Let’s suppose you are the Master of a Buddhist sangha, or in Western terminology, an Abbot of a Buddhist monastery or convent. A student comes to you and asks: Is the world eternal or not eternal? Is the world finite or infinite? Is the soul the same as the body or is the soul one thing and the body another? Does a Buddha exist after death or does a Buddha not exist after death? Or after death does a Buddha both exist and not exist? Or after death, does a Buddha neither exists nor does not exist?
And now suppose your student says: If you answer my questions, I will remain your student. If you do not, I will return to lay life.
How would you respond?
The Buddha’s answer was one of the most famous responses ever recorded. It has been repeated millions of times over 25 centuries.
The Buddha began by asking the questioner: Did I ever say that if you would become a member of the sangha, I would answer such questions? Did you ever say to me that you would be a member of the sangha if I would answer such questions? Having received a “no” response to both questions, the Buddha then gave the famous response.
Suppose a man is struck by a poison arrow and people who care about him bring a surgeon in the hope that the arrow and its poison can be removed before it is too late. Suppose that man says: Before the surgeon removes this arrow from my body, I must know if the person who shot me was a noble, a Brahmin, a merchant or a worker.
And I must know his name and which clan he belongs to. Was he a tall man, a short man, or a man of average height? Was he a man of dark skin or brown or was he golden-skinned? In which village, town, or city does he live? Was the bow a long bow or a cross-bow? Was the bow string formed of fiber, reed, sinew, hemp or bark? Was the wood of the arrow shaft a wild or a cultivated wood? What kind of feathers were on the trailing end of the shaft? Were the feathers taken from a vulture, a heron, a hawk, a peacock or a stork? Was the arrow bound with the sinew of an ox, buffalo, deer or monkey? Was the arrowhead spiked, razor-tipped, curved, barbed, calf-toothed or lancet-shaped?
The Buddha observed that such a man would die before his questions could be answered. Instead of squandering time responding to his irrelevant questions, it would have made more sense to do the work, the surgery, that needed to be done.
He also made the very interesting observation that such questions represented wrong view, as distinguished from Right View, the first fold of the eightfold path. Where ever there is wrong view, “there is birth, there is ageing, there is death, there are sorrow, lamentation, pain, grief and despair.” Wrong view presupposes a self and only a self can hold a view such as “The world is eternal” or “The world is not eternal.”
So every question propounded by the monk presupposed the existence of a self that could hold views. By asking: “Which view is correct?” he was asking a question that was inherently invalid.
The Buddha went on to observe that even if speculative questions were answered, the answers would be: “unbeneficial,…would not lead to disenchantment, to dispassion, to cessation, to peace, to direct knowledge, to enlightenment, to Nibbana.”
And the Buddha reminded the monk that he had taught the First Noble Truth that suffering is inherent in life, the Second Noble Truth that desire conditioned by ignorance is the cause of suffering, the Third Noble Truth that a path leading to the cessation of suffering had been found, and that the path was the Eightfold Path.
The Buddha than asked, rhetorically: “And why did I teach the Four Noble Truths? Because they are beneficial,… lead to disenchantment, to dispassion, to cessation, to peace, to direct knowledge, to enlightenment, to Nibbana.”
The Buddha responded, in effect, by saying that the shortest distance between two points is a straight line. Any deviation from that straight line lengthens the time it takes to get from point A to point B. If the traveler enjoys the side excursions, he or she may not live long enough to explore all such speculative paths.
The Buddha made the path of Buddhism very simple. The theistic religions can debate which one worships the true god, why there is a trinity instead of a unity, what is god’s plan for mankind, how many angels can dance on the head of a pin, and other such questions the answers to which do not lead to enlightenment.
Buddhists can simply cultivate the eightfold path. The desire to engage in the mental gymnastics of speculation is nothing other than the desire to avoid cultivation.
So do you know the way to Nirvana? It is cultivation of the eightfold path, thereby removing the poison arrow of sakkaya ditti, the wrong view of self. The wise leave uncultivated the side trails that lead nowhere.
(I based this blog on my understanding of The Culamalunkya Sutta, “The Shorter Discourse to Malunkyaputta,” No. 63 in The Majjhima Nikaya (The Middle Length Discourses of the Buddha), translated from the Pali by Bhikkhu Nanamoli d.1960 and Bhikkhu Bodhi).
