Buddha and the Three Questions

As Gautam Buddha and his disciples visited a village, a man approached Buddha and asked, "Does God exist?"

Buddha replied, "No, Absolutely not." 

In the afternoon, another man came to him and asked, "Does God exist?"

Buddha replied, "Yes, of course." 

Later in the evening, yet another person asked him, "Does God exist?"

Buddha did not answer; he just kept silent and closed his eyes. 

On seeing this, the man did the same. 

Then something transpired in the silence: the man suddenly smiled and looked at Buddha with tears in his eyes, then touched Buddha's feet and said, "You are the first and only person who actually answered my question." The man left with a heart full of gratitude.  

One of Buddha's disciples was flabbergasted. "Master, I have been with you the whole day, and I heard you give completely different answers to those three people who asked the exact same question. It's left me very troubled!"

Buddha said, "Why are you troubled, those answers were not for you, they were for them! My answer had nothing to do with God, and everything to do with the questioner. 

"The first man who came was a theist, a believer, the second man who came was an atheist, and the third was an agnostic."

"To the person who believes in God and asks if God exists, I will say no because I want him to drop his idea of God, I want him to be free of his idea of God -- which is borrowed. He has not yet experienced God. If he had experienced he would not have asked me; there would have been no need.

"And if he was trying to find confirmation for his belief, I had to deny just to destroy his belief, because all beliefs are barriers to knowing the truth. Theist or atheist, all beliefs, Hindu or Christian or Mohammedan, all beliefs are barriers.

"As for the atheist? The person who does not believe in God also had a belief that needed to be broken. Else he would never start to search the truth, and will only accept his belief as truth. So I said yes in challenge to that, which gave him somewhere to go. 

"And the person with whom I remained silent was the right inquirer. He had no belief, hence there was no question of destroying anything. I kept silent, which was my message to him: Be silent and know. Don't ask, there is no need to ask. It is not a question which can be answered or that the intellect can address - intellectual answers are available very cheap. It is not an inquiry but a quest, a thirst. Be silent and know.

As you witnessed, he looked within and knew. He needed something existential -- he needed a taste. I gave him a taste."