Once Bhagwan Mahavir was preaching, “To see the truth one needs inner and outer eyes. The outer truth is seen by the physical eyes and inner truth by the eyes of the mind.”
To illustrate his point he gave an example through a story—
“In a village there lived five blind men. They were friends. Once they decided to go to a far off village and managed to reach there somehow.
There they learnt that someone had brought an elephant there. The five had never heard about the animal by that name. They wished to know the creature.
The five blindmen went to the village headman and pleaded, “Headmen sir, please take us to that animal called elephant. We want to know about it.”
The headman said, “Dear folks, you are blind. How would you know what elephant is like?”
“We need not see with eyes,” one of the blind men said and revealed, “We know about everything by touch.’’
“Alright,” the headman nodded his head and told them, “I will take you to the elephant. Let us go.”
The headman took the five to the elephant and spoke, “The elephant stands before you. Touch and you can feel it.”
All the five men touched different parts of the elephant and tried to feel out the shapes.
The headman said, “Now you have touched the elephant and I hope you all know what it is like.”
The first blind man spoke, “I know well. It is like a pillar.”
Another counter, “You are lying. I bet it is like a banana trunk upside down.”
The third laughed and said, “You two are bananas. It is like a banana leaf.”
The fourth one spoke, “Are you all trying to fool me? I know it is a huge huge hook.”
The fifth blind man hissed, “You can’t trick me. Elephant is like a mountain ridge tethered to a rope.”
The headman spoke, “My friends, all of you are right in relative sense. No one is lying. Your only fault is that you don’t have eyes to see a thing in totality. One who touched elephant leg thought it was a pillar. For the one who touched the elephant trunk concluded that elephant was upside down banana trunk. The one who felt the tusk it was a huge hook. Whose hands touched ear for him an elephant was a banana leaf. And the one who got to feel wits rear and tail the creature was a hillock tethered with a rope. No one got it right because you were individually feeling only a part each of the whole truth. The elephant is sum total of what you each felt plus much more. Had you got the benefit of the eyes you could have seen the entire picture. No one of you was telling a lie. To each of you the others appeared to be lying because you only knew the small part of your own truth and failed to realise that others could also be telling truths.”
After telling the story Bhagwan Mahavir explained, “It proves that the truth is as one sees it. It may not be the whole truth. This world is as one perceives it or experiences it. The small facts are far from the whole fact. The real truth is only in its totality.”
