m glad to have anytime. During that lifetime, when I built my canoe, I often desired solitude.

My other reason for building it was much more complex. A couple of years prior, I found myself spiritually adrift. The faith I was raised with had slowly eroded until, finally, there was nothing of it left for me. I was desperate for spiritual direction. At about the same time, a 10-year stint as an author of how-to books had come to a close. I nurtured the idea of writing a book about some aspect of my spiritual dilemma, but I couldn’t figure out where to go with it.

Back then, I carried around the concept of “spiritual journey.” I was on a journey of discovery, finding myself and all that. It’s the journey that matters, not the destination was the mantra of the day. Looking back, it seems so, well, silly. It’s been years since I’ve considered the journey metaphor viable. The destination is important.

Back then, though, I had this idea that a canoe – not the boat itself, but the building of it – could be a vehicle for a book, a spiritual book of my journey.

It never happened. Perhaps it wasn’t the journey after all that mattered. But I do feel that having sold my boat, I have arrived at a new beginning. I didn’t realize it until yesterday, the day after I watched it leaving on the top of someone else’s car.

Olallie Lake, Summer 2002

Although I never wrote the book (read the essay), I did use it often in its early life. I took it out alone many times, usually to the many lakes on Sauvie Island. My daughter Kathryn and I would take it on our once-annual camping trips together. It was she who took the picture of my boat and me on the shore of Olallie Lake. And Robin and I had some very pleasant paddles together.

Not all canoes are alike. Some are made for whitewater, others for flat water (small lakes and slow-moving streams). Mine was a flat-water canoe. Whitewater canoeing is exhilarating, sure, but I prefer the placid nature of still water. Besides, I’m not much of a risk taker – at least with my physical being.

Except for the arrangements of the two seats, my canoe was the same end to end. If there were two people in the boat, we’d paddle it one direction. When by myself, I’d paddle it in the other direction (placing my weight closer to the center). Either end could be the front, depending on the circumstances. I loved the symmetry of it all.

And this is why I had no trouble letting the boat go. Not only had it had served it’s purpose (solitude when I needed it), I had reached the end of one journey to find myself at the beginning of another.

In Buddhism there is the metaphor of the raft. The Buddha compares his teachings, the Dhamma, to a raft used to take one to the far shore (of liberation). Once there, he says, one doesn’t carry the raft on one’s back. Rather, one leaves it behind as it is of no more use.

On Friday, I am traveling with several others to Abhayagiri Monastery for the annual Upasika Renewal weekend. An upasika/upasaka (feminine/masculine versions) is a Buddhist lay person who joins with monastics in Dhamma practice. This will be my first visit to Abhyagiri as an upasaka or otherwise. I’ve been practicing Buddhism for more than a dozen years, but now it seems I’m bringing it to another level.

It’s fitting to have put aside the canoe – once a symbol of my spirituality – at this time in my life. It’s not that it went without a sense of loss. Robin and Kathryn both have pleasant memories of paddling with me (and I with them, to be sure). Today, as I was writing this, Kathryn burst into my room. “You sold the canoe!?” She had been away for the past couple of days and, because I hadn’t told her of my plans, it came as a surprise. She sniffed and took her complaint to Robin, who agreed that it was a bit of a shock. “I didn’t even get to say good-bye,” Robin had said when she came home Friday after the fact.

I regret having caused them to suffer the loss, but it was time for me to put it down. I have no regrets about that.

Along with advice, they shared with us some of the difficulties they’ve had along the way. That’s when Alistair said, “Are you prepared to fail?” An alarming and provocative question, but appropriate too.

A tenet of Buddhism is seeing truth for what it is with dispassion and wisdom. Culture teaches that “Failure is not an option.” We insist on success and measure our own self-worth and the worth of others by it. True enough. Failure is not an option.

Success is not an option either. Success and failure are outcomes. If one does things skillfully (and good intentions are implied here), success is much more likely than if one does things unskillfully. Yet many factors are not under our control. Failure, although not always inevitable, is always possible. From a contemporary standpoint, this is not just heresy, but it’s the kind of thinking that ensures failure. So we are told.

Buddhism, however, runs counter to popular conceptions – regardless of age or era. I don’t mean to imply that Buddhism is passive and that nothing is to be done about anything. If that were the case, no one would accomplish anything. Buddhism is a spiritual way of life, and the ultimate accomplishment is the release from suffering. To be free from suffering requires not being attached to outcomes, because it’s the attachment itself that causes the the suffering in the first place – along the the delusion that attachment to a goal ensures success.

Another central idea of Buddhism is that of striving. To achieve anything, one must strive, that is, one must devote time, energy, and effort into the endeavor. Even striving, though, doesn’t ensure success. Just look at the current political contest. Only one of these very driven candidates will succeed in reaching the goal of presidency. I wonder if any of them has asked the question, “Am I prepared to fail?” Not likely – not openly anyway, because doing so would “send the wrong message to voters.” We can’t have that, can we? The reality is, of course, for all but one of them failure to win this race is is the inescapable outcome.

Most of us householders are not involved in such high-stakes activities. But every day there there is much to do. Our activities include what is necessary for fulfilling personal and family wants and needs and the wants and needs within the greater community. Basic to human nature is the need for accomplishment. But how much of that drive for accomplishment is tied up with the ego and self-identity?

I think Alistair’s point was aimed precisely there. Accomplishment as a means of satisfying the ego and propping up the self leads to dissatisfaction – even if success is the result. Being detached from the outcome, while at the same time taking the necessary steps for achievement ensures success, because success isn’t the goal. Freedom from suffering is.

The Five Precepts have but one purpose: creating safety for the one who practices them and, by extension, everyone who is in any way associated with the practitioner. Of course, by further extension, this includes all living beings.

Disclaimer: I’ve broken them all. But through retrospection on my past, and in my associations with those who do practice the precepts as well as with those who don’t, I’ve come to appreciate their immense and immeasurable value.

The Five Precepts, according to Venerable Walpola Rahula, Buddhist monk and author of What the Buddha Taught, are “the minimal moral obligations of a lay Buddhist.”

The Five Precepts are:

1) To refrain from destroying living creatures
2) To refrain from taking that which is not given
3) To refrain from sexual misconduct
4) To refrain from incorrect speech
5) To refrain from intoxicating drinks and drugs which lead to carelessness

By following the precepts, one offers, in the words of the Buddha, the Five Faultless Gifts:

“There are these five gifts, five great gifts, original, long-standing, traditional, ancient, unadulterated, unadulterated from the beginning, that are not open to suspicion, will never be open to suspicion, and are unfaulted by knowledgeable contemplatives & priests, Which five? ….” (AN 8.39)

To answer the question of which five, the Buddha teaches that in practicing each of the five precepts the practitioner “gives freedom from danger, freedom from animosity, freedom from oppression to limitless numbers of beings.” Further, the Buddha says that in giving such freedom the practitioner “gains a share in limitless freedom from danger, freedom from animosity, and freedom from oppression.”

I’ve heard the precepts expressed in ways that open them to interpretation. But when anyone opens a precept to interpretation (to make it more palatable? to justify breaking it?) it becomes adulterated, watered down, and worthless as a means of protection and safety.

In the United States, we see freedom as being able to do what we want and when we want, so long as we follow the rules. Rules, though, are always subject to change, not to mention open to interpretation.

Buddhism sees rules and freedom in a much different light. A rule is like an umbrella in a rainstorm or sandals on a gravel path: It offers protection. For the Buddhist, the protection is not from the elements and terrain, but from blame and suspicion. This is real freedom, that is, freedom from the suffering brought about through mental anguish on the inside and through accusation or on the outside.

Someone who is free of blame and above suspicion is able to offer to others, not just an umbrella and a pair of sandals, but an expansive tent and a lush carpet. Such freedom is safety in its most refined form.

For more on the Five Precepts, go here. Follow this link or an excellent essay on The Healing Power of the Precepts by Thanissaro Bhikkhu.