Buddhist Audio Books

From Year 3, Part 4, Week 1

Unanswerable questions There are many instances in the Pāli Canon where the Buddha tries to indicate to his hearers that the questions they are asking do not make sense, apparently because the language of the question does not reflect the way things are. Over and over again someone puts a question to the Buddha which, from the Buddha’s Enlightened point of view, makes no sense and cannot be answered. For example when someone asks him, “Does an Enlightened being continue to exist after death?” the Buddha replies that:

• They do not continue to exist,

• They do not cease to exist,

• They do not both continue to exist and cease to exist,

• They do not neither continue to exist nor cease to exist.

Other questions, such as whether the world is eternal or not, and whether the soul and the body are the same thing or not, all get the same treatment. What the Buddha seems to be doing here is saying that these questions cannot be answered, because from the Enlightened viewpoint they do not really make sense. He may also be implying that any answer framed in words which his hearers could understand would be false and misleading. The words that are used to frame the questions, or the words he could use to frame the answers, imply certain assumptions about the world that are not true. Perhaps it is a little like asking, “Where is the end of the rainbow?”, or, “Would our house survive if the sky were to fall?” Both questions assume that because there is a word for something there is a real ‘thing’ that is designated by the word. But in fact ‘rainbow’ and ‘sky’ are not independent things, they are just convenient designations for phenomena that are produced by conditions, and depend on our perceptions for any reality they may have.