The Coin and the Toad: What Liu Haichan's Moment of Letting Go Teaches Us About Sleep

The Most Famous Coin in Chinese History

The year is somewhere around 940 CE. Liu Cao — a high-ranking official in the court of the Later Liang dynasty, a man of considerable wealth, influence, and social standing — is visited by a wandering Taoist sage named Zhongli Quan (one of the Eight Immortals). The sage produces a single copper coin and balances it on the edge of a toad’s back, then stacks another coin, and another, building an impossible tower of spinning copper on the back of a living creature.

Liu Cao watches, transfixed. And in that moment of watching — in the absurdity of a coin balanced on a toad, in the fragility of something so carefully constructed and so easily lost — something inside him breaks open.

He sees, with sudden and total clarity, that everything he has spent his life accumulating is exactly like that tower of coins: precarious, temporary, and ultimately meaningless in the face of the toad’s next breath.

He resigns his position the next morning. He takes the Taoist name Haichan — “Sea Toad” — in honour of the creature that woke him up. And he walks away from everything to become one of the most revered figures in the Quanzhen lineage, a direct spiritual ancestor of Wang Chongyang himself.

“The heaviest thing you carry to bed is not your body. It is everything you have not yet agreed to put down.”

What Liu Haichan Actually Let Go Of

The popular retelling of Liu Haichan’s story frames it as a story about money — a rich man who gave up his wealth. But this misses the deeper teaching entirely.

What Liu Haichan released was not his coins. It was his grip.

The Quanzhen tradition, which Liu Haichan helped to seed, teaches that the fundamental obstacle to spiritual cultivation — and, by extension, to genuine rest — is not external circumstance but internal clinging. The Chinese term is 執著 (Zhí Zhuó): attachment, fixation, the compulsive holding-on to outcomes, identities, and objects that the mind has decided are essential to its survival.

Liu Haichan was not suffering because he was wealthy. He was suffering because he was gripping his wealth — and his status, his future, his sense of who he was — with the white-knuckled intensity of someone who believes that releasing any of it means falling.

Sound familiar? It should. It is the exact neurological state of approximately 30% of the global adult population every night between 10pm and 2am.

The Neuroscience of the Grip: Why Your Brain Won’t Let You Sleep

When you lie down at night and find that your mind refuses to quiet, what is actually happening is not a mystery. Your prefrontal cortex — the brain’s executive control centre, the part responsible for planning, problem-solving, and threat assessment — has not received the signal that its work is done.

In evolutionary terms, this makes sense. The brain that stayed alert to unresolved threats survived. But in the modern world, the “threats” your prefrontal cortex is monitoring are not predators. They are the email you haven’t replied to, the conversation that didn’t go the way you wanted, the financial decision you’re not sure about, the version of tomorrow you’re trying to control in advance, the version of yesterday you’re trying to retroactively fix.

Your brain is gripping these things. And as long as it is gripping them, it cannot enter the parasympathetic state required for sleep onset. The amygdala remains on alert. Cortisol stays elevated. The default mode network keeps spinning its anxious narratives. You are, neurologically speaking, Liu Haichan before the toad — holding your tower of coins with desperate concentration, terrified of what happens if you let one fall.

The toad, in this metaphor, is sleep itself. It will not come to you while you are gripping.

TCM Perspective: 心 (Xīn) and the Burden of Holding

In Traditional Chinese Medicine, the Heart (心, Xīn) is not merely a pump. It is the sovereign organ — the seat of consciousness, emotion, and the Shen (神, Spirit). When the Heart is burdened by unresolved holding — by what TCM calls 心結 (Xīn Jié, “heart knots”: emotional tangles that have not been released) — the Shen cannot settle into its nighttime residence, and sleep becomes shallow, fragmented, or impossible.

The Quanzhen inner alchemy tradition that Liu Haichan helped establish offered a systematic approach to dissolving these heart knots through three practices: 觀心 (Guān Xīn) — observing the Heart, watching one’s own mental activity without identifying with it; 練心 (Liàn Xīn) — refining the Heart through patient, compassionate observation; and 清心 (Qīng Xīn) — clearing the Heart, the nightly ritual of consciously releasing the day’s accumulations before sleep.

The TCM clock places the Heart’s most vulnerable hour at 子時 (Zǐ Shí) — midnight, 11pm to 1am. This is when the Heart Shen most needs to be settled and at rest. If you are still gripping at midnight, you are working against the deepest rhythms of your own biology.

Cognitive Defusion: The Modern Name for Liu Haichan’s Practice

Contemporary sleep science has arrived, through a very different route, at almost exactly the same insight that Liu Haichan embodied in 940 CE.

Cognitive Behavioural Therapy for Insomnia (CBT-I) — the gold-standard clinical treatment for chronic insomnia — includes a technique called cognitive defusion: the practice of creating psychological distance between yourself and your thoughts, so that you can observe them without being controlled by them.

The instruction is deceptively simple: instead of thinking “I won’t be able to sleep,” you practise noticing “I am having the thought that I won’t be able to sleep.” Instead of being the thought, you watch the thought. Instead of gripping the coin, you watch the coin balance on the toad.

This small shift in perspective — from fusion with the thought to observation of the thought — activates the prefrontal cortex’s regulatory capacity, reduces amygdala reactivity, and creates the neurological conditions for sleep onset.

Liu Haichan did not have a CBT-I workbook. But he had something more powerful: a living demonstration, in the form of a toad and a coin, that the thing you are gripping is not as solid as it feels.

“You do not need to solve your thoughts before you sleep. You only need to stop mistaking them for emergencies.”

The Grip in the Age of AI: When the Tower Never Stops Growing

Liu Haichan’s tower of coins was finite. He could count what he was holding. He could see, in the sage’s demonstration, the absurdity of the grip. And he could choose, in a single morning, to put it down.

In the age of artificial intelligence, the tower never stops growing. AI-powered content feeds generate an endless stream of information, each piece optimised to feel urgent, relevant, and unresolved. The email that arrives at 11pm. The news alert that demands a response. The social media notification that implies someone is waiting. The AI assistant that is always available, always ready, always suggesting the next thing to hold.

The result is a prefrontal cortex that has been trained, by hours of algorithmic engagement, to believe that the work is never done — that there is always one more coin to add to the tower, one more thing to grip before the night can be released. The Zeigarnik effect, which keeps incomplete tasks in active working memory, has been weaponised by the attention economy into a state of permanent incompletion.

Liu Haichan’s teaching is, in this context, not merely a spiritual practice. It is a survival strategy. The deliberate, nightly ritual of putting down the device — of closing the feed, of writing down the coins and placing them on the toad — is the contemporary equivalent of his resignation letter: a conscious declaration that the tower is complete for tonight, that the grip can be released, that the toad’s next breath is not your responsibility.

In the age of AI, the most radical act of self-care is the simplest: decide that the tower is tall enough, put down the last coin, and let the toad breathe.

The Four Things We Grip at Night (and How to Release Them)

Drawing from both the Quanzhen tradition and modern sleep psychology, here are the four most common forms of nighttime gripping — and the Liu Haichan approach to each.

1. The Unfinished Task: The brain’s Zeigarnik effect keeps incomplete tasks in active working memory. The Quanzhen response: write it down before bed. Externalise the grip. The moment a task is recorded, the brain releases its hold. Your notebook is your toad — it holds the coin so you don’t have to.

2. The Unresolved Conversation: Rumination about interpersonal conflict is one of the leading causes of sleep-onset insomnia. The Quanzhen response: practise 觀心 (Guān Xīn) — observe the conversation as if watching it from a distance. You are not the argument. You are the awareness watching the argument.

3. The Anticipated Future: Anxiety about tomorrow is the mind’s attempt to control what cannot yet be controlled. The Quanzhen response: recall Liu Haichan’s coin. Everything you are trying to protect is balanced on a toad. The toad will breathe when it breathes. Your planning tonight changes nothing about tomorrow’s toad.

4. The Identity You’re Protecting: The deepest grip is often the most invisible: the attachment to being a certain kind of person — successful, responsible, in control. Sleep requires the temporary dissolution of this identity. The Quanzhen tradition calls this 忘我 (Wàng Wǒ) — forgetting the self. Neuroscience calls it the deactivation of the default mode network’s self-referential processing. Both are describing the same necessary release.

The Liu Haichan Pre-Sleep Release Ritual

Here is a practical five-minute practice, drawn from Quanzhen inner alchemy and adapted for the modern bedroom:

Step 1 — Name the Coins (2 minutes): Sit on the edge of your bed. Take a piece of paper and write down everything your mind is currently holding: tasks, worries, conversations, decisions. Do not analyse them. Simply name them. You are counting your coins before you put them down.

Step 2 — Place Them on the Toad (1 minute): Fold the paper and place it on your bedside table. Say, silently or aloud: “These are real. They will be here tomorrow. Tonight, I am not responsible for them.” This is not denial. This is the recognition that Liu Haichan had: the coins exist, but you do not have to hold them.

Step 3 — Enter the Silk (2 minutes): Lie down. Feel the temperature of your silk bedding against your skin — the cool, smooth weight of mulberry fibroin, the fabric that has been used in Chinese sleep ritual for over 5,000 years. Let the sensation anchor you in the present moment. The silk does not know about your emails. It knows only the temperature of your body, right now, in this breath. This is the toad’s breath. This is the moment the coin falls. This is sleep.

The Sea Toad’s Final Teaching

Liu Haichan chose his Taoist name carefully. The toad — 蟾 (Chán) — is an ancient symbol in Chinese cosmology of the moon, of transformation, and of the cycles that cannot be controlled. The three-legged golden toad of Chinese mythology lives on the moon, swallowing it and releasing it in the eternal rhythm of waxing and waning.

This is the teaching encoded in his name: life moves in cycles that do not require your management. The moon does not need you to hold it in the sky. Your body does not need you to supervise its sleep. The toad will breathe. The coin will fall. The night will do what nights have always done.

Your only task — the task that Liu Haichan spent the rest of his life practising — is to release your grip long enough to let it happen.

“The toad does not ask permission to breathe. The night does not ask permission to come. Only you are still asking — and that is why you are still awake.”

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Liu Haichan watched the coin balance on the toad’s back — and in that breath of recognition, released a grip he had held his whole life. 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 →🕯️🏮☯️

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