The Elephant in the Dark
The Teaching
Some Hindoos were exhibiting an elephant in a dark room, and many people collected to see it. But as the place was too dark to permit them to see the elephant, they all felt it with their hands, to gain an idea of what it was like. One felt its trunk, and declared that the beast resembled a water-pipe; another felt its ear, and said it must be a large fan; another its leg, and thought it must be a pillar; another felt its back, and declared the beast must be like a great throne. According to the part which each felt, he gave a different description of the animal.
The eye of outward sense is as the palm of a hand, The whole of the object is not grasped in the palm. The sea itself is one thing, the foam another; Neglect the foam, and regard the sea with your eyes.
— Rumi, Masnavi III
Commentary
Rumi tells the Buddha’s story some seventeen centuries later, with one change that alters its meaning. In the Udāna the men are blind. In the Masnavi they can see perfectly well, but the room is dark. The fault has moved from the people to the light.
That makes it a kinder story and a more hopeful one. A blind man can’t be cured by a lamp, but a man in a dark room can. The palm still grasps only part of the elephant, and Rumi doesn’t scold the hand for it. He tells the reader where to look instead: past the foam, to the sea.
Rumi didn’t hear the story from the Buddha. It travelled, from India into Persian poetry, where the poet Sanā’ī had told it a century before Rumi. On this Map that makes it a teaching that crossed from one tradition to another, not one that arose twice independently. That distinction is the subject of Who Met Whom.
Themes
Connections 6
Travelled
The story itself travelled: from India, through the Persian poet Sanā’ī (12th c.), to Rumi.
Unsure
Islam took in Buddhist Central Asia (the monastery at Balkh), and the Buddha’s legend circulated in Arabic (Kitāb Bilawhar wa Būdhāsaf). The renunciation of Ibrahim ibn Adham echoes the Buddha’s. Influence on Sufism is argued; unsettled.
Arose apart
No known transmission between Sufism and Taoism while these teachings took shape. Liu Zhi (18th c.) wrote Sufism in Chinese philosophical terms, but that came late.