Unprofitable Questions
The Buddha often refused to answer vague and unprofitable questions, which he called avyākata, meaning “undeclared,” neither affirming nor denying them. These were not seen as irrelevant but were deliberately left unanswered because they do not directly lead to relief from suffering.
Such questions include enduring speculative puzzles, such as whether the universe is eternal or not, whether the self is identical with the body, whether, upon death, the liberated being continues to exist, or whether there is or is not a soul.
Refusing to assert or deny is not a sign of ignorance. Instead, it is a compassionate and practical response. Engaging in such speculation often causes people to become trapped in mental loops, confusing permanence with impermanence, fixating on views, and polarising eternalism, such as the idea of some permanent essence, against annihilationism, which is the belief that selfhood ends at death.
Both extremes can hinder clarity, tranquillity, and dispassion, ultimately preventing freedom from suffering.
The Buddha offered a vivid metaphor that illustrates this well: imagine a man wounded by an arrow who insists on knowing the caste or social status of the shooter, the type of bow used, whether the bowstring was twisted six or eight times, or whether the arrow was fletched from eagle feathers or hawk feathers, before he permits removal of the arrow or receives treatment. By the time all his questions are answered, he will die of shock.
The point is clear: speculation can distract from urgent care. The essential task is to remove the arrow, which is healing, rather than engaging in endless questioning.
From a therapeutic perspective, this principle maps beautifully onto the process of suffering, wounding, and recovery. When we ask, “Do I have a soul?”, “Does the soul continue after death?” or “Is my self permanent or not?”, we may be expressing a deeper movement of longing.
A wish to be secure, enduring, inviolable or a fear of ceasing, being lost, impermanent, or insubstantial. In such cases, the question is less about facts and more about the impulse behind it: the emotional urgency, existential fear, or desire, the wish not to vanish.
In the therapy room, the spirit of avyākata fosters a stance of relational openness. This is not passivity but a cultivated willingness to sit with not-knowing.
It involves avoiding rushing to define identities, diagnoses, narratives, or meanings too soon. Instead, it is a conscious pause from the need to answer, “What must be true?” Allowing what is present, such as sensations, feelings, thoughts, patterns, stories, silences, to emerge more fully, without distortion or premature framing.
This attitude fosters curiosity, attunement, and a sense of spaciousness. It loosens the grip of deeply held beliefs about who the client is, how trauma functions, what recovery should look like, what normality is, and what "progress" or "health" necessarily signifies.
Such rigidity can cause unnecessary suffering, including shame when someone doesn’t meet a prescribed “healthy” ideal, frustration with the rate of change, and fear that one is fundamentally broken or defective. In contrast, not knowing allows for openness to how things develop, rather than how we think they should unfold.
In adopting this stance, we honour what is not yet known, the deeper subtleties of a client's experience, the hidden fears, the unspoken yearnings, the latent potential, the nuance between change and continuity. The therapeutic approach becomes one of attentive engagement: guided by theory and skill, informed by compassion, but not over-confident in conceptual certainties. Interventions are offered but not enforced; meaning is co-discovered, not assumed.
The practice, then, is not to eliminate the question of the soul or self but to explore the grasping and fear behind it. What does it feel like to cling to permanence? What resistances arise when impermanence appears? What emotional energy fuels the question in the first place? As we dwell in that exploration, the focus shifts: from resolving the metaphysical query to observing the psychological drive behind it.
Over time, one may realise that impermanence is not merely a doctrine or philosophical concept, but a lived experience: felt in the body, in breathing, in ageing, in loss, in change, and in relational shifts. Similarly, the sense of a fixed, unchanging self may soften, leaving behind not a metaphysical soul but a dynamic flow of experiences, perceptions, memories, habits, and intentions.
This does not suggest nihilism or deny the existence of value, meaning, love, connection, or identity. Instead, it involves reducing the need for a permanent essence as a guarantee of worth or continuity.
In other words, one can still experience love, purpose, care, moral significance, and continuity without needing the soul as a metaphysical anchor. The burden of permanence is lessened; the weight of certainty is eased.
In this way, avyākata supports a therapeutic approach that balances careful observation, informed intervention, and humble openness to what cannot yet be known or resolved. It encourages clients and therapists alike to rest in emergence, to remain curious, to engage with fear and desire, and to find freedom not in clinging to what must be fixed, but in attending to what actually is, moment by moment, breath by breath.
Rory Singer
You can also read this post on our Substack journal, Unfolding.