76. BLIND MEN AND THE ELEPHANT

108 Buddhist Parables

A number of disciples went to the Buddha and said, “O Master, there are many hermits and scholars living here in Sravastti who indulge in constant disputes. Some are saying that the world is infinite and eternal and others that it is finite and not eternal. Some are saying that the soul dies with the body and others that it lives on forever, and so forth. What would you say concerning them?”

The Buddha answered, “Once upon a time there was a certain king who called his servant and told him to go and gather together in one place all the men of Sravastti who were born blind and show them an elephant. The servant did as he was told. Then he said to the blind men assembled there, ‘Here is an elephant,’ and to one man he presented the head of the elephant, to another its ears, to another a tusk, to another the trunk… the foot, back, tail, and tuft of the tail, saying to each one that it was the elephant.

“When the blind men had felt the elephant, the king went to each of them and asked, ‘Tell me, what sort of thing is an elephant?’

“Thereupon the man who were presented with the head answered that elephant was like a pot. And the man who had observed the ear said it was like a winnowing basket. The man who had been presented with a tusk said it was a like ploughshare. The man who knew only the trunk said it was like a grainery;… the foot, a pillar; the back, a mortar; the tail, a pestle, the tuft of the tail, a brush.

“Then they began to quarrel, shouting, ‘Yes it is!’ ‘No, it is not!’ ‘An elephant is not that!’ ‘Yes, it is like that!’ and so on, till they came to blows over the matter. And the king was delighted with the scene.

“In the same way these preachers and scholars holding various views are blind and unseeing. In their ignorance they are by nature quarrelsome, wrangling, and disputatious, each maintaining reality as thus and thus.”

Then the Buddha rendered this meaning by uttering this verse:

O how they cling and wrangle, some who claim

For preacher and monk the honored name!

For, quarrelling, each to his view they cling.

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