On Buddhism

In Buddhism, there are 14 unanswerable questions about the big-picture nature of the cosmos: how did it start, how old it is, and so on. The Buddha tells us not to worry about these big picture questions, that what matters is addressing suffering. To illustrate, he tells a parable in which a man struck by a poisoned arrow refuses to have it removed, until he knows who shot it, what kind of arrow it was, and so on. He is advocating an internal, personal view, one focused on ending suffering, and eventually reaching enlightenment, without the need for a third-party god. Unsurprisingly, some variants of Buddhism are compatible with atheism.` Came across this thought at Notes on Tanya M. Luhrmann’s book ‘How God Becomes Real’