The poisoned arrow is the clearest statement of Buddhist method there is. The unanswered questions — whether the cosmos is eternal, whether it is finite, whether an awakened being exists after death — are set aside not because they are unanswerable in principle but because the answers do not remove the arrow. The Buddha lists what he does teach immediately afterward: suffering, its origin, its cessation, and the way. It is also the passage most often used to argue that Buddhism is compatible with any cosmology, which is a slightly larger claim than the text is making.