In this setting, the famous maxim attributed to Baizhang Huaihai—“A day without work is a day without food”—was not a colorful saying about work ethic. It summarized a doctrinal stance: emptiness lived as responsibility within form. Agriculture, cooking, cleaning, and timekeeping were not things to be endured in between “real” practice. They were codified as practice. The Chan articulation of emptiness did not float above these details; it descended into them.

Time as a Visible Structure of Emptiness

Classical Mahāyāna texts speak of śūnyatā as the emptiness of inherent existence: things arise only in dependence on causes and conditions. In early Chan communities, this teaching was not left as an abstract philosophical claim. It became something one could hear in the sound of the morning bell and see in the coordination of hundreds of bodies moving to work or to the hall at exactly the same moment.

Monastic codes of the Tang and Song, especially those influenced by Baizhang’s lineage, prescribe a day carved into specific segments: the pre-dawn rising signaled by a wooden board or bell; morning chanting and meditation; communal breakfast; work periods in the fields or within the compound; midday meal; afternoon study or further labor; evening chanting and meditation; night rest. Each transition was audible. Bells, drums, and clappers were not mere alarms; they were instruments that rendered the emptiness of individual preference concrete.

A monk did not choose when to meditate, when to eat, or when to rest. Those decisions had been handed over to the communal form. This surrender of private time was not simply an exercise in obedience. It was an enactment of non-self (anātman) and dependent arising. “My” practice was never merely mine; it was knotted into the collective life of the community and the seasons of the land it cultivated.

Here, emptiness did not mean a refusal of structure. It meant that no form, not even a meditation period, had an inherent privilege. The early Chan materials repeatedly insist that practice (gongfu) is not exhausted by seated meditation alone. The bell that sent the assembly to work in the fields did not signify a break from practice. It signified a shift of posture within practice.

Baizhang’s Regulations and the Critique of Quietism

Baizhang is remembered as the Chan master who “established monastic regulations” (Baizhang qinggui), a set of rules that later generations saw as foundational for Chan institutional life. While the exact content of any “original” Baizhang code is historically tangled, the tradition that gathered around his name is clear on several points: Chan monasteries were to be self-sufficient as far as possible; monks were expected to work; and these expectations were elaborated into detailed schedules.

The oft-cited anecdote of Baizhang working in the fields in his old age makes this point sharply. Seeing him exerting himself despite his advanced years, disciples tried to hide his farm tools, hoping to spare him. Baizhang responded by refusing to eat, stating, “A day without work is a day without food.” This is not simply a stern injunction to diligence. It is a refusal to separate realization from the ordinary economy of cause and effect. Food in one’s bowl is not magical. It has conditions: soil, rain, labor, tools. To eat without sharing the labor is to deny that one is implicated in those conditions.

In context, this stance also marks a critique of a particular kind of quietist monasticism that could arise when emptiness is misunderstood as withdrawal. If sitting in the hall is seen as the only real practice, then work becomes a necessary interruption. Baizhang’s maxim inverts this valuation. Where there is fieldwork, there is Chan; where there is cooking, there is Chan. To exempt oneself from those arenas in the name of “meditation” is, in this view, to misunderstand emptiness as escape rather than non-separation.

The regulations attributed to Baizhang and to later Chan compilers carry this critique into institutional form. Work periods are not slotted into whatever time is left after meditation. They are positively defined, often with clear seasonal adjustments: more agricultural labor during planting and harvest; different rhythms during the winter when fieldwork diminishes. In each case, the monastic day is shaped by the needs of the land as much as by the cycle of rituals. This is emptiness as responsiveness: the form of the schedule changes because conditions change.

Agriculture as Articulated Gongfu

Agricultural self-sufficiency did not simply happen to Chan monasteries because they were in rural settings. Texts from the period make clear that fieldwork and manual labor are explicitly named as practice (gongfu). Gongfu here is not a heroic exertion but a steady, cultivated effort that shows itself in how one handles tools, keeps time, and attends to communal obligations.

In this framing, a weeding or harvesting assignment is not a pragmatic distraction that monks must grudgingly accept. It is a structured field in which key teachings—impermanence, non-self, dependent arising—are enacted physically. The seedlings rise or fail according to soil preparation and timing. Labor delayed cannot simply be made up later without cost. Monastic work rosters that specify who goes to which field, when, and under whose supervision, give this reality a precise institutional expression.

In some later Chan and Song-dynasty codes, roles such as the farm steward (tianzhu) are delineated with almost administrative specificity: responsible for scheduling, for allotting plots, for ensuring tools are maintained. The Chan view does not oppose this emerging bureaucracy to emptiness. Instead, it treats the tangle of responsibilities as another configuration of dependent origination. No one, not even the abbot, stands outside it.

From this angle, “a day without work is a day without food” is not only an individual rule. It is a way of holding the entire community to account. If the sangha eats, it has collectively entered into relationships with the soil, with local lay supporters, with the climate conditions of that year. Refusing to name this as part of practice would be a kind of institutional self-deception.

Bells, Drums, and the Non-Dual Use of Form

There is a long-standing temptation, especially in later romanticized accounts of Chan, to oppose “form” to “spirit,” rules to realization. Yet the material culture of early Chan timekeeping argues otherwise. The bell that signals the beginning of morning meditation is the same kind of instrument that announces the shift to work or to meals. The sound does not carry different ontological weight depending on the activity it ends or begins.

Within the Chan understanding, what matters is not the type of activity but the quality of non-grasping engagement with it. Śūnyatā, in this context, does not mean that forms are illusory and therefore negligible. It means they lack independent essence and are therefore usable. Because the schedule is empty of inherent sanctity, it can be adjusted with the seasons and tailored to the needs of the community; because it is also binding while in force, it becomes the exact site where tendencies toward self-centeredness, resistance, or clinging become visible.

The discipline of responding to the bell without hesitation can be read as a daily rehearsal of non-duality. One does not split the moment into “what I feel like doing now” and “what the community demands.” Such splitting does occur internally—that is part of what practice reveals. But the form of the schedule establishes a clear outer rhythm, against which inner resistance or attachment can be seen. The bell becomes a mirror.

In this sense, communal discipline itself functions as upāya, skillful means. The monastic timetable is not mistakenly reified as ultimate truth; it is explicitly acknowledged as a constructed device. Its authority comes from its usefulness in exposing clinging, not from any metaphysical status. Emptiness here is not a negation of form, but the reason form can be adopted, inhabited fully, and relinquished without remainder when circumstances change.

Against Ritual Formalism: Work as Liturgical

Early Chan also had to define itself against another tendency: the reduction of monastic life to carefully performed ritual and scholastic recitation. While integrating themselves into the wider Chinese Buddhist monastery system, Chan communities were suspicious of a model in which the main spiritual currency was formal liturgy or scriptural learning alone.

This suspicion does not result in the rejection of ritual. Chan monasteries maintained chanting services, confession rituals, offerings, and memorials. But the insistence that work periods were equally, or sometimes more, critical to training undercuts the idea that spiritual life is concentrated in ceremonial events while the rest of the day is mere infrastructure.

In some monastic codes, the timing of rituals is fitted around essential chores: water must be drawn, firewood gathered, rice cooked. The practicality is not a sign of spiritual compromise. It is a doctrinal statement: there is no practice that can bypass the body’s dependency on food, warmth, and shelter. To stand in the chanting hall while others labor in the kitchen and fields, if made habitual, would in Chan eyes risk turning emptiness into an aesthetic or intellectual posture, detached from the texture of actual interdependence.

In this way, agricultural labor becomes quasi-liturgical. The field is the ritual space where the law of causality cannot be ornamented away. Seed sown too late will not sprout because of refined doctrinal understanding. The precision of the seasonal schedule, its non-negotiable deadlines for planting and harvest, place the community under a discipline that is as sharp as any formal vow. This is not a romanticization of peasant labor; Chan is not idealizing hardship for its own sake. It is simply taking seriously that emptiness must be lived within the constraints of climate, geography, and bodily need.

Śūnyatā as Form Fully Inhabited

If we read early Chan monastic time-discipline as a commentary on śūnyatā, a particular portrait of non-duality emerges. Emptiness is not the discovery of a timeless interior realm insulated from schedules and tasks. It is the realization that there is nothing outside conditions—not even one’s most private sense of awakening.

Early Chan’s emphasis on self-sufficient agriculture, communal work obligations, and precise daily timetables pushes against the fantasy of a spirituality liberated from dependence. “A day without work is a day without food” could be paraphrased doctrinally: a day of claimed realization that does not touch the ground of ordinary causality is a day of delusion.

At the same time, the very flexibility and pragmatism of Chan monastic codes—changing schedules with the seasons, evolving offices, and adapting to local conditions—enact emptiness as openness. There is no single ideal form of the day mandated from some transcendent realm. Forms are adopted because they work. They are dropped when they no longer do. To inhabit a form fully is not to absolutize it, but to give oneself to it without remainder while it functions, and to let it go when its function is done.

In that sense, the Chan schedule, with its bells, rosters, and seasonal rotations, can be read as a moving diagram of dependent origination. Each sound, each assigned task, is a node where multiple conditions meet: individual capacities, community needs, weather patterns, harvest cycles, the obligations to lay supporters, and the shared aspiration for awakening. Śūnyatā is not apart from this diagram; it is what the diagram displays when seen without clinging to any of its nodes as self-standing.

The distinctive contribution of early Chan, then, is not that it discovered emptiness, but that it insisted on locating emptiness inside the machinery of monastic life rather than beyond it. Work, meals, and the passage of hours were not the scenery against which awakening happened. They were its texture.

If we look closely at how time was carved and filled in these communities—who rang which bell, who went to which field, who cooked, who studied, and when—we see śūnyatā not as an abstract philosophy but as a disciplined responsiveness: form fully inhabited, with nothing left over that needs to stand apart as “the real thing.”