This is a bit hokie maybe but sometimes I wonder if a part of the point of Zen isn't that you have a person asking a question and you have a person answering the question. The person asking the question doesn't know the answer and the person being asked doesn't really, truly know the answer. So what if the two people switched positions? What if the Zen master played the student and the student played the master?
On the one hand you have the guy who more or less runs the temple. Someone comes in from the outside and you immediately have the following situation: Why are you master of the temple and I am the interloper? Why is it not the other way around? It's really a social convention that makes this so. There are no bars preventing you the interloper from walking right up and taking the master's seat. The only thing preventing you from doing so is your own inhibitions. To which the Zen master may say, "here, have my temple" and you feel sort of stupid because you have no place being the master of the temple, you haven't earned it so to speak, and you know it. Still, what separates you tangibly from the master of the temple other than you are the interloper and he is the master? Does anything else extraordinary separate the two of you as radically different people with differnent stations in life?
I went to a Catholic wedding once where the priest, in part of his sermon, mentioned that since people were at "our" place (the cathedral we were in, refering to the clergy and everyone who lived and worked there I assume) it would be appreciated if they acted politely or whatever his exact words were I don't remember. I sort of thought to myself, "their place"? This huge building is "theirs"? Did they build it with their own hands? Did they personally purchase the land from the previous owners and if so where did that money come from? It seemed to me that the place was more or less built for them by others and quite a long time ago before anyone currently in it was alive. It was purchased for them with other people's money (the parishioners). It sort of struck me as odd that the priests thought they had some claim to it as "theirs". But then again I nor any other stranger there had any right to claim it as ours. It sort of made me feel like an outsider, like a "guest" at their church. It's brash of me to think that, I know, but those were the thoughts that came to my mind. Who's church was it really? I guess the socialist or communist in me came out at that moment to speculate on all sorts of things.
However, if you think of it, what's to stop me from walking up on the pulpit, grabbing the bible and start lecturing the people inside the cathedral about what is in the book in front of me? It's like one of those surreal moments when someone does something that is just way off the meter and it exposes a kind of fragility in our institutions. You see how fragile our institutions are by the fact that people act and are expected to act in a certain way. But there is nothing tangible preventing someone from breaking the norm, like standing up in a courtroom in the middle of session and yelling to the Judge, "here comes the judge...da do da do... It's just unexpected and it reveals that we humans are creatures who are tamed by nothing more than our own inhibitions and beliefs about the institutions we assemble in.
What if I were a professor of a classroom and one day all the students got together and decided to do something totally off the wall like get up in the middle of a lecture and take me out of my seat and sit me in the class seat while they all stood up on the lecture podium reading me the class text. Suddenly the rules have been violated in a radical way. Again, there is nothing physically preventing us from doing radical things other than our inhibitions and expectations of how we are supposed to act. Such actions sort of stun us, don't they? We are taken back when the rules are radically transgressed because it doesn't happen very often and we are not accustomed to how to respond. If people start doing it alot then there would fall into place a procedure for responding to the situation but if something is radically off the wall, we suddenly become stupified.
Just some random thoughts about religious people and their "domains" as it were.
