Questions to be answered and answers to be questioned

Believe nothing, O monks, merely because you have been told it, because it is traditional, or because you yourselves have imagined it. Do not believe what your teacher tells you merely out of respect for the teacher. But whatsoever, after due examination and analysis, you find to be conducive to the good, the benefit, the welfare of all beings - that doctrine believe and cling to, and take it as your guide.

Gautama Buddha (Source: Kalama Sutta, Pali Canon)

Although this discourse is often cited as the Buddha's carte blanche for following one's own sense of right and wrong, it actually says something much more rigorous than that. Traditions are not to be followed simply because they are traditions. Reports, such as historical accounts or news, are not to be believed, just because the source seems reliable.

One's own preferences are not to be followed simply because they seem logical, or resonate with one's feelings. Instead, any view or belief must be evaluated and tested according to the results it yields, when put into practice.

When adopted and carried out, if it leads to welfare and happiness for all, then one should enter and remain in them. To guard against the possibility of any bias or limitations in one's understanding of those results, it is best to check it further with the experience of people who are wise.

The ability to question and test one's beliefs in an appropriate way is, said to be, appropriate attention. The ability to recognise and choose, wise people as mentors, is having admirable friends. These are the most important internal and external factors for attaining the goal of the practice; the goal to one’s life.

Existence

Life is imponderable. This impossibility of reckoning; this inability to foresee; is what makes this vital existence, this life, a life full of verve, vigour, vitality, and vivacity; a life long quest of questions and answers; questions to be answered and answers to be questioned.

Life is also full of abstracted imaginings - dreams; dreams of fortune; visions of glory; trance of delight. Dreams are the answers to questions that we have not yet figured out how to ask. Be that, as it may; life can also be dreary. In order to live, man must act.

To act, he must make choices. To make choices, he must define a code of values.

To define a code of values, he must know what he is and where he is - he must know his own nature, including his means of knowledge, and the nature of the universe in which he acts. He needs metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, all of which means: philosophy.

He cannot escape from this need. His only alternative is whether the philosophy guiding him is to be chosen by his mind, or by chance.

The Buddha said: “…whatsoever, after due examination and analysis, you find to be conducive to the good, the benefit, the welfare of all beings – that doctrine believe and cling to, and take it as your guide”. This is not always possible in the world we live in; and that is when philosophy comes to our aid.

If philosophy is about questions that may never be answered, then religion is about answers that may never be questioned. However, unlike religion, the philosophy of life has nothing to do with what could be called the inner deed, or true actions.

A person’s inner deed, an exercise of the will, an act by volition, an act that is the choice of his mind, is the true life of freedom.

However, this true life of freedom, the choices one would actually like to make, the willing and voluntary deeds dictated by one’s mind, are rarely attainable, in reality.

The termination of the process of deliberation or vacillation of purpose is not always volitient. Life is all about, and full of, compromises. Society necessitates this, in spite of what religions may say. Often, we chose not, what our mind says to chose, but what circumstances, and the need of the moment, dictates. Philosophy, on the other hand, takes into consideration the external deeds of man. Yet, it does not see such actions, this choice by chance, as isolated; but sees it as assimilated into and transformed in the world-reality process.

This process is the proper subject for philosophy and it considers this under the category of necessity. Therefore, it reject the reflection that wants to point out that everything could be otherwise; it views man in such a way that there is no question of an Either/Or. However, philosophy goes no further than probabilities, and in every assertion keeps a doubt in reserve.

Philosophical

Thus, it is well and good to be philosophical; but the realities of life dictates that we be practical as well. To be realistic means, we need to seek answers to questions and then again question the answers before we put action to thought.

As long as our motives are not based on greed; and, as far as possible, encompasses the common good of all, or at best the majority; then one could be quite certain that the resultant actions will produce more good than less.

It is also possible to attain, to some extent, the cherished ideals espoused by religions. After all, what is going to come of one’s actions, the results of which; the one who acts does not really know, and expectation is the only possibility.

The individual can only act, but his action enters into the order of things that maintains the whole of existence.

But this higher order of things that digests, so to speak, the free actions and works them together in its eternal laws of the universe, is the movement of karma, the creator of merit or otherwise.

“The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existing.” said Albert Einstein.

Buddha was foremost in questioning. Later, Socrates applied questioning as a method of examination to concepts that seem to lack any concrete definition; e.g., the key moral concepts at the time, the virtues of piety, wisdom, temperance, courage, justice, and, so on and so forth.

“According to W. K. C. Guthrie's The Greek Philosophers, while sometimes erroneously which one seeks the answer to a problem, or knowledge, the Socratic method was actually intended to demonstrate one's ignorance. Socrates, unlike the Sophists, did believe that knowledge was possible, but believed that the first step to knowledge was recognition of one's ignorance. Guthrie writes, “[Socrates] was accustomed to say that he did not himself know anything, and that the only way in which he was wiser than other men was that he was conscious of his own ignorance, while they were not. The essence of the Socratic method is to convince the interlocutor that whereas he thought he knew something, in fact he does not.”

Life is a question. Life is all about questions. More the questions, more the questions to be answered and answers to be questioned. The main thing is, not to fear to question.

Whoever needs to be questioned question them. If their answers do not satisfy, question the answers. If our politicians know that they will be questioned about all their uttering, mutterings, and actions; perhaps it will force them to be more responsible, more accountable, and more honest.

See you this day next week. Until then, keep thinking; keep laughing. Life is mostly about these two activities.

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