6.12 — The Questions He Refused to Answer

There is a list, and it is called the avyakata — the undeclared, the things not answered. Fourteen questions, in four groups.

Is the universe eternal, or not eternal, or both, or neither?

Is the universe finite in space, or infinite, or both, or neither?

Is the soul identical with the body, or different from it?

Does an awakened person exist after death, or not exist, or both, or neither?

He would not answer any of them, and he was asked repeatedly, and by people who were annoyed about it.

Malunkyaputta and the arrow

A monk named Malunkyaputta got frustrated enough to issue an ultimatum. He said he would leave the order unless these questions were answered.

And the Buddha gave him an image.

A man is shot with a poisoned arrow. His friends bring a surgeon. And the man says: wait. I will not have this arrow removed until I know who shot me — his name, his clan, his caste, whether he is tall or short or of middling height, what colour his skin is, what village he comes from. I will not have it removed until I know what kind of bow it was, what the bowstring was made of, what kind of shaft, what feathers, what the arrowhead was.

"That man would die," he said, "and those things would still be unknown to him."

And then the point: the religious life does not depend on the view that the world is eternal, or not eternal. Whether you hold those views or not, there is birth, there is ageing, there is death, there is grief and lamentation and pain — and it is the ending of these, here and now, that I teach.

Why he refused, properly

And "he was being practical" is only part of it. The texts give four distinct reasons and they are worth separating.

One: it does not help. The arrow argument. These questions do not lead to disenchantment, to dispassion, to peace, to direct knowledge, to awakening. Time spent on them is time not spent on the thing that works.

Two: the questions are malformed. This is the deeper reason and it is a genuinely sophisticated philosophical position.

Take the fourth group: does an awakened person exist after death? The question assumes there is a fixed entity that either continues or does not (6.7). If there is no such entity, both answers are wrong, and so are "both" and "neither."

His own image: if a fire in front of you goes out, and someone asks in which direction it went — north, south, east or west — the question does not apply. The fire did not go anywhere. The conditions for burning ceased.

This is a claim that some questions are not hard but broken, and answering them either way would confirm a false assumption inside the question. Modern philosophy calls this a category error and the Buddha was doing it in the fifth century BCE.

Three: answering would produce clinging to a view. The tradition treats attachment to opinions as a form of clinging like any other (6.8), and one of the more damaging kinds. A person who has been given a metaphysical answer now has a position to defend, and the defending is precisely the mechanism the whole path is aimed at.

Four: the answers are not available by the means he had. He does not say the questions have no answers. He says they are not declared. There is a genuine difference between "there is no answer" and "I will not tell you," and he sits carefully in the second.

The best answers we have now

The user's question, and it deserves a real attempt rather than a restatement of the refusal. Here is where each of the four stands after twenty-five centuries.

Is the universe eternal?

Partly answerable now, and the answer is interesting.

The observable universe has an age: about 13.8 billion years, established from the cosmic microwave background, the expansion rate and the ages of the oldest stars. Volume IV covers the evidence.

But "the universe began 13.8 billion years ago" is not the same as "the universe is not eternal." What is established is that our observable region has a finite past in its current form. Whether there is something before, outside or underneath it — an eternal substrate, a cycle, a multiverse — is not established and may not be testable.

So the honest position is: the question has been partly converted from a metaphysical one into a physical one, and the remaining part is exactly as undecided as it was.

Is the universe finite in space?

Also partly answerable.

The observable universe is finite — light has only had 13.8 billion years to reach us, giving a horizon. Whether the whole thing is finite or infinite is unknown. Measurements of the curvature of space are consistent with flat to within the precision available, which is compatible with infinite extent and also with a very large finite one. Nobody knows and there may be no way to find out.

Is the soul the same as the body?

This is the mind-body problem and it is the most live of the four.

What is established: mental states depend on physical states in extremely fine detail. Damage a specific region and a specific capacity goes — Volume VI's opening case, Phineas Gage, is exactly this. Chemistry changes mood. Anaesthesia removes consciousness reversibly.

What is not established: why there is any experience at all. A complete physical account of a brain does not obviously entail that there is something it is like to be that brain, and this is the hard problem, which 15.2 takes up in full.

Where the honest ground is: the dependence is not in doubt, and the identity is. Which is roughly where the Buddha left it — his position was that the question as posed assumes a fixed soul to be compared with a body, and that the assumption is the problem.

Does an awakened person exist after death?

Not answerable, and probably not answerable in principle.

What can be said: there is no reliable evidence for the persistence of a person after death. The categories of claimed evidence — near-death experiences, reported past-life memories, mediumship — have all been examined and none has produced a result that survives scrutiny. 14.1 goes through them.

And the Buddha's structural point remains the sharpest thing anybody has said about it: the question presumes a fixed self that either continues or stops (6.7). If what is there is a process, the question is the fire's direction.

What to do with a question you cannot answer

This is the transferable part, and it is why this chapter exists.

The Buddha's method has four steps and they apply to any unanswerable question in an ordinary life.

Ask what turns on the answer. If nothing you would do differs between the two answers, the question is not urgent, whatever it feels like. Most metaphysical anxiety fails this test immediately.

Check whether the question is well formed. Does it contain an assumption that might be false? What is the meaning of my life assumes meaning is a property a life has, like mass. Why do I always fail assumes a fact not in evidence. A great many unanswerable questions are unanswerable because they are broken, and rephrasing dissolves them.

Notice what holding the question is costing. The arrow is in you. Malunkyaputta's real position was that he would not do the work until the metaphysics was settled, and the metaphysics is not going to be settled.

And be willing to say "I do not know," and to sit in it. This is the rarest of the four and the most valuable. The Buddha, at the height of his authority, with everyone waiting, said fourteen times that he would not answer — and did not substitute a comfortable guess, which is what almost every religious and political figure does with the same question.

The one honest criticism of the refusal

It should be made.

A refusal to answer can be a way of protecting a system from being tested. If nothing is asserted, nothing can be falsified. And the later tradition did not maintain the discipline — Buddhist schools produced elaborate metaphysics about rebirth, about the moment-by-moment structure of reality, and about what an awakened being is, all of it going well beyond what he declared.

The refusal was maintained for about one generation and then abandoned by nearly everybody, which is worth knowing when a tradition presents its metaphysics as his.

What to carry from this page

Pull the arrow out first. Whatever you are waiting to have settled before you deal with the thing that is actually wrong — it is not going to be settled.

Some questions are broken rather than hard. Check the assumptions before you attempt the answer.

Ask what turns on it. If nothing, the urgency is manufactured.

And "I do not know" is a complete answer. He said it fourteen times, at the height of his authority, and did not fill the gap with a guess — which is the single hardest thing in this chapter to imitate.

Next: 6.13 — the last year, the last meal, and the last sentence.