Arrow Parable

In Buddhism, there’s a story of a man who is struck by an arrow who, upon receiving offers of treatment from an available, trained individual, refuses until other questions can be answered; for example, who fletched this arrow? The value attributed to this parable is seemingly to inspire those who are presented with the teachings of the Buddha to focus on what he considered to be the most pressing issues and the teachings offered to address them. Critics may target the intended teaching as being focused on dismissing questioning or investigation of the methods or teachings; I believe this would be a misunderstanding. If a teacher is claiming to offer you a solution to a particular thing, and suggests that pursuing answers from them to questions beyond this scope is not useful, I would say there is a good chance they are right. I heard someone mention a story of a woman who sought out the advice of a purportedly very wise monk. This, on its own, could be considered worthwhile; he may have answers to questions or advice to offer. The problem arose when we recognize that this monk is a man raised in a monastery solely inhabited by other male monks, and that the woman was pregnant and seeking advice on how best to go about birthing her child. Best guess, nothing this man had done or to which he had been exposed could prepare him to offer that kind of advice, and likely, he was not advertising offers of those answers. She came to the surgeon seeking the name of the fletcher.

I don’t think that the only worthy pursuits are spiritual; I place a lot of focus in my own life on how I understand and relate to the ideas of reality and the world around me, but I would be remiss to advise anyone else to focus on this any more than they do, much less to focus on this alone. I do, however, think that it’s important to be conscious of what answers you’re seeking and from whom you might best seek them. If you are conscious of why you wish to pursue something, and you believe that pursuit is worthwhile, there should be no reason to discourage that pursuit. Fully informed and aware as we can be, we make our best choices. I personally do not believe that most people (myself included) could consider their pursuits fully informed; I do believe that many things we may pursue are frivolous. These pursuits often are not directly harmful (although it is possible) but they can often present a bottleneck of sorts to progress on those that are more fully investigated; “more fully” here because it would be difficult to point out one in most of our lives whose pursuits and practices are fully investigated and fully targeted at a wholistic sense of value as opposed to at least involving some sense of the need to establish oneself, or make oneself more real. This process of investigation to me is a process of identifying what we are doing to become versus what we do because we are. I don’t mean to end on that potentially confusing note, but I can feel this start to drift from my original point, so more of that may be for another day.