This session is part of Reflective Meditation’s Daily Online Meditation practice at reflectivemeditation.org/dailyonline.
It’s Memorial Day, and the session begins with a question that someone brought to one of Linda’s recent groups: would I be willing to die for my country, for democracy? It’s the kind of question that stops you. And rather than sidestep it, Linda uses it as an opening into a teaching that has been part of Buddhism from the beginning — the teaching on unanswerable questions.
Questions the Buddha Wouldn’t Touch
The Buddhist tradition has a formal category for questions that resist resolution. They are described as unfathomable, beyond logic and reason — not because the answers are simply unknown, but because answering them wouldn’t help. The Buddha’s criterion was pragmatic: does engaging with this question lead toward freedom from dukkha? If not, he set it aside.
Two classic examples: have I lived before, and will I live again after death? Is there a creator god or an ultimate divine being? These questions have occupied human minds across millennia, and most traditions, Linda notes, will say: don’t even go there. They’re a hindrance. They’ll run you in circles.
Modern Unanswerable Questions
But we are living in an era full of our own unanswerable questions — not the cosmological kind, but the existential and ethical ones. And unlike the classical formulation, many of these do feel pressing. They come into meditation uninvited, because they’re woven into our lives.
Linda invited her group to name theirs, and what surfaced was striking in its range: why do bad things happen to good people? What does it mean to believe in a practice and know it isn’t enough? Who gets into the lifeboat first? What’s outside the universe? What is evil, and does it exist on its own? Where will I find my courage in the face of illness and death?
These are not idle philosophical puzzles. They are questions people carry because the answers feel like they would change something — would reduce the dukkha, clarify what to do next, release some knot of uncertainty that’s been there a long time.
Befriending the Questions
Rather than advising people to dismiss their unanswerable questions in the classical manner, Linda proposes something gentler: bringing kindness and curiosity to them. Letting them run their course within meditation and within life. Even befriending them.
That shift in relationship, she suggests, might change the questions themselves. Or it might reveal that some of them can be set aside — not because they’ve been answered, but because we’ve outgrown them, or because their urgency has changed. And sometimes what we discover is that the question was never really about the abstract thing at all. It was about time. It was about belonging. It was about whether there would be room for us.
Sitting With What We Can’t Resolve
The session closes not with answers but with companionship — with a few minutes of freeform writing and then sharing, and then thirty minutes of sitting together with whatever questions are present. Kate noticed hers were all about time. Janet’s was about who gets into the lifeboat. Elizabeth’s went back to her teenage self, wondering what’s outside the universe.
These questions don’t disappear in meditation. But they can be held differently. And that holding — with curiosity rather than urgency, with friendliness rather than demand — is its own kind of practice.
