the sutta begins at jetavana where the monk malunkyaputta is troubled by gautama buddha's silence on the fourteen unanswerable questions, which include queries about the nature of the cosmos and life after the death of a buddha. malunkyaputta then meets with gautama buddha and asks him for the answers to these questions, he says that if he fails to respond, malunkya will renounce his teachings. gautama responds by first stating that he never promised to reveal ultimate metaphysical truths such as those and then uses the story of a man who has been shot with a poisoned arrow to illustrate that those questions are irrelevant to his teachings.