questions without answers

"I had a vision in which I saw myself knelt before the Buddha."

My mind had been loaded with so many questions that I was having trouble going through my day. I felt stifled, not unlike a clogged faucet, and the words that came out of my mouth trickled out miserably. My heart was clenched in anguish out of desperation to know the answers, incapable of letting anything in or out.

I knelt in silence for a couple minutes, reciting the questions in my head to make sure I did not miss a single one. I knelt in silence until my knees and ankles were in pain, then at once I burst into recitation:

O Enlightened One, Why is it that we are alive? Why is it that we are born? Why is it that we die? Why is it that we are surrounded by people yet feel so lonely? Why is it that we spend so much time on meaningless things? Why is it that we cannot bring ourselves to be honest with others? Why is it that we must hate ourselves? Why is that the universe continues to expand? Why is it that the animals fear us? Why is it that we must kill to be at peace? Why is it that we are afraid of being alone with our thoughts? Why is it that...

I continued for hours, adding in even more questions that I thought of as I was reciting others. And when finally, I stopped out of exhaustion, I gazed up into his eyes.

He did not speak a single word. He simply stared back and smiled. The light in his eyes made it clear to me that he had pondered all those questions as well, had been consumed by the agony of ignorance, had been restrained in the grip of confusion and sorrow and thirst for knowledge. And yet there was kindness and joy in those eyes. An unmatched generousity that struck me with guilt for having been as self-absorbed as to think that I could not live without the answers to these questions. I was filled with shame that not knowing the answer was giving me such untold pain, that I had even have wasted my time contemplating these issues that seemed to be so irrelevant now.

At the same time, I felt as though some tension inside of me had released itself. Some blockage deep inside had been dissolved. I was forgiven.

At once I realized that such questions did not need answers. It did not matter whether the Buddha knew and had refused to tell me, or whether he could not answer them either. It did not matter that I would never know the answers. It mattered only that I knew they did not matter. It mattered only that now I could unload them and leave them behind, and open my heart and mind towards understanding what truly mattered, to open my eyes and see for the first time the lessons the universe had been trying to teach me all along.

"What we are looking for is what is looking."