Sacred Energy

A young monk who complains of restlessness is told simply to return once more to the sweeping of the courtyard

A classic Zen teaching story answers a monk's complaint about restlessness not with advice about restlessness but with an instruction to simply go back to sweeping.

In a well-known style of Zen teaching story, a young monk who complains of restlessness or spiritual dryness is told by his teacher, without further explanation, to return to sweeping the courtyard. The response is not evasive; it reflects a consistent Zen position that ordinary daily labor, known as samu, is itself a legitimate form of practice rather than a chore to be finished so that "real" practice can resume elsewhere. By refusing to treat the monk's restlessness as a special problem requiring a special solution, the teacher implicitly denies that some other, more exciting activity would actually fix it — the discomfort is something to be worked through inside ordinary tasks, not escaped by finding a different one. This kind of story circulates widely in Zen teaching precisely because it resists easy paraphrase: its point is made by the plainness of the instruction itself, not by any hidden symbolic meaning waiting to be decoded.