Just Sleep

Among many incisive observations in Adam Savage's maker manifesto Every Tool is a Hammer, I found this boldest:

"There is no skill in the world at which you get better the less sleep you have."

Reading it, I declared aloud, "AMEN."

The belief that sleep deprivation is useful to enlightenment practice figures highly on the list of counter-productive teachings inflicted on Zen by the organised sangha. Our monasteries – largely indistinguishable from boot camps – glory in it: rousting monks afoot at freezing 0-dark-30, and then chastising those who fall asleep on the cushion. (Dōgen actually attained enlightenment to the sound of his neighour being beaten for this.)

It's worth mentioning that such machismo isn't limited to Buddhist houses, either. Most monastic establishments, of any kind, think stumbling about in a numb stupor is God's plan for humanity.

But it's not.

The fact is, any state that compromises your brain's ability to focus – being drunk or high, cold, hot, hungry, under stress, in pain – reduces the quality of zazen. And sleep is possibly the most important of all. I've found the more seriously I take it – valuing sleep as highly as sitting – the better I practice.

This lesson landed with an audible thud in the early days of my 100 Days on the Mountain. I hadn't planned for an adequate bed, and the lack of rest complicated my practice for every one of those 100 days.

In the end, it's your right and responsibility to decide whether to sleep or sit in any given moment. I eventually learned to do both simultaneously, out there on ango, a technique I still fall back on sometimes here in the Red Dust World.

In any case, it's always well to keep self-hatred – such as "I wouldn't be sleepy if I were a better monk" – in view. It's so easy to confuse that with practice.

(Photo of a sleeping monk ...seal, courtesy of Jared Wong and Wikimedia Commons.)