Whose Side Are You On Anyway?

Are the monk and priest good guys, bad guys, or neither?

Whose Side Are You On Anyway?

We just finished reading a pretty peculiar passage.

In a dream, Zhen Shiyin asked the Buddhist monk and Taoist priest to show him the way to gain enlightenment in order to help him “escape the pain of karmic suffering.” The monk and priest told him it was a celestial secret, showed him the stone, told him to remember their names, and left him confused.

He wound up seeing them again after waking up. They came up to him as he was turning to go back home with his daughter Yinglian.

Instead of warning him about something that was coming, though, or telling him some deep and profound truth, they asked him to let her go:

那僧還說：「舍我罷！舍我罷！」

“Let her go! Let her go!” continued the monk.

“Continued” here is probably not a strong enough translation on my part. I’d say that this is more like “commanded.”

Now, this really should strike us as odd. Even if we allow for the craziest of cultural differences, this really isn’t the way that we’d expect a trusted and respected religious authority to act, right?

So what’s going on here?