No-Nonsense Buddhism for Beginners: Clear Answers to Burning Questions About Core Buddhist Teachings

by Noah Rasheta

This Buddhist understanding of truth is encapsulated in the parable of the six blind men who stand around an elephant and begin to describe it on the basis of what they can feel by touch. One feels the tail and thinks he’s touching a rope, while another feels the trunk and concludes it’s a snake. The other men describe what they touch as a tree trunk (the elephant’s leg), a fan (its ear), a wall (its side), and a spear (its tusk). Each man is certain that his experience of the elephant is the accurate one, failing to understand that the other descriptions are also accurate—and that all the descriptions are inaccurate as well, in that they each take into account only one part of the elephant. Buddhism teaches that we all see the truth from a unique perspective and that, like the blind men, we can’t see all perspectives.