Think about this: it makes beautiful sense.
The Arrow in the Eye
The Buddha recounted this analogy many times for a good reason. We need to start immediately with dhamma practice, not worry about the right version or trappings and environment it is set in, whether it is the best or true, but does it cut suffering now?
Our sufferings arise because we are convinced we have some kind of fixed identity –a ME or Atman– and we imagine we can grab hold of the same kind of essence that we imagine is in attractive things and make them MINE. Or we imagine an essence in things we don’t want and we try to resist them for that same reason. This how the basic 3 poisons operate —Greed and Hatred that both depend on Ignorance/not-knowing.
The Buddha teaches knowing. He teaches that all things arise dependently and so cannot have an essence. For the same reason, everything is impermanent. We practice mindfulness and morality until we reach that understanding from then on, why do we need them? We create karma because we have that separation and it drives all our actions. Similarly, we stop creating karma once we stop picturing things as self-reliant.
This is practicing dharma and why we aim to continue practising until we don’t need to.
The beautiful paradox: We practice until we don’t need to practice, just as we take medicine until the illness is cured. The “person” who started practicing and the “person” who no longer needs to aren’t the same fixed entity—that very illusion is what dissolves.
This is why the Buddha kept returning to pragmatism: the point isn’t that we must find perfect doctrine but to quickly end our suffering. To do that, we start where the arrow is lodged–and pull it out.
Start practicing where it suits you and where you feel encouraged to start. You can always switch to something better if you find it but the key thing is to recognise that the choice is always yours – it doesn’t come from outside.
The arrow-in-the-eye story (or arrow-struck story) appears multiple times across the Pali Canon, which tells us several important things:
Why the repetition matters:
The Buddha deliberately reused certain teachings when they addressed fundamental human tendencies. The frequency of this particular story suggests he encountered the same pattern repeatedly: people intellectualising their suffering rather than addressing it directly. This wasn’t a rare philosophical question but a common obstacle to practice.
The core pattern it addresses:
The story typically responds to metaphysical speculation—questions about whether the world is eternal, whether the self exists after death, whether the universe is finite. The Buddha’s point: when you’re struck by an arrow (suffering), you don’t debate the woodworker’s caste, the type of wood, or the fletcher’s hometown. You remove the arrow.
Its teaching purpose:
- Pragmatic focus: Redirects attention from unanswerable metaphysics to practical liberation from suffering
- Urgency: Shows that suffering is immediate and requires immediate response
- Diagnostic precision: Just as a doctor treats the wound, not the arrow’s origins, the Dhamma addresses suffering’s cessation, not its cosmic origins
What repetition reveals about the Dhamma:
The Buddha wasn’t building a philosophical system, he was offering medicine. The recurring use of this story shows he was willing to “repeat the prescription” whenever the same diagnosis appeared—minds trapped in speculation while dukkha remains unaddressed.
The story essentially encodes a key aspect of the Buddha’s method: therapeutic pragmatism over metaphysical speculation.
The illustration is drawn from an Andy Weber thangka of the Wheel of Life