I liked this discussion of a Buddhist text in Myth, Faith, and Hermeneutics, and want to capture some of it here:
Thus have I heard: The Exalted One was once staying near Savatthi, in the Deer Park. Then the venerable Rādha came to the Exalted One. having done so, he saluted him and sat down to one side.
So seated, the venerable Rādha thus addressed the Exalted One: “They say, ‘Māra! Māra! lord. Pray, lord, how far is there Māra?'”
“Where a body is, Rādha, there would be Māra or things like Māra, or at any rate what is perishing. Therefore, Rādha, regard the body as Māra; regard it as of the nature of Māra; regard it as perishing, as an imposthume, as a dart, as pain, as a source of pain. They who regard it thus rightly regard it. And the same is to be said of feeling, perception, the activities and consciousness”
“But rightly regarding, lord, — for what purpose?”
“Rightly Regarding, Rādha, for the sake of disgust.”
“But disgust, lord — for what purpose is it?”
“Disgust, Rādha, is to bring about dispassion.”
“But dispassion, lord — for what purpose is it?”
“Dispassion, Rādha, is to get release.”
“But release, lord — what is it for?”
“Release, Rādha, means Nirvana.”
“But Nirvana, lord — what is the aim of that?”
“This question, Rādha, goes too far. You can grasp no limit to this question. Rooted in Nirvana, Rādha, the holy life is lived. Nirvana is its goal, Nirvana is its end.”(Samyutta-nikaya, khandha-vagga II, 1)
Panikkar: “This is reduction to the sublime. He does not say the question has no meaning. How could he say this when it is the most anguishing question for a good part of mankind and the very torture from which, according to the Buddha himself, he has come to liberate us, the torment of useless anguish and suffering without reason? It is not an absurd question.
Let us imagine the question: ‘What is God?’ for this is basically the question at issue although nirvana is the problem in the dialogue. The Buddha answers that the question itself cannot grasp its proper limits, that the question does not know what it is asking. We must be careful in our exegesis. The Buddha does not say the Man who raises the question does not have something very definite in mind when he asks. He believes he knows it. He is asking about the Absolute, about God, about the last things, eternity, nirvana, etc. He knows very well what he wishes to know. What is truth? Pilate asked this question of him whom he called ‘Man’ and he too obtained only silence…
What the Buddha is saying is that the question itself is not capable of defining its limits, that the question asks nothing, for it does not know where the request leads or what it asks for. If I ask the color of the stone hidden in Shakyamuni’s pocket, I have some idea of the question’s limits. I do not know the color of the stone, nor even all colors, but I do know what a color is and I can distinguish a color from a sound or anything else. And I know that stones have colors.
The question, in a word, already contains the answer ontically; the question determines the very level at which the answer is an answer and through which the answer must pass, so to speak. The question fixes the limits of the answer and also gives the conditions of its intelligibility. Only what is possible to ask is asked because the limits of the answer are already known.
The unquestionable cannot be questioned, and if the Absolute is questionable it is no longer absolute. In other words, a real question about the nature of the Absolute cannot grasp its limits, can offer no criteria by which the answer might be verified. The question does not know what it is asking; it is not a question. This comes down to saying that I am asking nothing… All the meaning I find in the question is the meaning I inject into it, a meaning the questioner gives, but certainly not the meaning of the question itself.
We are near the end of the Buddha’s catharsis. The meaning of the question is not the question’s meaning, but the meaning the questioner gives it, his anguish, his insecurity, his doubts. He projects into a question a problem the question does not contain and cannot support. So what is to be done? What the Buddha does is very clear. He makes us understand that the real question destroys itself and in so doing ceases to be a question, and frees us to go directly onto the path of deliverance. To be sure, by destroying the question he has also destroyed the questioner, the little ego who had identified himself with the question.
What is to be done then? To make Man aware of his limits, to center him on what he can do, not to distract him from his human task, not to allow him to be dissipated by and in his speculation…He removes the obsession with orthodoxy in order to return to orthopraxis…” (pp. 271-272)
—
These ideas to me connect back to the purifying value of atheistic arguments to the excesses of certain speculative theology and theistic affirmations, and the value of the apophatism of the church fathers (and also Panikkar’s own cosmotheandric framing) in understanding the aim of religious life. Transcending the modern western emphasis on orthodoxy and religion as “belief system” requires this silencing of the question, this liberation. This text seems to me to say the kind of thing that I wanted to say here, but so much more transparently and clearly.
Ἐν Αἰνίγματι 