The Japanese Parable of the Elephant and the Blind Men: On the Existential Incomprehension of Anything at All
Being Open to the Possibility of One’s Own Error
Six blind men, one elephant, and an endless dispute over what reality truly is. One touches the side and perceives a wall. Another grasps a tusk and says, “It’s a spear.” The third feels the trunk and senses a writhing snake. The fourth touches the leg and proclaims, “It’s a tree.” The fifth experiences a fan, and the sixth – a rope. This ancient Indian parable, dating back to the time of the Buddha, is not only a commentary on religious dogma but also a philosophical metaphor for how each of us, limited by our own perspective and cognitive tools, attempts to comprehend the world.
In Japan, the parable took on a new form in the works of artists such as Hokusai. In one of his woodblock prints from the Manga series, we see eleven blind men bent over an elephant as if it were the riddle of the world – each with his own gesture, expression, conviction. Hokusai does not draw the truth – he draws our attempts to touch it. The aesthetics of this image – restrained, rhythmic, and comical – resonate with what so often returns in Japanese culture: that beauty and wisdom are born not from knowing the whole, but from abiding in uncertainty. In zen philosophy, one speaks of mu – the empty space that opens the mind. In the doctrine of mujō – of the impermanence of all that exists. In haiku – of moments that do not explain the world, but merely touch one brief instant of it.
Many different narratives and convictions can easily create the illusion of wholeness. The parable of the elephant and the blind men reminds us of the value of scientific skepticism, which is not negation but an open posture – ready to accept correction, to embrace incomplete data, to continue seeking despite uncertainty. And perhaps that is why we, modern blind men with access to data from across the globe, should learn humility from those who knew they were only touching a part. We may never come to know the entire elephant. But if we examine it together – with attentiveness, humility, and readiness to change our minds – we are far closer to the truth than if we remained alone at one of its legs, convinced we held the whole world. Let us then delve deeper into the tale of the elephant and the blind men – and how it was perceived in Japan.
The Parable of the Elephant and the Blind Men
群盲評象の譬
(gummō hyōzō no tatoe)
Let us imagine a morning in a small Indian town, where the sun has only just begun to pour golden light over the rooftops, and the air is filled with the scent of spicy sauce and wet earth. On the edge of the village, in the shade of a large tree, six men gather. All of them have been blind since birth. Their eyes have never seen the shape of a leaf, the glint of light, or the colors of a face. And yet their minds are hungry for knowledge, and their hands – sensitive, patient, precise. They have heard tales of a strange creature called an “elephant” – large and mighty – and have decided to get to know it. Not with their eyes, but through touch, imagination, and words.
They are led to an enclosure where a calm, majestic elephant stands – an animal not only real but also symbolic, bearer of the earth’s wisdom and nature’s mystery. The blind men approach cautiously, like explorers on uncharted ground, and one by one, they extend their hands toward the unknown.
The first encounters the elephant’s side – broad, solid, unmoving. His fingers wander over the rough skin as though over a wall of living clay. “The elephant,” he declares with conviction, “is like a wall. Impenetrable, flat, immense. It’s an animal that does not move – like the wall of a fortress.”
The second reaches the tusk – smooth, cold, hard. His hand slides along its curved surface. “What nonsense! The elephant is like a spear – pointed, dangerous. It’s a weapon, not a structure.”
The third finds the trunk. He feels muscles moving beneath the skin, the structure changing over time, as if he were holding a living snake. “No. The elephant is like a great snake. Flexible, wet, slippery. It’s something that moves, writhes, bends.”
The fourth blind man embraces the leg – thick, solid, with grooves like the bark of an old tree. “You’re mistaken,” he says solemnly. “The elephant is a tree. A rough trunk, deeply rooted. It stands still and bears the weight of the sky.”
The fifth touches the ear – thin and wide, like a fan woven from soft cloth. “Can’t you feel it? It’s something one could use to cool oneself! The elephant is like a fan – delicate, breezy, wide.”
The sixth grabs the tail – thin, ending in a tuft of hair. He shakes his head and says ironically: “You can’t recognize a rope? The elephant is like a cord. It’s obvious.”
Then the argument begins. Each insists on his own version. They proclaim their “truths” with a saintly stubbornness. Discussion turns into quarrel, quarrel into accusation. No one notices the fundamental fact.
Each of them spoke truthfully, describing what he had experienced. All were partially aligned with reality. But each – confined to his own perspective – was mistaken. Not because he spoke falsely, but because he knew only a fragment of the whole and wrongly assumed it to be the whole.
And that is what makes this parable so powerful. It is a story not so much about error as about the limits of understanding. About how easy it is to mistake our version of reality for reality itself. About how dangerous it is to believe that our senses, views, or experiences give us the full picture of the world.
Over hundreds and thousands of years, this has been humanity’s bane – many people consider themselves infallible experts on everything – from history to morality, from politics to metaphysics – and in our twenty-first century, the parable of the blind men and the elephant returns like a mirror image of our own thinking. It shows that everyone and no one may be right at the same time. That truth need not be singular. That it may exist not in one point, but in a totality that none of us can grasp alone. This is the essence of modern science – humility before what we do not yet know and openness to what we manage to “discern” from reality. With the awareness that even so – it is but a certain fragment.
The History of the Parable – From India to Japan
The roots of the parable of the blind men and the elephant go back to ancient India – the spiritual laboratory of humanity, where the oldest philosophical and religious systems of Asia were born. Its earliest known version comes from the Udāna, a collection of parables and sayings attributed to the Buddha Śākyamuni, which forms part of the Pali Canon of early Theravāda Buddhism. There, the parable serves as a warning against intellectual arrogance and as evidence of how superficial, fragmentary knowledge can lead to conflict – not only in philosophical disputes but also in the existential misunderstanding of the nature of things.
In this original version, the Buddha listens to the quarrel of several blind men who are trying to describe an elephant by touching its different parts. After their confident arguments, the Buddha calmly explains that each of their statements contains a piece of the truth, but none conveys the whole – and that the source of the error is not a lack of intelligence, but a limited point of view and an unwillingness to move beyond one’s own experience. In this way, the parable becomes a tool of epistemological awakening – a lesson in humility before the complexity of the world.
From India, the parable spread along two main paths – through Buddhism and Jainism, in which it served an educational function. For the Jains, it symbolized the relativity of truth (anekāntavāda); for the Buddhists – the illusory nature of phenomena and the necessity of spiritual insight. It was Buddhism, however, that took the parable on a long journey – through the Himalayas, the steppes of Central Asia, the Tang Empire, all the way to the shores of Japan.
The parable likely reached China as early as the first or second century CE, during the intense period of translating sutras into Chinese. Commentators associated with the Madhyamaka and Yogācāra schools eagerly used it to illustrate the limits of conceptual understanding and the dangers of dogmatism. From there, through Korea – where the Hwaeom school flourished, closely related to China’s Huayan – the parable finally arrived in Japan, probably in the 7th or 8th century, that is, at the time when the Japanese ruling elites began to adopt Buddhism as a state religion (about the state of Nara you can read more here: The City of Nara – a Geometrically and Spiritually Designed Metropolis of Ancient Japan Long Before the Samurai).
On the Japanese Archipelago, the Parable Found New Life
As early as the 8th century, during the time of Empress Shōtoku and the powerful Tōdai-ji temple, the parable was already known within monastic circles. It was most fully embraced by the Hossō school, the Japanese counterpart of the Chinese Weishi – the “Consciousness-Only” (yui shiki) school, whose foundation lay in analyzing phenomena as projections of the mind. For Hossō, the parable of the blind men and the elephant served as a perfect metaphor for the illusory nature of perception – for how our senses, emotions, and concepts create illusions we mistake for reality.
But Japan did not merely passively adopt this story. Over time, it began to reinterpret it, imbuing it with aesthetic depth and local nuance. It appeared in emaki – painted narrative scrolls that combined text and image. One of the most well-known examples is the version illustrated by Katsushika Hokusai in his Manga (volume 8), where the number of blind men is increased to eleven – perhaps as a symbol of a more complex, multi-perspective society. The elephant in Hokusai’s illustration appears foreign, almost fantastical – reflecting the fact that elephants were rare in Japan and existed primarily as imagined beings, not as reality.
Eventually, the parable began to appear in dramaturgy as well – including in the subtle nō theatre, where the elephant’s presence was sometimes merely a metaphorical backdrop for stories of error and illusion (for more on nō theatre, see: Chimerical Masks of Noh Theatre – A Form Truer than Content). In zen culture, the parable took on an even quieter, more paradoxical tone – becoming not so much a teaching, but a question: “And what if the elephant does not exist at all?”
Japan absorbed this tale like a drop of ink on washi – not changing its structure, but giving it a new rhythm. It was no longer merely an intellectual dispute – as is often the case in the land of Yamato – the silence between the words became more important. Subtlety, gesture, attentiveness. The Japanese version of the parable does not end with a moralistic punchline.
Japan and the Allegorical Elephant: Hokusai and His Version of the Parable
In the eighth volume of his legendary sketch series titled Hokusai Manga, Katsushika Hokusai – a master not only of landscapes but also of observing human behavior (more about him here: Hokusai: The Master Who Soothed the Pain of Life's Tragedies in the Quest for Perfection and here: With Master Hokusai Through Japan's Eight Waterfalls) – included one of the most surprising philosophical illustrations in his entire oeuvre. The woodblock print depicting blind men examining an elephant is not just a graphic reinterpretation of an ancient Indian parable. It is also a distorted mirror reflecting Edo-period Japan – its aesthetics, knowledge, prejudices, spiritual curiosity, and cognitive limitations.
Hokusai's Manga
Scene Description
In the foreground, we see eleven men – blind, as we can infer from their closed eyes and tentative gestures. Each one is examining a different part of the elephant, trying to grasp its form. One investigates the trunk, another a leg, a third touches the tail, another tests the firmness of the belly – all of them scattered around the massive body of the animal, absorbed in their own “discovery.” Amid them is a sense of confusion – several men are clearly trying to say something, others make gestures in an attempt to explain, which adds a comic element to the scene, though not a caricatural one. The number of figures is striking – one can count eleven (more than in the original version of the legend).
And at the center of this commotion – the elephant. Large, wrinkled, almost grotesque. Its body appears disproportionate, unnaturally bloated, as though it were imagined, not real. The head and eye are exaggeratedly massive, the torso likewise, and the legs resemble wrinkled pillars of skin and fat. Hokusai likely never saw a real elephant – in Edo-period Japan, the animal existed almost exclusively as a mythical being encountered in Chinese texts and Buddhist scriptures. Hence, its depiction in the Manga resembles a hybrid between the imagined elephant and the monsters of Japanese legend – more a metaphor than an animal.
Interestingly, although the central figure – the elephant – is undeniably the largest, it does not completely dominate the composition. The spatial balance between the animal and the people creates tension (this is likely why Hokusai increased the number of examiners to eleven) – each character exists in their own microcosm of perception, and the whole image resembles a map of epistemological chaos. The composition is dynamic but not chaotic – Hokusai guides the viewer’s gaze along a spiral path, from the tail, through the legs, to the trunk and head, and then back to the people.
The graphic style is typical of Hokusai’s Manga – a quick brush sketch, ink on paper, without color but with extraordinary expressiveness of line. Despite the simplicity of means, every gesture, facial expression, and fold of fabric carries meaning. It is not realism, but penetrating observation – art that does not need color to speak with a full voice.
Context of Its Creation – Buddhism and Curiosity About the World
Hokusai created this drawing in the first half of the 19th century, at a time when Japan – though formally closed to the world under the sakoku policy – was experiencing a flourishing of culture and science. Despite limited foreign contact, the import of Chinese works, Buddhist sutras, lexicons, and illustrations continued uninterrupted. In precisely such works – in the texts of Chinese Chan Buddhism or Confucian encyclopedias – the parable of the blind men and the elephant was present and well known.
At the same time, Hokusai was fascinated by all that was foreign and unknown. His sketchbooks are filled with Chinese dragons, European ruins, exotic animals, atmospheric phenomena, but also people – poor, rich, old, drunk, playing, praying, arguing. The parable of the elephant fit perfectly into his interest in the nature of perception and the absurdity of human stubbornness.
Why Did Hokusai Choose This Parable?
Hokusai’s choice of this story was no coincidence. On one hand, it was a well-known and popular Buddhist tale, used by monks as didactic material. On the other – it perfectly suited his own creative philosophy. Hokusai was an artist deeply aware of the incompleteness of knowledge, the mutability of things, and the mystery of existence. In the preface to one of the Manga volumes, he wrote that only after turning sixty did he begin to truly understand how to draw. And on his deathbed, he is said to have asked the gods to grant him just a few more years – because then, perhaps, he would finally “learn how to draw leaves and flowers.”
The parable of the blind men and the elephant perfectly captures the Japanese sensitivity to fragmentation, transience, and the limitations of form. In Japanese art, one does not strive for absolute perfection or objective truth. On the contrary – it is acknowledged that everything knowable is merely a fragment, a shadow, an echo. This attitude is expressed in the wabi-sabi aesthetic, the spirit of mu (無) in zen, and in stories like this one.
In this sense, Hokusai’s elephant is not merely a metaphor. It is a reminder that no perspective – neither the scholar’s, nor the artist’s, nor the blind man’s – is complete. And that it is precisely in this incompleteness, in this dispersed truth, that the essence of human understanding lies. Japanese art does not resist this limitation – it celebrates it.
The Search for Fragmentary Truth in Japanese Culture
The parable of the blind men and the elephant resonates with Japanese culture not only because it was assimilated into Japanese Buddhist tradition. Its spiritual message – humility in the face of partial understanding – permeates many aspects of Japanese philosophy, aesthetics, and art. In contrast to the Western pursuit of synthesis, systematization, and the embrace of a rationally ordered totality, Japan often chooses a more mystical path – one of silence and deliberate ambiguity. Instead of arranging the world into a cohesive structure, it teaches how to perceive meaning precisely in the cracks, the absences, and the ephemeral. This is not about which concept is “better” or “worse” – scientific progress has certainly been more easily built upon the Western approach. Yet nothing prevents a person from drawing on the benefits of culture – and learning different ways of seeing life. And the Japanese, fragmentary one undoubtedly allows us to grasp many aspects of existence more easily.
Wabi-sabi – The Beauty of Imperfection and Incompleteness
One cannot begin without the concept of wabi-sabi – the aesthetic and spiritual core of Japanese sensibility. Wabi denotes simplicity, stillness, solitude, while sabi refers to the patina of time, the melancholy aging of things, their natural wear. Objects beautiful in the spirit of wabi-sabi are never perfect, symmetrical, or whole. Instead – they are incomplete, cracked, provisional. A ceramic bowl with uneven glaze, a chipped edge, and traces of repair using the kintsugi method (golden joinery) is not defective – it reveals a truth about life: its impermanence, the scars we carry, the kind of beauty that does not require symmetry (more about kintsugi here: Kintsugi – to make life's scars a source of pride and gold, and about wabi-sabi here: How to Stop Fighting Yourself at Every Turn? Wabi Sabi Is Not Interior Design but a Way of Life).
These are the kinds of things that tell a fragment of the truth. They do not attempt to be metaphysically complete – they are like a blind man touching the elephant’s trunk: sincere in their limitation, truthful in their lack of totality.
Zen – Freedom from Cognitive Illusions
In the tradition of zen (which grew out of Chinese chan and was brought to Japan from the 12th century onward), understanding does not mean the accumulation of facts. It means freeing oneself from illusions. The illusion that the world can be fully understood. The illusion that logic leads to enlightenment. The illusion that words can grasp the truth. Well-known zen kōans (paradoxical dialogues between master and student) deliberately disrupt discourse to show that language is merely the blind man’s tool – useful, but insufficient.
The kanji 無 (mu) – meaning “nothing” or “non-existence” – is not nihilism, but liberation from dogma. Truth does not arrive through the accumulation of evidence, but through the clearing of the mind from cognitive habits. The zen master does not say: “know everything,” but rather: “see how you cling to your own tail.”
Mujō – The Impermanence and Elusiveness of the World
The second pillar of Japanese ontology is the concept of mujō (無常) – impermanence, transience. It is one of the key concepts of Buddhism, but in Japan it took on a particularly profound cultural dimension. Already in the 12th-century Heike monogatari, we find the sentence:
“The sound of the Gion bell echoes the impermanence of all things.”
Everything passes – elephants and blind men, beliefs and certainties, and our attempts at understanding as well.
The realization of mujō is an act of maturity. Instead of demanding that the world be clear and legible, the Japanese learn to live with its changeability. This is why they celebrate falling leaves and blossoming cherry trees – not despite their fleeting nature, but precisely because of it.
Japanese Art as a Fragmentary Reflection of the World
This fragmentariness is also visible in Japanese art.
Ukiyo-e – literally “pictures of the floating world” – never aimed to depict reality as a whole. They were like haiku in visual form – capturing a moment, a glance, a gesture, a shadow, an expression. Tsukioka Yoshitoshi’s series One Hundred Aspects of the Moon shows that the moon can be something different in each scene: a light during a murder, a sign of loyalty, a symbol of longing, a backdrop for solitude. Each print is only a fragment – like a blind man’s tale (you can read more about Yoshitoshi’s One Hundred Aspects of the Moon in our reflection album: album).
Haiku, in turn, is the most condensed way of speaking about the world – 17 syllables, three lines, one scene. But behind this sparseness lies not a poverty of expression, but a deliberate limitation, like closing just one hand around a part of the elephant.
Japanese miniaturization – whether in the art of netsuke or karesansui gardens (read more about them here: Japanese Karesansui Garden is a Mirror in Which You Can See Yourself) – also does not strive for realism, but for essence. Bonsai art does not represent an entire forest, but suggests it. The fragment is not a missing link – it is all we have, and at the same time, all we need.
In this way, Japan – through wabi-sabi, zen, mujō, and the art of fragmentariness – expresses what the parable of the blind men and the elephant has been teaching for millennia: we will never see the whole, but we can honor the pieces of understanding we have managed to gather. In a world flooded with simplifications, memes, and intellectual laziness stoked by (social) media, this is a profoundly relevant lesson.
And in the 21st Century?
The parable of the blind men and the elephant, despite its ancient roots, resonates with astonishing power in the modern world – a world of artificial intelligence, neurobiology, chaos theory, and distributed cognitive systems. It tells us – perhaps more than ever – about the way the human mind constructs reality: always from fragments, always through the prism of experience, limited senses, and language. Contemporary epistemology and cognitive science say nothing essentially different from what the Buddha said two and a half thousand years ago: we see only parts, and the whole – if it even exists – eludes not only the senses, but reason itself.
Neuroscience offers no illusions: our brains are not objective instruments of cognition, but machines for constructing models. Daniel Dennett spoke of the “intelligent user of illusions,” Karl Friston of the “predictive machine,” and in a spirit akin to zen, some suggest we “let go” of conceptualizations before they dominate reality. In Japanese zen philosophy, as in the thought of Umberto Eco, truth is not something “to be grasped,” but a motion – a dynamic balancing between premises, experience, and the awareness of incompleteness.
But the Parable Does Not Advocate Nihilism
It does not say: “There is no truth,” but rather: “Our understanding of truth will always be partial.” It is a call for cognitive humility—not for resignation. That is why in Japan, where no single dogmatic orthodoxy was ever formed, this parable resonates particularly strongly. This country has never had one dominant religion—Shinto, Buddhism, Confucianism, and Taoism have coexisted for centuries, not merely side by side, but rather forming a somewhat undefined yet unified whole. Religious practice was often pragmatic, rooted in the “here and now,” and spirituality was based on everyday gestures, rituals, and harmony—not on abstract dogmas.
This is precisely why philosophers like Nishida Kitarō and Keiji Nishitani were so eager to refer to the idea of ontological emptiness (kū – 空) and indeterminacy. For Nishida, understanding reality did not mean “taking control of it”—but remaining in relationship with that which is undefined. Things exist, but are not fully graspable—and the mind, if open and alert, can form temporary images from these fragments. Images that do not have to be final in order to be useful.
The Traps of Interpretation: Who Looks from the Outside?
But the parable of the blind men and the elephant, despite its powerful metaphorical strength, is not free from hidden assumptions. From the perspective of analytic philosophy—as Katherine Wasson, a bioethics scholar at Loyola University Chicago, aptly noted in her paper “The Blind Men and the Elephant: What ‘Elephanomics’ Can Teach ‘Muromics’”—this narrative assumes that the elephant truly exists, and that someone (the narrator? the Buddha? the author of the parable?) knows its full form. This presupposes the existence of a “meta-knower,” someone who stands above the plurality of opinions. Thus, paradoxically, a parable meant to expose dogmatism may itself conceal a dogma: that all religions or systems of knowledge are touching the same thing, just from different angles. But what if... they’re not? What if there is no “elephant”? Or if each of them is touching something entirely different? Or if the elephant consists only of those fragments, and there is no greater whole to observe (because—to be observed by whom)?
This critical point is especially relevant today—in a world of post-truth, algorithmic information bubbles, and the resurgence of extreme ideologies. Does pluralism itself not risk becoming a dogma? Does worldview tolerance not often conceal a convenient relativism that abandons inquiry so as not to offend any of the “blind men”?
Japan, despite its pluralism, knows this tension well. On the one hand, it is a culture of cognitive humility, where one tends to dwell in the question rather than impose a definitive answer. The philosophy of shoshin (初心)—the beginner’s mind—encourages an always-fresh approach, free from the arrogance of knowledge. But on the other hand, there is a risk that this lack of definitive answers becomes an excuse for inaction. Zen Buddhism teaches action without cognitive illusion—not resignation (though this depends somewhat on the particular school of zen). Haiku, ukiyo-e, architecture—all of these are fragments of a greater reality—they are attempts to grasp the world “even in a sliver,” fully aware that the whole will never be captured. Yet they are not expressions of defeat; rather, they are celebrations of the world and of life, despite their transience.
The Elephant We All Face
In Hokusai’s woodblock print, the blind men lean in with focus and seriousness over an extraordinary phenomenon—the elephant, which for each of them is something different. Their attitudes blend solemnity with absurdity, curiosity with unawareness, and all of this plays out in the aesthetic of simplification and suggestion characteristic of Japanese ukiyo-e. Hokusai does not draw the truth—he draws our attempts to touch it. And therein lies the essence of the parable: not in what the elephant is, but in how we try to understand it.
For the modern person—immersed in the worlds of their own vast narratives—this parable can serve as an act of cleansing humility. It reminds us that none of our cognitive tools are perfect, and even the most rational minds can fall prey to the illusion of totality when they see only a fragment. But that does not mean we should stop seeking. Quite the contrary—science, built upon method, evidence, and error correction, teaches us the same humility that in Japan was expressed through zen, mujō, or the aesthetics of wabi-sabi: that the world is not a closed system of answers, but a process of mindful questioning.
The parable of the blind men and the elephant seems more powerful than ever. It teaches not only distance from our own convictions, but also compassion for the convictions of others. It does not say: “Everyone is right,” but: “Everyone sees differently—and that is precisely why it is worth listening.” We may never come to know the whole elephant. But if we examine it together—with attentiveness, humility, and a willingness to change our minds—we are far closer to the truth than if we stood alone at one of its legs, convinced we held the entire world.
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"Strong Japanese Women"
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未開 ソビエライ
An enthusiast of Asian culture with a deep appreciation for the diverse philosophies of the world. By education, a psychologist and philologist specializing in Korean studies. At heart, a programmer (primarily for Android) and a passionate technology enthusiast, as well as a practitioner of Zen and mono no aware. In moments of tranquility, adheres to a disciplined lifestyle, firmly believing that perseverance, continuous personal growth, and dedication to one's passions are the wisest paths in life. Author of the book "Strong Women of Japan" (>>see more)
Personal motto:
"The most powerful force in the universe is compound interest." - Albert Einstein (probably)
Mike Soray
(aka Michał Sobieraj)
未開 ソビエライ
An enthusiast of Asian culture with a deep appreciation for the diverse philosophies of the world. By education, a psychologist and philologist specializing in Korean studies. At heart, a programmer (primarily for Android) and a passionate technology enthusiast, as well as a practitioner of Zen and mono no aware. In moments of tranquility, adheres to a disciplined lifestyle, firmly believing that perseverance, continuous personal growth, and dedication to one's passions are the wisest paths in life. Author of the book "Strong Women of Japan" (>>see more)
Personal motto:
"The most powerful force in the universe is compound interest." - Albert Einstein (probably)
Mike Soray
(aka Michał Sobieraj)
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