The undeclared questions · the arrow

Asked whether the cosmos is eternal, whether it is infinite, what happens to the awakened after death — the Buddha declined to answer, and the list of these avyākata is preserved as carefully as any teaching. The parable is famous: a man shot with a poisoned arrow who refuses treatment until he is told the archer's caste, name, village and bow-string will die uninformed. Read that beside this app and the effect is bracing. The Tree of Life is an answer to the undeclared questions — how the infinite became finite, why there is something, what withdrew to make room. Tzimtzum is a cosmogony in one word. The Kabbalists thought the questions were the most urgent ones a person could ask and built four centuries of literature on them; the Buddha thought asking them was a way of not getting up. This is not a disagreement about the answer. It is a disagreement about whether to have the conversation — and it is the most honest thing on this bench, because it means the cousin has a standing objection to the Tree's entire subject matter.