The Blindmen and the Elephant

Shakyamuni Buddha apparently liked the story of the blindmen and the elephant and used it often. The story is part of the folk knowledge of India. There are Hindu versions and Jain versions as well. A couple of the Buddha’s tellings survive. It’s an important story.

Several people, blind all their lives, come upon an elephant for the first time. They’ve never seen an elephant, so they use their well-developed sense of touch to get familiar with this new thing. One of the blind men wraps his arms around one of the legs. “An elephant is like a great tree,” he says. Another gets hold of the trunk. He disagrees. He says, “An elephant is like a fire hose.” The third describes the elephant’s ear as a great leaf. To the fourth who had the elephant by the tail, the elephant is rather like a rope. In some versions of the story, the blindmen come to blows. You get the picture. We all confuse our seeing with the whole. Reality is what we perceive, and anyone who sees things differently is wrong, crazy, dangerous.

Bernie saw the danger. Bernie had been meticulously trained by Maezumi Roshi in the ways of the Japanese Soto Sect. So many of us were awed by his knowledge of the intricacies of Zen lore. Not just his students, not just others from Maezumi’s lineage, so many people came to Bernie with their Zen questions. He was always generous in sharing what he had learned. And he was always aware that with all his training, he had hold, inevitably could only have hold, of one piece of the elephant. So, after answering a question, during the last decade or so of his life, Bernie would always add, “It’s just my opinion, man.”

“It’s just my opinion, man.” It’s a wonderful koan. Try it. Embody it. Don’t just tell me about it. Show me. But don’t stop there. Go deeper.

Another trap awaits. The experience of just-my-opinion can be intoxicating. When the enormous burden of defending the truth as we see it is removed, a huge weight is lifted. What a relief! The elephant who has been sitting on my chest all these years has disappeared. There is a wonderful lightness. I can breathe.

What a relief! There is no elephant. There is only my opinion. Oops. That’s another opinion. The reality that none of us can ever fully know the elephant doesn’t mean that the elephant doesn’t exist.

Joseph Campbell told a different elephant story, about the Indian man who had newly heard the teaching of the oneness of life. Walking along a dirt road near his home, he hears the thundering of a runaway elephant. The elephant handler cannot slow his mount. Our guy can hear the yells, “Get out of the way. Get out of the way,” but our guy is not frightened. “I am one with all beings. I am one with God. I am one with elephant. I have nothing to fear.”

The dashing elephant sweeps up our guy with her trunk and flings him into the bushes. Shaken, sitting stunned on the ground, our guy calls out, “Dear God, how could you abandon me? How could you let this happen to me?” Seemingly from out of the clouds, a voice answers, “My son, I called to you several times to get out of the way, but you didn’t listen.” Sometimes, there is an elephant.