The room in the elephant

If I were a cartoonist, I might try to draw a group of blindfolded people in a room, each facing a different direction. One is fingering a column supporting the ceiling, another the rope of a curtain, a third a velvet wallpapered wall. Or perhaps it's in an exotic ancient place where one is touching a palm leaf fan, another a tree trunk, a third a spear. The joke in either case would be that all the people are saying "it's an elephant!" 

The joke would work, if it did, because people seeing the cartoon would immediately call to mind the famous story of the blind men and the elephant. In that fable, they're all standing around an elephant, fingering an ear or a leg, the side or the trunk, a tusk or the tail. "A fan!" says one. "No, a tree!" "A wall!" "A snake!" "A spear!" "A rope!" 

This story, of ancient Indian provenance (some attribute it to the Buddha) but told in many places, makes fun of the limits of human knowledge. In the religious world it's often told as a way of making sense of the apparent differences between religious traditions, a call to mutual respect - and humility. "Ultimate reality" (say) is like the elephant, and the religions are like these blind men, getting some small part of reality right but ultimately getting even it wrong by taking it for the whole. We laugh, but the laugh's on us - all of us.

There are problems with this allegory, of course. If it's not the omniscient Buddha, how does the storyteller know it's an elephant we're talking about? Isn't the point of the story that, with respect to ultimate reality (say), we're all like the blind men, leaping to unwarranted conclusions? And if the storyteller can know, then why tarry with anyone else's view, incomplete as she's shown them to be? Critics of religion like Russell McCutcheon see the story as an ultimately incoherent attempt to assert that there's a there there, that all religions are after the same thing - in fact a thing we think we basically know after all, for all protestations of false modesty. I suppose my imaginary cartoon would make a similar point: the one thing that's not there is an elephant, though everyone thinks there is! (But still, why trust the cartoonist's claims to omniscience...?)

My Union neighbor John J. Thatamanil's new book Circling the Elephant: A Comparative Theology of Religious Diversity tries to vindicate the story's power, for all its problems. He readily acknowledges the problem of the storyteller who claims to know it's an elephant we're dealing with. Indeed, tapping years of experience in Hindu-Buddhist-Christian dialogue, he teases out several other problematic assumptions baked in the way the story's usually told, too: the elephant doesn't speak (but many religions are based on revelation), each blindfolded person is alone (but every tradition is a polydoxy of multiple views), and we assume that people and the elephant are separate (when non-duality is important for many schools of insight): Only the flattest forms of theism, which take ultimate reality to stand in discrete and spatial transcendence to the world and humanity, conform to the pictorial logic of this allegory (11). 

Too many tellers of this tale also miss the fact that each of the men gets something right, something the others don't know (though it may take dialogue with otherto show each of us what the true is in our own views) Thatamanil prefaces his account with the objections of John M. Hull, a Christian theologian who lost his sight in middle age, who says that jumping to conclusions "is precisely what the blind do not and cannot afford to do." This is a story anchored in the confidence of the sighted but perhaps it can be retold, making the difference between visual and tactile knowing a feature, not a bug. Tactile knowing, Thatamanil paraphrases Hull, is incremental, patient, and must proceed deliberately. Vision gives the impression of being synchronic; touch is perforce diachronic. (5)

Thatamanil's own way of turning the story to good use is diachronic, too, breaking it free from a static insight. The way one might discern that one was groping to understand the same thing as others - not unrelated and unconnected things, as in my imagined cartoon - would be to talk to these others, to move to their position, to try to touch what they touch. If you "circled the elephant" you might even confirm that you were all trying to make sense of the same thing(s) after all, regardless what the wannabe omniscient narrator claims. These ideas recover the inspiration of the story, I think, making its very shortcomings reasons for engaging more wholeheartedly in the "holy work" of interreligious exploration. 

Even if there's no elephant in the room!