Sewing as a Spiritual Practice
Burke Butler on the Zen practice of making a Rakusu
Welcome back to our two-month series of guest posts on contemporary spiritual practices. Today’s writer is a human I have admired since I met her over a decade ago, when my dear friend Dave brought her over for dinner and to meet my brand-new baby. Dave and Burke hadn’t been dating long, but I knew after that one meal that he’d found his person, so I included a picture of Burke holding Shiv in one of our baby books, confidently using the title “Aunt Burke.” These many years later, I live a fifteen minute drive from Dave, Burke, and their two beautiful kids, whom I like to spoil with the occasional cookie-decorating session. As for Burke? I’m proud to call her a friend, not just my friend’s spouse. She is thoughtful, deliberate, deeply kind, as well a tremendous thinker & writer. I hope you find as much meaning in her words as I did. xoxo, Nishta
I first became interested in Zen when I was a law student. On occasion, a cold, snowy evening in the New England town I lived would find me opening up the door to the bookstore and lingering before the “self help & spirituality section.” On one of those nights, I picked up a copy of Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind, and I have owned it ever since.
I eventually found myself in Houston, a place I did not expect to come, and I stayed there for a long time; I am there still. In my early years in Houston, I read about Buddhism often and listened to lectures by Zen teachers. I gravitated toward the teachings of Roshi Joan Halifax, a Zen teacher from New Mexico who was also an activist and had worked in end-of-life care. At that time, I was representing people on Texas’s death row, and walking into a maximum-security prison made obvious to me that we are all living in a world on fire. We are all caring for people who are dying. We are all born into bodies that are dying. How to be upright in the world as it is - to hold a soft front and strong back, as Roshi Joan Halifax would say - felt like the central question of my life. For me, Zen was a way to try to understand how to exercise compassion for all in a world composed of pain.
Buddhism was also, for me, a way to try to understand change. When my son was a year and a half, I gave him a spinach muffin. He asked me to cut it in half, so I did. Once the muffin was cut in half, he burst out sobbing. He kept trying to squeeze the muffin back together with his hands. He wanted his whole spinach muffin back! I said, “Oh, sweetie, it is in the nature of muffins to fall apart.” He started wailing. I didn’t feel so different from him! My entire world is muffins! How do we live and love in the midst of constant transformation?
People who practice Zen may, at a certain juncture in their practice, decide that they would like to take the Zen precepts. The precepts are a series of ethical commitments, a vow to live a compassionate life. They are also a set of questions: questions about what it means to be human and how we can serve. And the precepts are also, as Tenshin Reb Anderson has said, a map of reality: a description of how things really are. People who take the vows promise to take refuge in Dharma, Sangha, and Buddha. They promise to do no evil, to do good, and to save all beings. To take the precepts, they must receive permission from their Zen teacher and sew a “Rakusu,” or Buddha’s robe, by hand. It is navy blue and looks like a large bib; Zen practitioners wear it when practicing meditation. It is sewn together from strips of cloth. When finished, the Rakusu resembles a field of cultivated rice.
One evening after the birth of my first child, I knew that I believed that the precepts were true, and that I wanted to take the vow. This wasn’t a knowing I expected to arise in my life. It was faith. It was like feeling the ground.
And so I asked the Abbot of the Houston Zen Center if I could take the precepts. By the time I worked up the courage to ask her, I was nine months pregnant with my second child and it was the middle of summer. I was so afraid to ask her that driving to the Zen Center felt like trying to walk through a cornfield under a blazing sun, with giant stalks of corn thwacking me with every step. But I asked, and she granted me permission to begin sewing, and when I drove home from the Zen Center I went into labor. I gave birth to my daughter a few hours later.
So this is how I began to sew. I would come to the Zen Center once a week, with a small group of others, sitting around tables. Our teacher would give us panels to sew one by one. I chose a purple thread because it reminded me of my daughter. I went to the Zen Center one night a week, most weeks, for over a year. I sewed, one stitch at a time.
From a conventional perspective, where one sees things as good or bad (this would not be a very Zen way to see things!): it would be fair to say that I am not particularly good at sewing. One stitch would be long, like a snaky scribble, the next very small, like the tip of a pencil led on paper. I had no idea how the cloth panels would fit together in the end. In some moments my mind would feel calm and clear and five of my stitches in a row would appear in a lovely straight line. And I would say, Oh, I am so good at this sewing project! And then my mind would become distracted, and the next time I looked down the stitches would look like fat globs of raindrops snaking down a car window. I never achieved mastery. I never knew what I was doing. All I could offer was my effort and my life.
I finished the Rakusu, and took a jukai ceremony to accept the precepts and receive lay ordination. When I see those purple stitches together now, I think of how life, aside from all of our grand schemes of what it should be or who we are, is a collection of footsteps. So often, we live in relationship to our idea of what is going on or who we are. Zen is letting those ideas fall away, if only for a brief moment. What is left, beyond our ideas, is our life. And all there is to do is the next right action with the life we have been given.
When I look at the Rakusu, which is a dark blue, I also think of the ocean. The dharma name I was given when I completed the Rakusu and took the precepts is Ocean Samadhi, Dharma of Compassion. There is a Zen story about how human life is like a little rowboat on the ocean with a giant hole in the bottom of it. When I first heard this story many years ago, I thought the metaphor was that our bodies are like rowboats that will eventually sink into oblivion. The rowboat was our body and the ocean was death.
Nowadays, I think of that little rowboat story differently. When we take the precepts, we commit to taking refuge in Buddha, Dharma, and Sangha. In the chant about Dharma, we vow to “enter deeply the merciful ocean/of Buddha’s way.” Now I believe the ocean is not death, but life. We are all already in the ocean; we are all already wet; and we are all connected. The rowboat is an illusion we uphold because we cannot see who we truly are. The rowboat is our effort to hold ourselves apart from life, to be separate from all that is.
I have spent a great deal of my life feeling alone; myself in my little rowboat, so to speak, navigating a treacherous ocean. But I don’t feel alone anymore. And maybe that is the gift Zen has seeded in my life, most of all, a gift I didn’t know I was seeking on that wintry night when Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind first entered my hands: a quiet faith that we belong to each other.
Because if you had asked me back then what I was looking for, walking into that bookstore, I wouldn’t have told you “an end to aloneness.” I might have told you that I was seeking a calm mind. Or happiness. Or an antidote to despair. Or the end of anxiety. Or whatever it is we think we are looking for when we begin our spiritual journeys, when we reach out to the universe and, before we can stop the word from coming out of our mouths, before we even know who or what it is we are speaking to, find ourselves whispering, Help.
These days, I can’t say I am calm, or wise, or free of anxiety. I can’t say I understand Zen. In my middle age, I mostly feel befuddled. But when I look at my blue Rakusu, and at those purple stitches sewn one by one, I think of the ocean. I am reminded that we are all in the ocean together, and it is my faith that the ocean is merciful.
Burke Butler lives in Texas with her husband and two young children. A lawyer by training, she is now the Executive Director of the nonprofit Texas Defender Service, which works to end mass incarceration in Texas.