Suddenly, a poisoned arrow comes whistling through the air and pierces a man’s chest. What happens next is unexpected.Instead of pulling it out, he demands to know who shot it, from where, and why.
The Buddha used this striking parable to show how we waste our lives in speculation while the real work—living wisely—waits to be done. The wise, he said, do not analyse the shooter or the motive; they pull the arrow out immediately. He shifted the question from ‘Why are we here?’ to the only one that truly matters: ‘How shall we live this moment?’
The Wisdom of Natural Beauty
True beauty, wherever found, has no purpose beyond its own being. Flowers, clouds, rivers, peacocks, and butterflies could have evolved to function perfectly well without such ethereal embellishment—yet they remain so unexplainably beautiful.
A butterfly doesn’t flutter to please anyone; it simply expresses its natural impulse. A river doesn’t flow to entertain, yet its movement soothes the heart. The koel’s effortless summer song is not for applause; it is simply its expression of being. So why should human life be any different?
Life has no grand purpose; to live it as it unfolds is its purpose. If so, why not live it—prudently, mindfully, and practically—to celebrate our gifts, serve others, and make a better world?
By living in the present moment meaningfully—with awareness, gratitude, integrity, and compassion—we can meet what lies beyond this life.
In this light, the Buddha’s arrow becomes a metaphor for our restless search for life’s grand purpose. We could spend lifetimes arguing about who shot it, or we could begin to remove what causes suffering by living wisely, gratefully, and consciously.
And once we stop debating why the arrow was shot and start living this moment fully, a deeper question naturally emerges: How do we live meaningfully? This is where the idea of Ikigai becomes a guiding light.
Ikigai, a Japanese concept, is the joyful intersection of what we love, what we excel at, what sustains us, and what the world needs. It enables us to find the perfect work for a purposeful life—serving others through our gifts while receiving cherished rewards. But to find what we naturally love and do well, let us turn towards what neuroscience has discovered.
The Harmony of the Whole Brain
Neuroscientist Ned Herrmann, who proposed the Whole Brain Model, showed that every person thinks and creates through four primary modes of the brain: the analytical (logical, quantitative), the organised (structured, sequential), the people-oriented (interpersonal, empathetic), and the innovative (imaginative, creative). Most of us lean on one or two of these quadrants and underuse the others.
Our purpose often begins where we feel most alive, yet growth begins where we feel least at home. Therefore, the analytical person must learn to imagine, the innovator to focus, the organiser to trust intuition and the people-person to reason. Purpose, thus, is not only expressing what comes naturally but also embracing the challenge to evolve toward wholeness. Ikigai awakens when we play our natural notes with joy; wisdom deepens when we learn to play the entire symphony of the mind.
From such living arise mindfulness, appreciation, gratitude, wonder, and humility. These dissolve the walls of self-importance and lead us into absorption and flow—states where life lives through us rather than we through it.
In that flow, the peacock dances, spreading its exquisitely beautiful feathers, the koel sings, the butterfly flutters, and the awakened human does what comes naturally to them—radiant, aware, and at peace. Purpose, then, is not something to search for outside ourselves; it is the gentle, ongoing, inner flowering that naturally emanates when we live meaningfully.
Purpose as a Human Invention
Eckhart Tolle distinguishes between two levels of purpose. The outer purpose concerns what we do in the world—our work, relationships and contributions. The inner purpose is to awaken to our non-physical shared essence—by living with full awareness in the present moment. As Viktor Frankl observed, in that small space between stimulus and response lies our greatest freedom—the freedom to fulfil our inner purpose. Even when we miss that small space, noticing the lapse helps—because every instance of becoming conscious of our non-awareness strengthens awareness.
In this light, Ikigai and Ned Herrmann’s model show how we can live our outer purpose. Likewise, we fulfil our inner purpose through mindfulness, meditation, flow, and the conscious pause between stimulus and response.
Yet, all these ways are gentle inventions—beautiful frameworks we create to guide us and lend coherence and meaning to an otherwise purposeless but beautiful life. For life, in its essence, needs no justification; like the butterfly’s flight or the koel’s song, it is complete in its being.
The wise understand this: we need not wait for a grand revelation about who shot this suffering-laced arrow of life—and why. Our task is more straightforward, humbler, but far more immediate—to pull it out and live the wonder of this moment fully.