Ways of Answering Questions

Reading guide

The teaching in one sentence

Not every question deserves a direct answer, and knowing which of four treatments a question needs is itself a skill.

Categorically

Ekaṁsabyākaraṇīya — to be answered one-sidedly, without qualification. Is form impermanent? Yes. There is no case to distinguish and no counter-question needed.

This is the mode most people assume is the only one, and the discourse’s first point is that it is one of four. A tradition that answered everything categorically would be either dogmatic or wrong, since most interesting questions contain an ambiguity.

Analytically

Vibhajjabyākaraṇīya — to be answered by dividing. Is such-and-such person to be praised? That depends: in this respect yes, in that respect no.

This is the mode the Theravāda takes its old name from — Vibhajjavāda, the doctrine of analysis — and it is the characteristic move of the whole collection. The Aṅguttara is very largely a book of divisions: this fourfold, that threefold, these two kinds of person.

The technique is not evasion. It concedes that the question is real and answers it completely, by first correcting the assumption that one answer will cover the cases.

With a counter-question

Paṭipucchābyākaraṇīya — the answer is another question, asked in order to find out what was actually being asked or to make the questioner supply a term they had left undefined.

The canon uses this constantly. A wanderer asks whether pleasure and pain are self-made; the reply asks what he means. The move assumes that many questions arrive malformed and that answering them as put would confirm a mistake embedded in the asking.

It is worth teaching alongside the fourth mode, because the two are often confused. A counter-question is a way of proceeding. Setting aside is a way of stopping.

Set aside

Ṭhapanīya — to be put aside, left standing. This is the treatment given to the undeclared questions listed in AN 4.38: whether the cosmos is eternal, whether a realized one exists after death, and the rest.

The reason given elsewhere in the canon is consistently practical rather than epistemic: these questions are not connected with the goal, do not lead to disenchantment, dispassion, cessation, peace, insight, awakening, or extinguishment. The refusal is not a claim that the answers are unknowable; it is a claim that pursuing them does not help.

It is honest to note that readers have disagreed for two thousand years about whether that is a satisfying position, and that the canon itself never elaborates it further than the practical grounds. A teaching guide should present the reason given rather than improve on it.

What the verses claim

The mendicant who knows which mode each question needs is called intimidating, hard to defeat, deep, and hard to crush, and expert in what the meaning is and what it isn’t.

That vocabulary belongs to debate. These four are being presented as a competence in public disputation as much as a pedagogical method, which fits the setting: a teacher in this environment was regularly required to field questions from people trying to trap him.

The closing verse shifts registers and gives the whole thing a criterion: shunning what is not the meaning, an astute person grasps the meaning. The four modes are in service of attha, the point — which is also what AN 4.6 said learning was for. The skill is not in answering well but in keeping the answer attached to what matters.

Key terms