This children’s story from James Baldwin is based on a religious parable from India. Six blind men come across an elephant for the first time. Although they have often heard about elephants, they have never been close to one. They ask the elephant’s carer if they could try to ‘see’ what it looks like by using their sense of touch. At the end of the story, the blind men are arguing fiercely. Each of them has put their hands on a different part of the elephant’s body. Each of them believes that only he knows what the elephant looks like.
The parable is generally thought to be of Jain or Buddhist origins, but versions also appear in Sufi Muslim and Hindu writings. The story was introduced to Western audiences thanks to this poem of the same name by American poet John Godfrey Saxe. Our source was an 1896 book called Fifty Famous Stories Retold by James Baldwin.
Original Text / PDF (525 words)