The Fourteen Questions the Buddha Refused to Answer Are
More Important Than Everything He Said. During the Buddha's forty-five years of teaching, there
were fourteen questions he was
repeatedly asked,
yet he
never uttered a single word in response. His
reasons for refusing to answer are clearer
than all his words combined; they reveal his
true intentions.
But before discussing these fourteen questions,
we need to talk about two things
that will help you understand
why the Buddha's silence is more powerful
than his words. Hello
everyone,
I'm Wang Lijie.
Today we're entering the fourth episode of our series on practicing Buddhism along its historical timeline. In the last episode,
we discussed how
Siddhartha's first sermon in Sarnath
was essentially a dimensional reduction translation, breaking down the
indivisible enlightenment under the Bodhi tree
into a linear framework that human language can bear.
But today I want to tell you an even more surprising fact:
the Buddha didn't just translate once;
he translated countless times for different people.
Sometimes, for the same question,
he would say yes to one person,
no
to another, and remain silent to a third.
Let's discuss two stories together. By
looking at these two stories side by side,
you can understand the
core secret of the Buddha's teaching method. The
first story
comes from the commentary tradition of the Pali Canon's
Khuddaka Nikaya. There was a woman named Kesyakotami whose
only son died shortly after learning to walk.
She frantically searched the city for medicine, clutching her child's body.
Everyone told her the
child was dead and there was
no cure.
Finally, someone told her
to seek the Buddha.
She found Siddhartha with her child in her arms.
Siddhartha glanced at her and
said, "
I can help
you. Go through the city and ask each house
for a mustard seed,
but on one condition:
the seed
must come from a family where no one has ever died."
She went and
knocked on the first door,
asking, "Has anyone died in your family
?" The
person replied, "Yes,
my husband passed away last year." The
second house
said, "Yes,
my mother passed away three years ago." The
third, the
fourth, the
fifth...
She knocked on every door in the city
but couldn't find a single suitable mustard seed. At this point,
she stopped,
not out of despair,
but because she had
witnessed firsthand a truth:
death was not a unique tragedy that befell her;
it was a universal truth that everyone must experience.
She put down her child's body,
returned to the Buddha, and
later became a nun.
Ultimately, he attained Arhatship. Did
you notice
what profound teachings the Buddha spoke of here?
No.
He didn't lecture a mother who had just lost her child on dependent
origination, impermanence, or the
Twelve Links of Dependent Origination.
He knew
those concepts were meaningless at that moment. What
he did
was design a
process for her to experience for herself.
She didn't need to hear a doctrine;
she needed to walk through it, to live out the doctrine
with her own feet and her own
eyes. The
second story
comes from the Samyutta Nikaya of the Pali Canon.
On Gaya Mountain,
facing a thousand ascetic practitioners whose practice centered on fire offerings, the
Buddha
spoke a very short sutra to them.
He said, "
Everything is burning.
Your eyes are burning, your ears are burning,
your body is burning,
your consciousness is burning.
What fire is burning you? The
fire of greed, the
fire of hatred, the
fire of ignorance."
Why didn't he speak of the Four Noble Truths or the
Twelve Links of
Dependent Origination here, but instead spoke of fire?
Because he was facing
a group of people who regarded fire as the ultimate symbol of the universe.
He directly used their most familiar and
sacred symbol as an entry point,
and then, within their own conceptual framework,
completed a cognitive reversal.
You worship fire?
Fine,
I tell you,
you yourselves are on fire.
According to the scriptures,
those thousand people all attained Arhatship on the spot.
This number is certainly astonishing to modern people,
but the focus of the scriptures is not on the numbers. What
they are saying is that
the Buddha accurately found their frequency and
hit the mark. If
you put these two stories together, you
can find an extremely clear pattern.
Siddhartha never starts from his own framework;
he starts from the framework of his audience.
He first goes to where you are,
using your language,
your experience,
your pain points,
to lead you to where he wants to take you.
Kesyapa Kotami didn't need concepts; he needed experiences,
so he designed an experience. The
fire-worshipping ascetics didn't need new symbols; they needed the
redefinition of old symbols,
so he borrowed fire. The
five ascetics in the previous episode needed to
hear an alternative they could accept,
so he first talked about the Middle Way, then about the Four Noble
Truths. The same
enlightenment has
countless translations.
Each version
is tailor-made for a specific person,
at a specific moment,
to solve a specific problem.
In the Pali scriptures,
this is called teaching according to the audience's capacity.
The Buddha wasn't teaching a course;
he was healing.
He was a doctor.
And the standard of a good doctor is never
how many prescriptions he knows,
but whether he can
accurately diagnose your illness
and prescribe the right medicine. The
same
ingredient, a different dosage, changes the
effect. The
same medicine,
given to people with different constitutions, elicits
completely different reactions.
Understanding this
will prevent you from making a
fatal mistake that many people have made: taking what
the Buddha said to person A and applying it to person B, only to
find a contradiction. It's
not a contradiction, it's that
you're using a prescription for a cold
to treat a broken bone.
Okay,
up to this point,
we've talked about what the Buddha said.
But now,
I want to take you to a deeper level.
What he didn't say:
In the Buddha's forty-five years of teaching, there was
a set of questions that were repeatedly
asked by different disciples,
but he always refused to answer. The
Pali scriptures
list ten such questions. The
Sanskrit tradition expanded some of these sets into four-line phrases,
making fourteen.
Chinese Buddhism uses the
term "fourteen unanswerable questions," which is called avyākata in
Pali and avyākṛta in Sanskrit. This
means
these fourteen unspoken questions, which
I've categorized into four groups. The
first group
concerns the time of the world:
Is the world eternal,
impermanent, both
eternal and impermanent, or neither eternal
nor impermanent? The
second group
concerns the space of the world:
Is the world bounded, boundless, both
bounded and boundless, or neither bounded
nor boundless? The
third group
concerns the relationship between body and mind: Is the
subject of life (
traditionally translated as "life-giving being" in Chinese, and "
jīva" in Pali) the
same thing as the body,
or something different? The
fourth group
concerns the state of the Buddha after his death: Does the Tathagata
still exist after death, or not? Or does he
both exist and not exist, or neither exist
nor not exist? If
you look closely at these questions,
they cover some of the most core directions of human philosophy:
cosmology,
ontology, the
body-mind problem, and
life after death.
These are not questions asked casually; they
are the ultimate questions that the
most prominent thinkers in India 2,500 years ago were
most concerned with. The
Buddha's response was
silence.
His reasons for not answering are expressed from different angles
in different scriptures.
In the previous episode, we mentioned the parable in the *Arrow Parable*.
He addressed these questions...
Like being struck by a poisoned arrow and then
asking who shot it and
what the bow was made of—
this is a practical explanation.
These questions don't help with liberation,
so they're not worth answering.
But this is only the surface reason. There's a
deeper reason: the way
these questions are asked
is flawed.
They presuppose a
premise that the Buddha has already denied.
Look at the first set:
Is the world eternal or impermanent?
What does this question presuppose? It
presupposes that the world is a fixed entity
before you can ask whether it's eternal or not.
But within the framework of dependent origination, the
world isn't a fixed entity;
it's a continuously changing
process of causes and conditions coming together. If
you ask whether a river
is eternal or impermanent, the
question itself is invalid
because a river is
n't the same every second.
Now look at the fourth set: Does the Tathagata
still exist after death?
What does this presuppose? It
presupposes that there's an entity called the Tathagata, which
either exists or
doesn't exist after death.
But what was Siddhartha's core discovery under the Bodhi tree?
No-self. There was never
a fixed, unchanging Tathagata.
If there isn't even a fixed, unchanging subject,
then whether it exists after death is
like asking how many corners a square has. The
very structure of the question...
It's self-contradictory.
Therefore, the Buddha's silence was
n't because he didn't know,
nor because he knew but wouldn't tell you. Rather, it's
because the very phrasing of your question is flawed. Within this framework, regardless of whether my answer is yes, no, both, or neither, it will lead you astray. This contains a profound teaching wisdom: sometimes, answering a wrong question is more harmful than not answering at all. Because once you give an answer,
whether yes
or no,
you implicitly accept that the questioner's premise is correct,
locking them into that flawed framework. The
Buddha's silence
is itself the loudest answer:
your question is wrong. Go
back and examine your premise.
Now, if you put the teachings tailored to the individual and the fourteen unanswerable questions together, the
entire strategy of the Buddha's forty-five years of teaching
emerges.
It's not a theoretical system;
it's a precise diagnostic system.
Facing a mother who has lost her child,
he doesn't talk about theories;
he designs an experience.
Facing a group of fire worshippers,
he uses fire as an entry point.
Facing ascetics, he first teaches the
Middle Way.
Facing someone who raises a structurally flawed question,
he chooses silence.
Facing people of different capacities,
he teaches Dharma at different depths.
This isn't a contradiction;
it's
countless precise projections of the same enlightenment. There
's a hidden thread here that has had a profound impact on later generations.
It directly explains
why later Buddhist scriptures seem so contradictory. In
some scriptures, the Buddha speaks of reincarnation; in others,
he refuses to discuss what happens after death. In some places,
he describes the levels of meditation in detail; in others, he
says meditation is merely a tool,
not an end. In some scriptures,
he discusses cause and effect in great detail; in others,
he refuses to answer whether the world is fair. This is
n't a contradiction, but rather
because every statement has an
unseen premise—the
person he was facing at the time, their
state of mind, and their needs. If
you separate the prescription from the patient and read it in isolation, it will seem incongruous.
But if you put each sentence
back into its original context,
you'll find that
every dose is perfectly
appropriate.
Later, Mahayana Buddhism
used a term to summarize the Buddha's teaching style:
skillful means.
Many people misunderstand skillful means as discounting or
lowering standards.
This is a misunderstanding.
Skillful means means that
because he understands you so well, he
can transmit the deepest teachings to you in a way that is perfectly suited to you. Skillful means is
not discounting; it
's tailor-made.
And this tailor-made teaching method functioned flawlessly
during the Buddha's lifetime.
Because he was there in person, he
could adjust the prescription based on the patient's reaction at any time. Like a
doctor personally examining a patient,
looking directly at their face, he
could change the prescription at any moment.
But the problem was,
he couldn't live forever.
After his death, the
disciples faced an extremely difficult situation.
They had countless prescriptions,
but the doctor was gone.
They knew these prescriptions were effective for some people,
but they didn't necessarily fully understand
why one prescription worked
for one person but not another. Even
more troublesome was that
different disciples
had followed the Buddha for different periods and in different
situations, so
each person remembered different prescriptions.
When they sat together
trying to organize all of the Buddha's teachings,
those seemingly contradictory points
became unavoidable problems. The
Buddha himself
hadn't written a single word;
all his teachings
existed entirely in the memories of his disciples. A
doctor skilled in teaching according to the patient's capacity
left behind a room full of scattered prescriptions,
without indicating who each prescription was for,
without leaving instructions, and
then he was gone forever.
What would the succeeding disciples do?
They couldn't let these prescriptions just scatter like that; they
had to organize,
verify, and
unify them.
But before the organization even began,
a profound conflict erupted within them. The
two sides of the conflict... These
were the Buddha's two closest disciples,
Mahakasyapa and Ananda.
Mahakasyapa was renowned for his
ascetic practices and was recognized by the Buddha as the foremost ascetic, possessing
profound spiritual cultivation. However,
he spent many years in solitary practice in the forest, unlike
Ananda, who was constantly
by the Buddha's side.
Ananda served the Buddha closely for twenty-five years,
hearing more teachings than anyone else
and possessing the most astonishing memory.
But Ananda had a fatal flaw that Mahakasyapa seized upon: at the
moment of the Buddha's death,
he had not yet attained Arhatship. The tension arose between the
most profound practitioner
and the one with the most complete memory regarding
what the Buddha actually said.
Behind this tension
lies a fundamental question that has permeated Buddhism for two thousand five hundred years:
how do you determine which teachings are the Buddha's true teachings? By the
depth of one's realization, or by the
breadth of one's memory?
By how much you have understood,
or by how much you have heard? But we will not delve into
this story,
nor the first large-scale
rectification movement of Buddhist teachings it sparked,
because before discussing that,
we need to understand one thing:
how did the Buddha manage the people around him during his lifetime?
What are your thoughts on this episode, viewers? Have the
Buddha's silence and his teachings tailored to the individual's needs
brought you any new insights?
In your own study of Buddhism,
have you encountered any seemingly contradictory passages that seem perplexing?
Feel free to leave your thoughts in the comments section.
Next time,
we'll discuss a particularly interesting topic: the
birth of the Sangha.
How exactly does someone who has fully realized the absence of self manage a group of people with a sense of self? The
precepts he established are
not the kind of moral dogma you might imagine,
but rather a sophisticated community operating protocol. The
design of this protocol
may be more sophisticated than many modern management theories.
I'm Wang Lijie,
see you next time.