by Tang Huyen

A quiet mind has no questions and no problems. It doesn’t look for anything beyond what’s already at hand.

Our discursive mind is made for daily routines
(survival in the small) but perhaps is not made
to tackle big issues (intelligibility in the big), and
for the latter perhaps riddles are the only things
to be fed to it like pacifiers if it wants to bother
itself with them at all.

And beyond the riddles, perhaps there is the
quiescence of all mentation, in which one no
longer poses questions to oneself, especially
if they are insolvable questions that at best
can admit of riddles as Ersatz answers.

A quiet mind has no questions and no problems.
It doesn’t look for anything beyond what’s
already at hand, my love.

Colophon

Posted to talk.religion.buddhism on July 17, 2004, in reply to a thread on rebirth, where an interlocutor (haunts) asked for an explanation rather than riddles. Author: Tang Huyen (Laughing Buddha, Inc.). Message-ID: <[email protected]>.

The post makes a clean epistemological distinction: the discursive mind (vikalpa) is functional equipment evolved for survival at the small scale — identifying food, danger, social patterns. Big metaphysical questions (rebirth, consciousness, the nature of the self) are outside its native range. Riddles are the most honest response available — not a refusal but an acknowledgment of the limit. Beyond them is not a better answer but the cessation of the questioning itself: quiescence of mentation, where no question arises because no questioner persists to pose one. This is consistent with the Buddha’s silence on the unanswerable questions (avyakata) — not agnosticism but the recognition that a quiet mind dissolves the questions along with the asker.

Preserved from the Usenet archive for the Good Work Library by the New Tianmu Anglican Church, 2026.

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