When a youth, I faced my first mind-imploding question. I was from an evangelical Christian milieu in which "God" was a household word. Well, one day the question arose, one no one had ever posed in my presence, "If God created everything, where did God come from?" I had no answer. My mind could not go to before God. I kept this dead-end inquiry secret. These kinds of questions were not to be made public. The out was, "There are some things we just accept by faith." Later, I learned of the well-known question, "Why is there something rather than nothing?" Good question.
I came from a culture of off-the-rack answers. I came, in time, to see unanswerable questions are teeming all around. Question marks fill earth and sky, and my mind and heart. I like it that way. I do not even know who I am or where I came from, but that matter can wait for another writing. Let us begin with a Zen koan.
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I'll use teacher for Daowu, disciple for Jianyuan, and teacher, the last, for Shishuang, all Chinese Zen Buddhists, or Ch'an Buddhists, from long ago -
The teacher and his disciple went to a house to offer condolences and perform funeral rites. The disciple hit the coffin with his hand and asked, "Alive or dead?" His teacher said, "I'm not saying alive, I'm not saying dead." The disciple asked, "Why not?" The teacher responded, "I'm not saying! I'm not saying!"
On the way home, the disciple said, "Say something right now, Teacher. If you don't, I'm going to hit you." "You can hit me, but even if you hit me, I'm not saying," came the reply. The disciple hit him.
After the teacher passed away, the disciple went to another teacher and told him this story. This teacher said, "I'm not saying alive, I'm not saying dead." "Why not?" questioned the disciple. Like the first, this teacher said, "I'm not saying! I'm not saying!"
At these words, the disciple had an insight. So, one day, he took a hoe, went into the teaching hall, crossed from east to west, and returned from west to east. "What are you doing?" asked the teacher, to which the disciple said, "I'm searching for the sacred bones of our late teacher."
The teacher said, "Waves flood every place, whitecaps overwhelm the sky. What sacred bones of our teacher are you looking for?" The disciple replied, "This is just what I need to strengthen me." Another Buddhist present said, "The sacred bones of the late teacher are still here."
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Buddhist teacher John Tarrot, in Bring Me the Rhinoceros, writes, "[S]ome questions once asked, cannot be unasked." True. The disciple could not give up the search for an answer. He, however, wanted someone else to give him the answer. And no one could give it to him, not even his beloved, wise teacher.
So, what could the disciple do? He had to live with the question. Or, better, the question lived him. Spiritually, answers do not just give themselves to you because you want them.
You may live many years, giving yourself to a question before it gives itself to you as an answer. And the answer might be, "I don't know. I can't know." The answer might be, "I won't say. I won't say." Or it might be an answer that conventionally makes no sense, so you can live with it, but if you share it, most people will have no idea what you are saying. You are not sharing an idea, and they only live in the world of ideas. They are looking for answers that fit inside letters pieced together. Not you. You are no longer satisfied with those answers.
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When we give our ideas as final answers for others, we are not being honest, even if we think we are. Likewise, we are doing others a disservice. We are trying to think for them. We are selling them short, so to speak. So, as a teacher, I learned the best thing I could offer is a question. I share my thoughts from my experience, but it all comes from and to a question that others must live for themselves.
The life-giving answers, the below-the-surface ones, must be lived through, not merely felt through or thought through. They cannot be inherited. No guru, roshi, preacher, holy book, ... can give them to you. No one can smile for you.
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So, where are the late teacher's bones? Through metaphor, the second teacher gives an indirect reply and asks, "What sacred bones of our teacher are you looking for?" Good question.
Now, what about the guy nearby who gives a direct answer? He says, "The sacred bones of the late teacher are still here." Well, the disciple might agree. Yet, that is not his answer. Truth is true to you when it is your answer, your truth.
Still, we are left, as the disciple, with a question. He hears, "The sacred bones of the late teacher are still here." What does that mean? How do you say what cannot be said? You do not.
Finally, you are left with that. You can know the truth, but when you try to put it in your mouth, it will not fit. Mouths and ears cannot hold it. It keeps slipping away, nowhere.
If someone says, "This is what a rock is...," they have not said what a rock is. No one can say what a rock is. No rock fits in the mouth. How much more what love is? No one can say what love is, but you can know what it is. Also, from one encounter with love to the next, love may present itself as different from before. Who knows how many love-shades there are? If one says, "I know God," well, what if there are many God-shades, too? One shade or a myriad, you see for yourself. Still, you may think, "I haven't an idea what I'm seeing."
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The disciple's teacher was wise in not saying. Sometimes, not saying is the answer, at least for a time.
This does not mean we need to shun answers. We need, however, to learn to live with questions without rushing to an answer. Rushing to an answer, we come upon pseudo-answers. Living with unanswered and unanswerable questions can be fun. I know what love is, so I have no idea what love is - wonderful!
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I leave you with Rainer Maria Rilke's words, from his Advice to a Young Poet ...
I would like to beg you, dear Sir, to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don't search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, some day far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.
