Among the old stories there is a demon named Kumbhakarna, the giant brother of the demon-king Ravana. He was famous across the three worlds for one thing above all: he loved to sleep.

He had not always been so. Long ago he had performed great austerities, and the gods, alarmed at his strength, had arranged that he would sleep for six months at a stretch and wake for only a single day. But Kumbhakarna came to treasure his sleep the way a miser treasures gold. He grew enormous and sluggish, mountains of him piled upon his bed, and his snores shook the palace walls.

When at last he was woken — and it took drums, and elephants walking over him, and cartloads of food heaped at his side — he would rise only to eat everything in sight, grumble that the day was a nuisance, and long to lie down again. He did nothing useful. He dreamed of nothing high. His comfort came entirely from sleep, from sloth, from not bothering, and it left him as dull when he woke as when he had lain down.

There was a kind of happiness in it, he insisted. The warm dark of sleep. The pleasure of no effort. The relief of caring about nothing. But it was a happiness that fooled him from the first breath to the last, for it never made him wiser, never made him kinder, never made him strong in any way that mattered. It only made him more like a stone.

The sages who told his story did not tell it to mock him. They told it as a warning. "Beware the joy that asks nothing of you," they said. "There is a comfort that comes from sleep and laziness and not paying attention — and it feels easy, but it clouds the mind at both ends, the beginning and the close. A whole life can sink into that fog and call it rest. Krishna named this the lowest of the three happinesses: the dark one, that deludes you start to finish."

And the listeners, who all knew the warm pull of the unmade bed and the undone task, listened closely.