Sloth and Torpor
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The five hindrances are the obstacles that prevent us from settling into the clarity and stillness of our minds.
In this talk, Zuisei explores the second hindrance—sloth and torpor—relating it to the importance of vow to keep our intent to be and stay awake clear and uppermost in our lives.
This talk was given by Zuisei Goddard. See below for transcript.
Transcript
This transcript is based on Zuisei's talk notes and may differ slightly from the final talk.
Here we are, finishing a day of practice. A day like any other day, and a day onto itself, unique, never to be repeated. Each day is like this, each moment is like this, each breath is like this. Knowing this, is the beginning of wakefulness.
The opposite of this state, is the hindrance that I want to speak about today: sloth and torpor (think of it as one compound word, with hyphens: sloth-and-torpor). This is the second of the five hindrances that Buddhism identifies as obstacles to our practice—particularly, but not exclusively, the practice of seated meditation.
Together, sloth-and-torpor form that general feeling of malaise, of heaviness, of I-can’t-be-bothered-ness. Sloth is a physical sluggishness, laziness—a general lack of energy. Torpor is mental lethargy, dullness, boredom, apathy. Both are different from fatigue, from tiredness, which dissipate when you rest your body and mind, which have a physical cause. Sloth-and-torpor, on the other hand, have an emotional root. We find it hard to care about our practice and to muster up the energy to do it.
As I mentioned on Wednesday, sloth-and-torpor shuts us down. And because we’re shut down, we can’t always see what’s needed to wake up.
John Climacus, a 7th century Christian monk, called sloth-and-torpor—which in Christianity is called acedia—“a slackness of the mind…(and) a hostility to vows taken.” To me, this is the key: it’s a “hostility to vows taken." The veil that comes down over our minds, the fog we find ourselves enveloped by, is a kind of hostility toward our own vows. Remember this, because this is the key to working with this hindrance. It’s not just that we’re sleepy, or tired, or disinterested in a passive way. It’s that some part of us has chosen, consciously or unconsciously, to turn away from what’s most important.
In a moment of sluggishness, we don’t care about awakening. We don’t want to be challenged; we don’t want to have to try too hard. We just want to be left alone; we just want to veg out.
I think, though, that all the hindrances are like this: a subtle or overt turning away from our vows—not because we’re bad people, not because we’re bad practitioners, or because we really don’t care, but because we’re caught, and the thing that’s catching us is, in that moment, stronger than our wish to wake up.
That is why vow is so important. Vow can hold desire that spins us this way and that. It grabs us, it squeezes us, and it spits us out. But vow can hold us steady in the boiling water that is desire. I mentioned the simile that the Buddha used for these hindrances: a pot of water whose surface gets disturbed or blocked by various things. In desire, the water is boiling, and so we can’t see our own reflection in it. But vow can hold that roiling.
Vow can also hold our tiredness—with ourselves, with our minds, with our bodies that rebel and don’t always do what we want. I don’t know if you experience this, but I’m finding that as I get older, I’m needing to adjust the way I practice. My energy is very different now, more of a steady burn than a red hot fire. And that’s appropriate for this stage in life. But sometimes it’s hard to calibrate, because I still want to do so much. I want to learn so much and write so much and share so much and see so much. So I have to be patient and do it a bit more slowly, more steadily.
Vow can also hold our restlessness, our worry, our fear of what we know and what we don’t know. Do you know that originally, the word “worry” meant “to strangle”? Like when a dog grabs a prey by the throat and shakes it. I suppose that’s why we say a dog “worries a bone”; it gnaws on it for hours. Just like we gnaw on this or that train of thought, chewing on what little piece of gristle we can hold on to, because it gives us a sense of control. The problem is that the gnawing is actually happening in the opposite direction. We’re being gnawed by that bone; it’s the thought that has us by the throat.
And yet vow can hold that. Vow is the action of releasing our grip on that bone, slowly, slowly. And turning toward something that will actually nourish us.
And vow can hold our doubt. It is so vast, so spacious, that it barely gets disturbed by our questioning. Vow is what helps us to see that we’re not actually dealing with a pot of water, but with the whole ocean. Throw a pebble into the ocean and what happens? It barely makes a ripple. It’s only when our mind feels small and constricted. It’s only when the space in here feels cramped, that we struggle. Give whatever feeling you’re having, whatever thought you’re struggling with, a bit of space, and it becomes workable. You see how these hindrances all feed on each other?
I’m bored so I look for distraction in a fantasy, in a story that plays out like a movie in my mind. But this makes me feel kind of hollow, and I don’t like myself when I’m in this state, so maybe I project my displeasure onto someone else. Then I begin to doubt whether I even have the capacity to stay awake. I worry that I don’t, which feeds the doubt even more. And on and on we go, pacing back and forth in a prison of our own making. We’ve walked into the room, we’ve locked the door, taken the key, and thrown it out. The thing is, the door isn’t actually locked. The thing is, there is no door, there are no walls. And when we figure that out, in the instant that we figure that out, we're free.
But we have to be alert or, at the very least, we have to know the ways that sloth-and-torpor presents itself. Because it’s actually not just a lack of interest. It can also take the form of discouragement, or self-pity, or complacency. It’s the part of us that thinks, “I can’t do this,” or “How long is this going to take? Why can everyone do this except me?” or, “Meh! Piece of cake.”
And then there’s an especially tricky one: sloth-and-torpor masquerading as compassion “Oh, poor baby! You’re obviously exhausted. You should take a nap. You’re not really sitting anyway. Go lie down.” And maybe you are exhausted and you should lie down, But the thing is, when we know, we know, and we just do it. We don’t need to spend time trying to convince ourselves. Sloth-and-torpor is wily, it’s persuasive—that’s how you know it’s a hindrance. It’s that voice whispering in your ear, “You don’t need to work so hard…”
But notice what these subtle forms of this hindrance are—self-protection. All of these hindrances do this—protect the self. Protect it from what? From failure, from disappointment, from loss, from harm It seems easier to tell ourselves, “I can’t do this” than to try and fail somehow. But what does it mean to fail when the work we’re engaged in cannot be measured, cannot be quantified? How does the ocean fail at being an ocean, or a mountain, or the sky? What makes us so special that we can fail at being ourselves when other creatures can’t?
Another way to combat acedia—we remind ourselves we’re not so special that it has a special grip. We’re as special as everything else—and we have a capacity that the ocean doesn’t have, as far as we know—the willingness to be awake. That is our unique power, that’s what we use to meet these hindrances.
So, if we’re going to work with this hindrance, first we have to clear away the slime. We have to remove the crud that’s settled over the water in the pot, so we can see better (this is the simile for this hindrance—the water’s covered over with algae, with moss, with slime). So we need to clear it, and we need energy to do that. We have to be aware enough and inspired enough to not just get comfortable in the slime.
Do you know what I like about these hindrances? The challenge they present! They’re not subtle, really. It’s not like I have to be on guard for this mysterious, unknown thing. If I’ve been practicing long enough, I know that at some point, I won’t want to. It won’t feel like it’s working, or it just won’t feel good. In *that moment, how do I encourage myself to keep going, because what I ultimately want is to not be caught? How do I remind myself that being awake is what I want most?
I read a beautiful story by a French writer, Jean Giono It’s called “The Man Who Planted Trees.” There was a man, a shepherd, who lived in the foothills of the Alps, in a barren land that skirted Provence. He lived alone after the death of his wife and only son in a stone cottage he’d built himself with a tile roof over which the wind made the sound of the ocean. His one room hut was immaculately clean, as were his clothes and his person. Even though he rarely saw anyone he took great care of himself, his animals, his things.
He spoke little, but he was also generous, sharing a bit of soup with a traveler who happened by one day. It was this man who watched the shepherd as he sat down after dinner one night. And spent a couple of hours carefully, painstakingly sorting acorns. Turning them in his hands to make sure they were whole. Then he separated them into piles of ten, and when he’d counted a hundred and he was satisfied that they were the best of what he had, he set them aside and went to bed.
Imagine this man, carefully sorting acorns, every bit of him focused on the task. One acorn, two acorns, three acorns… Does it remind you of anything?
The next morning, the two men left the cabin and climbed to the top of a ridge. There, the shepherd let his sheep loose, and carrying a bag in one hand and an iron rod in the other, he slowly made his way from one end of the ridge to the other, poking a hole in the ground every few feet. Then he’d drop an acorn, refill the hole, and move on. He was planting oak trees, the visitor realized.
"But do you know whose land this is?" he asked. The shepherd didn’t know.But it was bare and desolate and needed trees, he felt, and there was no one there to do the work except him, so he began.
He planted trees all morning, then he took a break for lunch, and continued planting into the afternoon. And that’s when it came out that he had already planted 100,000 trees over a period of three years. Of those, twenty thousand had sprouted. He thought of those he’d probably lose half, to blight, to animals, to weather. But that still left ten thousand trees where before there had been none.
The first World War happened, and the second. And the man, who’d become a beekeeper because his sheep were threatening the trees, went on planting, completely unbothered by the conflict around him. When he died, more than thirty years later, a natural forest had transformed the barren land. And towns had grown around it. And people who before were despondent, hopeless, were leading rich lives. More than ten thousand people owed their happiness to a single man, and none of them had any idea of it—which is exactly how the shepherd liked it.
When he died, the land had been completely transformed, as if the desert had never been there. But it had, it had, and now it was lush and alive with possibility.
I could talk about mindfulness and attention as tools to work with this hindrance. Or I could talk about the classical antidote, which is awareness of death—it’s creating a sense of urgency. I could refer to teachings in the sutras and to their commentaries and to the commentaries of the commentaries. But instead, I’m just going to say this:
When things get hard, when they get complicated or confusing, when you feel exhausted and think you can’t go on, remind yourself of your vow. And if it feels distant, get very close to a single thing, like your breath. Then follow it, sorting carefully the thoughts that get in the way. Take one thought, look at it, and let it go. Just one thought at a time. Then let go of the next thought, and return. This is how we carefully plant the seeds that will grow into a forest. Creating a buddha field out of barren land.
There’s nothing wrong with that desert, actually. It gives us more space, more area for planting. It’s simply that there’s more life to draw from in a forest. It’s easier to rest when you need to rest—in the shade of an oak, for example. And to keep working when that’s what’s required of you.
Love the work of keeping this forest growing. If you can do that, you’ll never run out of nourishment, & neither will everyone else.
Explore further
01 : The Five Hindrances by the Insight Meditation Center
02 : Sloth and Torpor by Gil Fronsdal
03 : The Man Who Planted Trees by Jean Giono