A Buddhist friend of mine once joked about sewing a rakusu or an okesa as taking a big piece of cloth, cutting it up into little pieces, and then sewing it back together. This fit pretty well with how I was thinking of rakusu sewing as a spiritual metaphor. When we are first born, we are like a sheet of uncut fabric. At birth, it seems that our psyches' have a minimum of features and we are in some sense undifferentiated. When my daughter was born, I was struck by realizing that how I was with her would have a great impact on how she would shape, cut, and sew the fabric of her own life.

When I was sewing my first rakusu, I could see quite clearly how the stitching changed over the course of the project. It took me about a year to sew my first rakusu, and it occurred to me during that time that creating a rakusu could be viewed as a metaphor for our lives as a spiritual journey. At first, I felt befuddled – how was I ever going to make all these little pieces of cloth into something which looked even remotely like a rakusu? My first stitches were irregular and nervous looking, then as I became more comfortable with sewing, they became overly relaxed and slack looking. Eventually, they became more even and balanced. The rakusu is Buddha's robe, and it is how we manifest visibly or wear Buddha's teaching. The precepts are Buddha's robe too, and wearing the precepts is how we manifest them in the world.

One of the more visible aspects of this receiving the precepts process is the sewing and wearing a rakusu. For those of us, like myself, who suffered from "male sewing anxiety syndrome", sewing a rakusu can become an odyssey in itself.