Can cleaning really bring inner peace?
Forget decluttering. This year’s wellbeing trend —the brainchild of a Buddhist monk — needs a bit more elbow grease. But...
THE moon is high, my children are asleep, my husband is snoring, it is not yet dawn and all is calm. I, meanwhile, am on all-fours in my pyjamas scrubbing a French window with scrunched up old newspaper — because, thanks to the teachings of a Japanese Buddhist monk called Shoukei Matsumoto, I know that a cloudy window means a cloudy mind and understand the importance of ‘shattering the blurry filter of the self and viewing the world as it truly is’.
I also know that newspaper is better than rags or towels for glass (or, however tempting, paying a professional). And, most of all, that cleaning should be done first thing — ‘your very first activity of the day after washing your face and dressing’.
Any minute now, I am likely to start chanting: ‘Clean off dust. Remove grime.’ If things really go well, I’ll feel so calm and cleansed by my scrubbing I’ll start humming. And before I know it, I’ll have moved seamlessly on to the loo, the ironing, the bathroom, the floors and a higher emotional and spiritual level. All before anyone else stirs.
Matsumoto has written what must be the most unusual self-help book of 2018 — A Monk’s Guide To A Clean House And Mind. He wrote it six years ago as a manual for junior Buddhist monks, but always hoped it might also help ‘regular people’ to achieve calm, Zen and reinvigoration through the simple art of cleaning. Because cleaning, he says, is the key to spiritual happiness.
‘If you live carelessly, your mind will be soiled,’ he explains to me. ‘But if you try to live conscientiously, it will slowly become pure again. And if your heart is pure, the world looks brighter.’
His book is already a huge hit in Japan and, since its publication, has spawned
an entire ‘cleaning can make you feel Zen’ movement. There are now endless selfhelp manuals about cleaning, tidying, even folding, all promising to bring calm and order into our overloaded lives.
‘The success was surprising, but I’m happy people are embracing simple practices,’ he tells me. ‘In a world where technology is getting faster and our lives fuller, keeping your mind clean is more important than ever.’
FINALLY, the book is available here. Which, quite frankly, is brilliant news, because I could certainly do with a bit of calm — and tidiness — in my house. I am a busy person with a hectic life, a full-time job, husband, two very bouncy sons under ten, two cats and two guinea pigs who spend far too much time roaming loose around our house.
While my husband is neat and tidy, bags his jumpers between wears, keeps his boxers in carefully pressed, colour-coded luxury and can’t pass a surface without wiping it clean, I am not.
Piles of detritus gather wherever I go. Clothes spill to the floor. Toothpaste lids go missing and dirty coffee cups are strewn in my wake. It goes without saying that, as well as forcing us to live in a bit of a tip, my untidiness causes the occasional marital flare-up.
Which is why, over the past few days, I have been embracing Matsumoto’s mantra to see if I, too, can achieve what he calls the ‘blissful tension’ that comes from the ‘tranquillity of the space’. And to learn to clean not just because my home is dirty or messy — but to ‘eliminate the gloom in my heart’.
‘We remove dust to sweep away our worldly desires,’ he says. ‘We scrub dirt to free ourselves of attachments.’ While I’m not sure my husband would want me to go quite that far, there have been so many positive reactions from vindicated housewives on Amazon raving about how cleaning has saved them, that it’s got to be worth a shot.
But first, some ground rules.
As well as recommending that cleaning should always be done first thing, Matsumoto insists windows should also be flung wide open, whatever the weather, because ‘if the air around you is stale, your mind will feel this way’.
Which in January is rather bracing, but at least it’s quiet with everyone asleep upstairs. It should also be done daily, in silence — no radio, no chatter, not even the buzz of contented humming — and, in an ideal world, for three hours.
Three hours!? THREE HOURS?? Is he completely bonkers? Apparently not. ‘That is the ideal amount, but you have to be flexible,’ he says, and explains it’s more about the ritual than the time spent. So just ten minutes’ cleaning a day would have a more positive effect than three hours once a week. ‘I know how hard it is to keep the house and office and desk clean in daily life,’ he adds. ‘I understand.’
And maybe he does. Because Matsumoto wasn’t always a monk. He only decided to join the order in 2003 after a degree in philosophy.
‘Initially I wanted to work for an advertising agency,’ he says. ‘But when I tried listening to my heart, I realised being a monk should be my future.’
For a few years he immersed himself totally. Today, though, he is married with two children, a boy, nine, and a fiveyear-old girl, and splits his time between the family home and the temple. (Buddhist monks in Japan are permitted to marry and have families.)
‘I understand the struggle. I have a laptop. I teach management, but I also clean in the temple and want people to learn how to clean in its most basic form.’
Zen-cleaning — if we can call it that — basic but, on the upside and unlike so many supposedly life-enhancing self-help crazes, involves neither a special diet, €150 leggings nor luxury retreats. There’s no need even for detergents or fancy cleaning gadgets. All you need to achieve Zen-like happiness is a sweeping brush, dustpan, bucket, dusters (ideally home-made from old cloth), yesterday’s newspapers, soap and some rainwater (‘a gift from heaven’).
A purist, though, might stretch to a set of cotton
As I head off to clean the bathroom, damp Matsumoto’s words ring in my ears: ‘If you enter a damp bathroom, your heart also becomes damp. If mould grows in a bathroom, then mould also grows in your heart.’
samue robes in deep indigo, and flip-flops. And a traditional Japanese tenugui hand towel tied around your head really helps you feel the part.
As I head off to the bathroom to pick up a wodge of flannels, my sons’ discarded pants and two cardboard loo roll inners, Matsumoto’s words ring in my ears: ‘If you enter a damp bathroom, your heart also becomes damp. If mould grows in a bathroom, then mould also grows in your heart.’
Oh dear. I bet his kids don’t leave wet towels everywhere.
‘We are like other people,’ he says. ‘Our house is normal. We usually clean as a family. Sometimes my children are not so keen, so I clean alone.’
And his wife? ‘Sometimes she gets tired of cleaning.’ he says.
Which is reassuring. But, I’m relieved he is thousands of miles away in northern Japan and isn’t coming to my house.
Because for all his empathy and experience of the secular life, he’s still a monk and monks can be surprisingly exacting when it comes to cleaning. Indeed, in his temple, he says, shoddy cleaners — together with their friends — are punished by long hours sitting cross-legged on a hard floor.
‘The entire family should work as a team, conscious of each other as they perform their tasks,’ he says. In my house, I and my youngest son are the weak links. I would not like my husband to have to sit cross-legged on a hard floor as punishment for our household sluttishness. I vow to try harder as I graduate from windows to floors.
WHY not polish the floor in your home as if you were polishing a mirror that will reflect your soul?’ he asks. Why not, indeed? Perhaps because I’ve a million things to do and two young boys hanging off my legs most of the time.
But I give it a go and, do you know what, it really is rather soothing rubbing away in the early morning gloaming. Surprising myself, I carry on. Happily, the book covers the whole house. Everything from lights (‘clean your lamps and fixtures gently as if you are polishing your heart and soul’) to the loo. Where the secret is simple — ‘use it in a clean way’. (Try telling that to two boys.) And if possible, fold the ends of the loo roll into a calming triangle.
Some sections are never going to fly, such as the recommendation I always wear crisp white clothes over crisp white underwear. And shave my head on every day ending with a four or a nine.
As I press a pair of pink boxer shorts, the ironing tips — ‘visualise yourself ironing out the wrinkles in your heart’ — leave me oddly giggly. Though it might be slight and rather strange, there is something surprisingly calming about just reading the book, hearing Matsumoto’s simple instructions and admiring the clean pen drawings of Japanese sandals and brooms.
Somehow, after implementing even the smallest changes, I feel calmer and my children sound marginally less shrieky than usual.
For Matsumoto, his mantra’s astonishing success has changed everything, turning him into a celebrity monk and the saviour of housewives around the world.
‘People say it has improved their life,’ he says, delighted. ‘Fed up housewives have been cheered by the importance in which monks hold cleaning. It makes them feel proud.’ (Even his voice is calm. Deliberate and thoughtful with no wasted words, no blather.)
Many are flocking to see him, keen to learn from the master. With profits pouring in, he’s setting up a series of hands-on cleaning, chanting and meditation workshops in temples across Japan. ‘We have a lot of visitors from overseas who want to master the basic skills.’
Today he is so busy he struggles to find time to clean every day — ‘sometimes it is just half an hour’ he says sadly — but he is happy. And working on his next book — again about cleaning, but this time less about the practicalities and more about the internal transformation that takes place as we scrub.