On Moving Beyond Myopic Musings - Seeing the Elephant as it is

The Blind Men and the Elephant

Scattered throughout the literature of ancient India, the parable of the blind men and the elephant has been told in variations preserved in Jain, Buddhist, and Hindu sources. It paints an image of the violence and vitriol that may erupt in the clash between different interpretations of reality, each surmised from a limited vantage point. We here examine one version of the story in detail, its early Buddhist depiction based on the Tittha Sutta of the Pāli Canon.



In exploring the parable of the blind men and the elephant, we aim to draw out its implications for our present state of affairs in a world characterized largely by contention and competing views, many of them starkly contrasting. In untangling the perspectives from the story, we hope they may be pieced together to allow for a collaborative understanding of the bigger picture, allowing the elephant to be seen as a whole rather than parts mistaken for something they are not.

Myopic Musings

The Buddhist version of the blind men and the elephant offers a critique of the tendency toward myopic musings, the narrow-minded and short-sighted perspectives we may be prone to entertain, informed by distorted perceptions of the world. Providing some context, the narration begins by setting the scene.

“There were many contemplatives, brahmans, & wanderers of various sects living around Sāvatthī with differing views, differing opinions, differing beliefs, dependent for support on their differing views.”

Here, the participants in the story are described as being in some way attached and identified with competing sets of doctrine, on which they depend for the sake of sustenance or status in society. For them, their prized views have become a crutch, the basis for their sense of self. Any challenge to such views is taken as a direct threat to their identity.



This attachment and identification is a felt reality for many in the modern world as much as in ancient times, lending itself to the emergence of divided factions in politics and religion. Pitting their precious views against each other, each camp advocates its own perspective as ultimate reality while dismissing all others as unworthy even of consideration.

“Only this is true; anything otherwise is worthless.”

In such a declaration, a single truth is pushed to the exclusion of all competing perspectives. We may witness this all around us, especially in light of differing portrayals of the coronavirus pandemic in the media by various sources, each laying sole claim to reality. In obsessing over their myopic musings, they lose sight of the bigger picture.

Missing the Bigger Picture

Not only do these individuals attach to and identify with their theories, they furiously debate over them, inflicting harm upon each other in the process.

“They kept on arguing, quarreling, & disputing, wounding one another with weapons of the mouth, saying, ‘The Dhamma is like this, it’s not like that. The Dhamma’s not like that, it’s like this.’”

The harm that comes from such vehement attachment and identification is evidenced throughout history up to the present day by wars waged and lives taken over doctrines and dogmas. Illustrating the absurdity of clinging to myopic perspectives, the Buddha in the Tittha Sutta compares these sectarians who quarrel over their cherished views to blind men arguing over their limited understanding of an elephant when coming into contact with but one of its various parts.


From their limited vantage points, each insists that the part they perceive (the trunk, the tail, etc.) is all there is, as illustrated by the image opening our reflections here. Not only that, they fail to even recognize the trunk as a trunk, mistaking it for a pole. The same applies to each of the elephant's various other body parts.

“Saying, ‘The elephant is like this, it’s not like that. The elephant’s not like that, it’s like this,’ they struck one another with their fists.”
Each of these men neglect the forest for the trees, over which they fight each another relentlessly, hacking away at the forest itself. In their frenzy, they miss the bigger picture. Much like many today, they are blinded by their narrow-minded, short-sighted insistence on their own perspectives. Their refusal to closely examine others stands in the way of seeing clearly.

Settled Clarity

We are thus reminded of the importance in considering experience collectively. In Jain contexts, here is where the notion of anekāntavāda or "many-sidedness" comes into play. The parts of the elephant function as valuable pieces of the puzzle, but such parts must be accurately discerned with settled clarity rather than mistaken for something they are not.

In a Hindu version of the story, the blind men conclude that each of them must have encountered an entirely different animal, and so they are at least spared of the fundamental delusion of mistaking parts of the elephant for inanimate objects found lying around the house or yard. However, this does not go far enough.

Rather, we are invited to consider the possibility that we perceive different sides of the elephant. If one can understand the elephant's trunk as the elephant's trunk, the elephant's tail as the elephant's tail, and so on, all belonging to the same elephant, then eventually one may piece the parts together and perceive the elephant as a unified whole, as it actually is.


In contemplative contexts, this discerning capacity is chiseled by practices such as meditation to facilitate the mind's settling and clarifying processes. By bringing such settled clarity into our everyday activities, we may develop greater immunity to the forces of attachment and identification, psychological drives that draw us into unwholesome relationships with our unchecked versions of reality, often informed by obstructions to settled clarity in vision. In so doing, we stand to widen our perspective.

Even so, successfully integrating such a widening of perspective into the broader realm of politics in an effort to resolve interpersonal conflict continues to prove itself an immense challenge.

Some "blind men" of our day and age refuse to step back and entertain any perspective other than their own. In those cases, without stirring up more dust to obscure both our own and their vision, we may attempt to calmly and clearly demonstrate to them, to whatever extent is possible in individual exchanges, that a rope is a rope and not the snake for which they mistake it. This may at least begin to shift the directional momentum of perspectives on the whole from a contracting to expanding orientation. To be continued.