Some monks spend much of their day cleaning.
While some people genuinely love to clean, many of us find it a necessary chore we don't particularly enjoy. We want the end result, but the process leaves much to be desired. If we could afford to hire someone to do all of our cleaning for us, we would.
A Zen monk might make us rethink that mindset. Soko, a Zen priest and spiritual director, says that not only is cleaning an effective spiritual practice, but it's actually 1000x more effective than sitting and meditating. Pretty strong words from someone who has dedicated a big portion of their daily life to meditation, no?
Soko explains that life in the temple is very simple: They eat, they clean, and they meditate. That's basically it, but it's purposeful.
"The idea is that when we're doing whatever we're doing, we are fully engaged," he says. "We are bringing everything we have, all of our concentration and attention to that thing. We're not in the past worrying about something that we regret or thinking about what we need to do in the future." In fact, they don't even know what the next day's tasks will be for that reason.
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Soko shares that Hakuin Zenji, a Japanese Zen master, said that moving meditation is a thousand times more powerful than sitting meditation. He also says they always start cleaning the inside of the building first before moving outdoors to tidy up the outside.
"You could say that this maybe correlates a little bit to the work we need to do spiritually, too," says Soko. "You know, before we can kind of clean up the mess of our lives outwardly, we've kind of got to look within first and do the inner work."
What does that inner work entail? "Work is getting to know yourself and know the parts that you really maybe are uncomfortable with that you don't want to look at and the parts you are quite happy with, knowing the full range. And a way to do that is through meditation or deep spiritual contemplation."
Sitting meditation has its benefits, but moving meditation is particularly powerful.Photo credit: Canva
He explains that the cleaning the monks do in the temple helps cleanse the inner self.
"Doing these kind of simple tasks in the monastery, like exhausting yourself through a rigorous schedule cleaning, and doing it in difficult ways that makes your body ache and tired, is kind of like a cleansing of this gook that's been calcified around your inner being through the years of your life. And so slowly, step by step, you know, sweeping away or washing off this unnecessary or not necessarily unnecessary, but you know, this accumulated gook so that you can get to and see clearly who you are and what's going on inside."
Well, that kind of changes what it means to clean, doesn't it?
Shoukei Matsumoto is another monk who wrote a whole book on this concept called A Monk's Guide to a Clean House and Mind. He shared that, in Japanese schools, it is normal for students to clean their own classrooms, and even corporate leaders incorporate cleaning into regular business practice. Monks, he said, spend more time cleaning than meditating.
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"When talking about the inner peace or mindfulness, people usually think of meditation, but I don't think that it is only about meditation. Every aspect of our daily life can become Zen and among these there is soji. Soji means cleaning in Japanese but as a Buddhist monk, soji for me is not just about the physical act of cleaning. It's meditation in motion, just like other actions such as cooking or driving, you might end up moving on autopilot and increase your concentration level. Soji can become a tool to cleanse your mind from anxieties and become an opportunity for reflection. It's easier to approach compared to traditional meditation and something you are already doing in your daily life."
A woman who goes by The Minimal Mom on YouTube tried out A Monk's Guide to a Clean House and Mind and shared her experience in a video. But what's great about her take on it is that she also incorporated some of the most recent research, combining the spiritual with the scientific:
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Perhaps if those of us who don't love cleaning can see it as more of a spiritual practice than a physical one, it won't seem like just another chore to do.