The Buddha's parable of the raft

The Buddha communicated important parts of his philosophy in parables. These parables were brief stories that illustrated to his audience some point or message. The parable of the raft is one of my favourites, and I’ve talked about others, such as the parable of the dirty cloth, in other posts, too.

The Buddha uses the parable of the raft to reply to a very natural objection to his philosophy. So, before we can understand what the parable says, we first have to recap the highlights of the Buddha’s philosophy.

While we can understand Buddhist philosophy as relying on many major ideas, the parable of the raft is especially concerned with the Four Noble Truths in particular. These truths capture the Buddha’s belief that suffering is a pervasive feature of our existence, but that suffering can be ended by ending what causes it and what it depends on. Specifically, we can end suffering by ending cravings and attachments.

For the Buddha, we suffer because we crave things to which we are attached. If we ended these attachments, we’d end the cravings, and thus end the suffering.

This is a pretty radical claim because it flies in the face of what most of us naturally think. We think that we can end our suffering by getting the things that we want. If we’re suffering from a disease, we’d be happy if we attained health. If we’re suffering because we are poor, we’d be happy if we attained wealth. And so on.

The Buddha thinks that, because suffering is so pervasive, these strategies would never be successful. Maybe we’d get anxious about losing the things that we got: how can I keep my health and my wealth? Maybe we’d find that we’d discover new things to be unhappy about: I got my health and wealth, but maybe now I want to look better or have some experience!

So, the Buddha recommends that we tackle the root causes: the attachments that cause the cravings that make us so unhappy.

It is in this context that the Buddha presents the parable of the raft.

That’s because the Buddha thinks that we could be, in principle, attached to anything. This is a question that I often get from my undergraduate students when I teach the Buddha’s philosophy: couldn’t anything be an attachment that causes cravings and suffering?

And the Buddha says ‘yes’.

In fact, we could even become attached to Buddhism itself!

Here is what the Buddha says:

‘This river is so deep and wide. Now, I could collect wood, grass, and leaves and bind them into a raft to get across. Once I have the raft, I could use it to go from this side to the other side.’ That person then collects wood, grass, and leaves and binds them into a raft. They then cross over from this side to the other shore.

Once that person has crossed to that shore, they again think, ‘This raft has been quite helpful to me; because of it, I was saved from that peril. I went from that fearful place and reached this untroubled place. I won’t discard this raft now. I’ll take it with me and make use of it.’ How is it, monks? Once they’ve reached that place, will they be able to use this raft when they take it with them, or will it be impossible?”

Let’s put it like this. Imagine that you used a very helpful raft to get from one shore to another. You built the raft yourself after a lot of hard work, and when you got to the other shore, you beheld the raft and treasured it. Now, would you continue to carry the raft around with you, or not?

The Buddha’s audience replies that you’d be foolish to continue to carry the raft around once you got to the other shore:

The monks replied, “No, Bhagavān. That person has reaped the reward that they wanted. What further use would the raft have if they took it with them?”

The point of the raft was to get you to a destination. Once you get there, you have to be ready to discard it, or you won’t be able to go very far. The raft will drag you down, even though it once got you from one shore to the other.

In this parable, the Buddha’s own teachings are the raft.

Ending your attachments to things made you free from many cravings. You no longer suffer from wanting money, health, good looks, vacations, and so on.

But there will still be things that you struggle to let go of. You might become attached to family or to the Buddha’s own teachings. It’s easy to imagine this sort of thing: you learn to stop craving money or health. How? By leaning on your family. Or maybe by leaning on the Buddha’s teachings. You’ve made progress, but you’ve still got some attachments left.

Living well, the Buddha thinks, requires living free from all attachments, even the ones that were once productive or constructive for you.

In Western philosophy, we sometimes talk about climbing a ladder to get to the top of a building, and then kicking away the ladder when you reach the top. That’s another way of describing the same thing that the Buddha’s getting at. Even though the raft was helpful initially, we have to discard it if we want to go all the way.

Notice that the Buddha is paying careful attention to how helpful something is in the journey that makes up our lives. He sometimes calls this the Noble Quest: the quest of ending suffering by ending cravings and attachments. The Buddha wants us to ask whether something serves us, but he also wants us to be prepared for the fact that something could serve us early in our quest but then become destructive later on.

That’s the point of the parable of the raft. There are things that we will come to lean on and rely on as we make progress in ending our suffering, and the Buddha doesn’t object to that. But we have to be ready to discard the raft, so to speak, when, upon reaching the other shore, that becomes necessary.

Douglas R. Campbell is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Philosophy at Alma College. He is the author of An Introduction to the Ethics of Social Media. He is also the host of The Ancient Philosophy Podcast.

I appreciate all donations and shows of support. I will never put any material behind a paywall, but if you’d like to make a small donation, you can pay for a subscription to my Substack, or you can make a one-time donation by clicking this link.