When the Buddha answered with his silence

Though there is no category of unanswerable questions, but there exists a category of unanswered questions in Buddhism. This text is a humble attempt to explore the reasons why the Buddha deemed it unnecessary to respond to certain questions and answered with his blissful ‘silence’. The Sutta-pi?aka recognizes altogether sixteen unanswered questions in Buddhism. A long list of ten questions, followed by a shorter list of four questions along with two extra questions was kept aside by the Buddha. Although the Buddha gave his own reasons for leaving these questions unanswered, modern scholars wanted to know what other reasons lay behind the Buddha’s ‘silence’. This literature review and critical textual analysis in modern perspectives revealed that all the ten questions in the longer list as well as the four questions in the shorter list were meaningless. They were considered ‘meaningless’ in Buddhist perspective as they were all based on a wrong approach towards understanding the Absolute Truth. All these questions are the root causes of suffering. Answers to these are not relevant for the understanding of suffering and its elimination.