Elder Ben Huan's 106-Year Secret: How a Chan Master's Ordinary Mind Unlocks Extraordinary Sleep

In the spring of 2012, a monk passed away at the Hongfa Temple in Shenzhen, China. He was one hundred and six years old. Until the final months of his life, he had risen before three o’clock every morning to lead the dawn liturgy. His mind was clear. His presence was calm. His body, though ancient, had carried him through a century of Chinese history — war, revolution, persecution, rebuilding — with a steadiness that those around him described as almost incomprehensible.

His name was Elder Ben Huan (本焉长老). And when people asked him the secret of his extraordinary longevity, his answer was always the same: ping chang xin. The ordinary mind.

Not a special mind. Not an enlightened mind, in the sense of something rare or achieved. The ordinary mind — the mind that does not grasp at good experiences or push away difficult ones, that meets each moment, including each night, with the same quiet equanimity it brings to every other moment of the day.

At Taiji Sleep, we believe that the most extraordinary sleep is available to the most ordinary mind — the mind that has stopped trying to make the night into something other than what it is.

Who Was Elder Ben Huan?

Born in 1907 in Xinzhou, Hubei Province, Ben Huan was ordained as a Buddhist monk at the age of twenty and spent the following eight decades in continuous practice within the Chan (Zen) tradition — one of the most demanding and uncompromising schools of Buddhist cultivation.

His path was not easy. The decades of the Cultural Revolution brought persecution, forced labour, and the systematic destruction of the religious institutions he had devoted his life to. He endured. When China’s reform era opened the possibility of religious practice again, he threw himself into the rebuilding of Buddhist life with the same energy he had brought to practice in his youth — overseeing the construction and restoration of Hongfa Temple in Shenzhen, which under his guidance became one of the most significant Chan monasteries in southern China.

He received ordination from some of the most respected masters of the twentieth century and was himself regarded as one of the highest-generation Chan lineage holders alive in his final decades — a living link to a transmission that stretched back, through an unbroken chain of teacher and student, to the Tang Dynasty masters who shaped the Chan tradition as we know it.

He passed away in April 2012 at the age of one hundred and six, having demonstrated through the sheer fact of his long, vigorous, and evidently peaceful life that the principles he taught were not merely philosophical. They worked. And they worked, in part, because he slept well — night after night, decade after decade, with the ordinary mind that is the foundation of everything.

The Four Pillars of His Sleep Philosophy

Pillar One: Ordinary Mind (平常心) — The End of the Sleep Performance

The phrase ping chang xin shi dao — “the ordinary mind is the Way” — originates with the Tang Dynasty Chan master Mazu Daoyi and runs like a golden thread through the entire Chan tradition. Elder Ben Huan embodied it completely. For him, the ordinary mind was not a philosophical concept but a lived reality: the mind that does not make a drama out of anything, including sleep.

Most of us, without realising it, have turned sleep into a performance. We monitor our progress toward it. We evaluate the quality of last night’s sleep and worry about tonight’s. We compare our sleep to what we think it should be, to what it used to be, to what the sleep tracking app says it was. We have, in short, made sleep into a project — and projects require effort, and effort is the enemy of sleep.

The ordinary mind does none of this. It does not have a special relationship with sleep, any more than it has a special relationship with eating or walking. Sleep is simply what happens when the body is tired and the conditions are right. It is not an achievement. It is not a failure. It is ordinary — and in its ordinariness, it is completely reliable.

To cultivate the ordinary mind toward sleep is to gradually dismantle the performance: to stop monitoring, stop evaluating, stop comparing. To lie down when tired, in a comfortable place, and allow what is ordinary and natural to occur without interference.

Pillar Two: Letting Go of Fame and Gain (放下名利) — Emptying the Mind Before the Night

Elder Ben Huan taught consistently that the root of suffering — and the root of sleeplessness — is the mind’s attachment to outcomes: to being seen in a certain way, to achieving certain results, to gaining what we want and avoiding what we don’t. This attachment does not switch off when we lie down. It follows us into the bedroom, replaying the day’s gains and losses, rehearsing tomorrow’s strategies, calculating and recalculating.

His teaching was not to suppress these movements of the mind but to see through them: to recognise that the fame and gain being pursued are, in the deepest sense, empty — not worthless, but without the solid, permanent reality we attribute to them. A reputation is not a thing. A financial gain is not a thing. They are events in consciousness, arising and passing, no more substantial than clouds.

When this is genuinely seen — not just intellectually understood but actually perceived in the moment — the grip of the day’s concerns loosens naturally. Not because we have suppressed them or resolved them, but because we have seen them clearly for what they are: passing phenomena in a mind that is, at its root, already at rest.

This is the Chan approach to the pre-sleep mind: not relaxation techniques, not breathing exercises, but clear seeing. And clear seeing, it turns out, is profoundly relaxing.

Pillar Three: Simple Living (简单生活) — The Body That Is Easy to Rest

Elder Ben Huan’s daily life was characterised by a simplicity that modern people might find almost shocking. His diet was plain — vegetarian, modest in quantity, eaten at regular times. His schedule was consistent — the same hours of rising, practice, teaching, and rest, day after day, season after season. His possessions were few. His needs were simple. And his body, as a result, was easy to rest.

This is not asceticism for its own sake. It is the practical recognition that the body’s capacity for deep, restorative sleep is directly related to the demands placed upon it during waking hours. A body that has been overstimulated — by rich food, by excessive sensory input, by the constant low-grade stress of a life organised around acquisition and achievement — carries that stimulation into the night. A body that has been treated simply and consistently arrives at the night already partway toward rest.

Simple living also means attending carefully to the sleep environment itself. The bedroom should be simple: cool, dark, quiet, and furnished with materials that support rather than disturb the body’s nightly work. Natural fibres — particularly silk, which has been used in Chinese wellness traditions for millennia — embody this simplicity in their most refined form: nothing unnecessary, nothing synthetic, nothing that does not serve the body’s genuine need for rest and repair.

Pillar Four: Longevity as Practice (长寿即修行) — Honouring the Body Across Time

Elder Ben Huan’s one hundred and six years were not an accident of genetics. They were the cumulative result of a life lived in alignment — with natural rhythms, with the body’s genuine needs, with the principles of moderation and consistency that the Chan tradition has always taught as the foundation of both spiritual practice and physical health.

He understood, in a way that modern longevity research is now confirming, that the quality of each night’s sleep is not merely a matter of the next day’s energy. It is a matter of the next decade’s health. Sleep is when the body performs its most essential maintenance: clearing metabolic waste from the brain, consolidating memory, repairing cellular damage, regulating the hormonal systems that govern everything from immune function to emotional resilience. To sleep well, consistently, over a lifetime, is one of the most powerful investments in longevity available to any human being.

To honour the body with good sleep is not self-indulgence. It is, in Elder Ben Huan’s terms, a form of practice — the daily, nightly practice of treating the vehicle of this life with the respect and care it deserves.

The monk who sleeps well at one hundred is the monk who has been sleeping well at thirty, forty, fifty — not because he was lucky, but because he understood that rest is not a reward for hard work. It is the foundation of it.

The Ordinary Mind in the Age of AI

Elder Ben Huan’s teaching of ping chang xin — the ordinary mind — was radical in the context of twentieth-century China. In the age of artificial intelligence, it has become essential.

We live in a world that has made the ordinary extraordinary and the extraordinary ordinary. AI generates content, insights, and recommendations at a pace that makes human output feel inadequate by comparison. Sleep trackers quantify rest into scores and percentages. Productivity culture measures worth in output per hour. In this environment, the ordinary mind — the mind that simply lies down when tired and sleeps without monitoring or evaluation — is a radical act of resistance.

The sleep performance that Elder Ben Huan’s teaching dismantles has never been more elaborate. We track our sleep stages. We optimise our sleep environments. We consume content about sleep while lying awake worrying about sleep. We have, in short, made the most natural human activity into a project — and then wondered why it no longer works.

The ordinary mind offers a different path. Not optimisation, but acceptance. Not monitoring, but trust. Not the anxious pursuit of perfect sleep, but the quiet confidence that the body knows how to rest — that it has been resting since before we were born, and will continue to rest when we stop interfering.

In the age of AI, the most sophisticated sleep technology may be the one Elder Ben Huan practised for one hundred and six years: the deliberate, daily choice to put down the device, close the tracker, and meet the night with an ordinary mind.

The ordinary mind does not need an algorithm to tell it when to sleep. It already knows. It has always known. The practice is simply to listen.

The Science Behind the Practice

Elder Ben Huan’s four pillars align precisely with the current scientific understanding of what produces long-term sleep health. The ordinary mind corresponds to what sleep researchers call low sleep reactivity — the trait of not responding to sleep disturbances with heightened anxiety and arousal, which is now recognised as one of the strongest protective factors against the development of chronic insomnia. Letting go of fame and gain corresponds to the well-documented relationship between trait neuroticism — the tendency to ruminate on negative outcomes — and poor sleep quality. Simple living corresponds to the sleep hygiene and circadian entrainment research that consistently shows the benefits of dietary moderation, consistent scheduling, and sensory environment optimisation. Longevity as practice corresponds to the now-extensive literature on sleep as a primary driver of healthspan and lifespan.

From a Traditional Chinese Medicine perspective, Elder Ben Huan’s approach supports the harmonious function of all five organ systems during their respective nightly repair windows. The Heart (9–11 p.m.) settles the shen. The Gallbladder and Liver (11 p.m.–3 a.m.) process and release the day’s experiences. The Lung (3–5 a.m.) governs letting go. When the mind is ordinary — when it neither grasps nor resists — each of these processes proceeds without obstruction, and the body wakes renewed.

Your Bedtime Ritual, Inspired by Elder Ben Huan

Here is a five-step ping chang xin — ordinary mind — practice for the night:

Step 1 — The Simplification (30 minutes before bed): Begin reducing stimulation half an hour before sleep. Dim the lights. Lower the volume of any sound. Slow your movements deliberately. Eat nothing heavy. This is not a special ritual — it is simply the ordinary act of preparing the body for what it naturally wants to do.

Step 2 — The Release (5 minutes): Sitting quietly, bring to mind the day’s main preoccupations — the gains, the losses, the unresolved matters. For each one, ask simply: Is this mine to carry through the night? In almost every case, the honest answer is no. Set it down. It will be there in the morning, unchanged, if it still matters then.

Step 3 — The Ordinariness (as you lie down): As you settle into bed, resist the impulse to evaluate. Do not assess how tired you are, how quickly you think you will fall asleep, or how last night compared to tonight. Simply lie down. Simply breathe. This is ordinary. This is enough.

Step 4 — The Body Scan (5–10 minutes): Move awareness slowly through the body, from feet to crown, releasing held tension with each exhale. Do this not as a technique for inducing sleep but as an act of simple attention — the ordinary mind noticing the ordinary body, with ordinary kindness.

Step 5 — The Non-Monitoring: When drowsiness comes — and with the ordinary mind, it comes reliably — do not try to catch it or hold it. Do not notice that you are falling asleep and then wake yourself up noticing. Simply allow the transition to occur, as it has occurred every night of your life, as it occurred every night of Elder Ben Huan’s one hundred and six years. It is ordinary. It is reliable. It is already happening.

---

Elder Ben Huan rose before three o’clock every morning for over a century — not because sleep was a struggle, but because the ordinary mind, having rested completely, was simply ready. Every month, we journey to ancient temples and Taoist sanctuaries across China — lighting incense, offering prayers, and carrying the intentions of our members into sacred spaces. Those who walk with us for six months or more will receive, at year’s end, a curated collection of sacred tokens gathered from the altars and shrines along our path — small objects that hold the memory of incense smoke, mountain silence, and whispered prayers. Each piece travels from a place of stillness to find its way to you. Discover the Journey →🕯️🏮☯️

We welcome wholesale, distribution, co-branding, content, and retail partnership enquiries — WhatsApp📱 or 📧hello@taijisleep.com📧.