Samu: Physical Effort

“Drawing water and carrying firewood are spiritual powers and sublime functions.” — Layman Pang

When I used to imagine those old Zen monasteries of China and Japan, I thought of them as these impossibly tranquil retreats tucked away in the mountains.

I pictured incense smoke drifting through silent halls while monks worked outside in beautiful gardens.

But in reality, these places were far less romantic.

Most monasteries functioned less like spiritual retreats and more like survival communities.

The days were long and the labor was hard and constant.

Winters were especially harsh… wood had to be chopped and the fires needed to stay lit. Water was carried in buckets, and nearly everything the monastery needed had to be built, repaired, or hauled by hand.

A monk’s day often began at four in the morning. Zazen was practiced before sunrise, followed by hours of samu — communal work practice.

It was seriously hard work.

It’s hard to imagine somebody living like this for thirty or forty years and not developing extraordinary physical strength.

They weren’t “fit” in the modern sense. Nobody was trying to get shredded in a monastery courtyard. There were no bench presses or squat racks.

But these guys were undeniably strong. Capable. Durable.

The strength and endurance that emerged from monastic life didn’t come from training — not as we understand it today at least. It arose as a side effect of continual engagement with the physical demands of sustaining life.

The work shaped the body because the work was real.

This stands in pretty sharp contrast to life in the modern world.

Most of us no longer need strong, capable bodies for the ordinary business of living.

We drive where we need to go. We hire contractors to repair our homes. We buy furniture assembled by machines in faraway factories. Water and heat arrive through pipes buried beneath our feet.

Most of the physical burdens human beings carried for thousands of years have been engineered out of ordinary life.

But we still have bodies that expect effort — and when nothing is asked of them, something in us begins to go dull.

A Day Without Work

“A day without work is a day without food.” — Master Baizhang Huaihai

Baizhang Huaihai was a renowned Zen master from the Tang dynasty. He understood something we’ve long forgotten in the modern world — that there is no clean separation between the body and the way one lives.

Baizhang was the abbot of a growing monastic community on a remote mountain in southern China. His position gave him an opportunity to put that understanding into practice.

Chan tradition (Chinese Zen) credits Baizhang with helping establish a distinct structure for monastic life in which communal labor became part of the daily rhythm. Working the fields, chopping wood, hauling water, cooking meals, and maintaining the grounds were no longer treated as mere interruptions to spiritual practice.

They became part of the practice itself.

The monastic model associated with Baizhang was carried into later Chan communities and codes, where work became a defining feature of Zen life.

Whether Baizhang created this system himself or simply became its great exemplar is irrelevant.

Baizhang was known to be fiercely dedicated to manual work. He continued working hard well into his old age.

At one point, his students became concerned for the old man’s health and tried hiding his tools to force him to rest.

It didn’t work… being the stubborn Zen master he was, Baizhang simply refused to eat out of protest. Only when his tools were returned did he resume accepting meals.

Baizhang didn’t exert himself for the sake of being productive, and it wasn’t some kind of macho glorification of suffering either. He simply recognized that there was no distinction between sustaining life and practicing the Way.

Work isn’t done in addition to spiritual life — work is spiritual life.

We find the same understanding throughout other Buddhist traditions — spiritual practice is not merely something that happens in the mind; the body is often asked to participate fully also.

In Tibetan Buddhism, for example, practitioners may undertake ngöndro — a set of foundational practices that can include 100,000 full-body prostrations. It’s an intensely physical form of devotion used to cultivate humility, discipline, and purification.

An even more extreme example is the kaihōgyō I wrote about last week. Tendai monks on Mount Hiei spend seven years completing a thousand days of jogging, covering roughly 40,000 kilometers in total — approximately the circumference of the Earth.

The point of these practices was never physical achievement for its own sake. They reflect the same underlying idea found in samu… the body is not separate from practice.

No One Else Can Do Your Practice

“The mind which finds the Way actualizes itself through working with rolled-up sleeves.” — Master Dogen.

Dogen (the founder of the Soto Zen lineage) wrote a book called Tenzo Kyokun (translated as Instructions for the Cook).

On the surface, it was just a manual for monastery cooks — it’s a pretty boring read, actually — but if you look closer, there’s a much more profound lesson throughout.

This book was really a manifesto on attention and effort.

How you wash rice matters. How you carry vegetables matters. How you stir soup matters. All of it matters.

The point isn’t the task itself, but the quality of attention, and ultimately, the effort you put into it.

In one story, Dōgen encounters an elderly monk drying mushrooms beneath the brutal midday sun. Dōgen asks why he doesn’t just have a younger monk do the work for him?

The monk replied — “others are not me.”

This is sort of the crux of what I’m talking about here.

Someone else could certainly dry the mushrooms for him, but they couldn’t do his practice for him. The task can be outsourced, but the effort cannot.

The point wasn’t merely to get the mushrooms dried. The work itself was his practice, and nobody else could participate in it for him.

The Middle Way

It’s a bit pretentious of me to say we should just live more like the monks did — do real work, stay physically engaged with life, and get ripped naturally as a side effect.

Unless you’re a farmer, landscaper, carpenter, or bricklayer, modern life simply doesn’t demand that kind of effort from you anymore.

Most people are not spending their mornings hauling rocks uphill or splitting firewood before sunrise. They’re answering emails and sitting in office chairs.

So yes — at some point, most of us probably do need to intentionally seek out physical challenge.

And I don’t think there’s anything inherently un-Zen about cultivating physical strength.

Being physically capable is objectively useful. It’s good to be able to carry heavy things. It’s good to maintain balance and mobility as you age. It’s good to have strong legs, healthy joints, decent cardiovascular health, and enough muscle mass to remain independent later into life.

The problem isn’t fitness itself — it’s our relationship to the way we pursue it.

Modern fitness culture turns the body into another optimization project — something to endlessly tweak, measure, photograph, compare, and improve. The goalpost keeps moving because the pursuit itself becomes tied up with identity and ego.

The Zen monks largely avoided this trap because their physical capability emerged indirectly through participation in daily life rather than obsession with outcomes.

This is where we have to find some sort of middle ground.

Maybe you lift weights or carry a kettlebell around your garage for a while.

Maybe you go hiking on the weekends, spend time in the garden, build things with your hands, walk instead of drive, or take on other challenging physical projects just for the sake of it.

It doesn’t really matter what form it takes. What matters is maintaining a relationship with effort.

Our bodies are adaptive meat machines. Muscles only strengthen under resistance, endurance only grows through exertion, and balance requires struggle.

Friction is how we become capable.

I’m not trying to argue that suffering is inherently noble (see last week’s post on the Kaihōgyō for more on this) or that we should deliberately make life harder than it needs to be.

I’m saying there’s probably something worth preserving in a life that still asks something of the body.

The monks didn’t work in order to become strong. They worked because the work was there, and strength emerged along the way.

Maybe that’s the balance worth exploring — not worshipping hardship, not clinging too tightly to comfort, and not treating the body as something separate from the life we’re actually living.

The work shapes the body. The practice lies in how we meet it.

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