Thirteen Blind Men and an Elephant

Thirteen Blind Men and an Elephant

There are only two breeds of elephant left in the world today, the African and the Asian elephant. Therefore, this story could very well originate from either Africa or Asia or both for all we know.

The story told goes something likes this…and there are many variations, remember. There were 13 blind men who were asked to tell us what an elephant actually looks like.



The first two men faced the elephant side. “It looks like a solid wall!” They proclaimed concurrently.

The next pair felt the legs “Not, so! It looks more like four tree trunks.”

The tall twin got a hold of the trunk and yelled, “No, sir! It looks like one big snake!”

The next two got the tusks and screamed, “Looks like a pair of hard- pointed spears to us!”

The other two felt the ears and pronounced, “Nop, pretty sure it looks like a pair of really big fans.”

The last two blind men got a hold of the elephant’s tail and insisted that it is actually “a rope.”

The last and the smartest one of them all took his time—without influence or bias due to “peer pressure”-and put the entire elephant together from data collected by the 12 blind men. He simply smiled and calmly said, “Ahhhh, I see the emerging picture of the elephant more clearly now. You are all partly correct, but you are all completely blind—no pun intended! The elephant looks like what God wanted us see it, only bits and pieces, and we must use our brain—not our lack of sight—and put them pieces together, like a jigsaw puzzle, to actually see the real elephant.”

The moral to this story is that we should think again and again when we are most certain that we have seen the elephant when, in fact, we only saw its various parts that made up of the “entire” elephant. We are all, more often than not, bias and wear rosy glasses. We are often wrong when we are sure that we are right. In short, we usually don’t actually see the big picture, but rather only bits and pieces. We are often become prejudice because of this short sightedness. We must look at the “big picture” to actually see a real elephant in our lives.

End Note: This story can very well applied to any and all situation—whether it is religion, socio-economic, politics, or whatever topic under the sky being discussed and debated.