The Elephant in the Dark
A Candle Would Have Settled It
Masnavi III.1259–1268 · tr. R. A. Nicholson, 1930The elephant was in a dark house: some Hindús had brought it for exhibition.In order to see it, many people were going, every one, into that darkness.As seeing it with the eye was impossible, (each one) was feeling it in the dark with the palm of his hand.The hand of one fell on its trunk: he said, “This creature is like a water-pipe.”The hand of another touched its ear: to him it appeared to be like a fan.Since another handled its leg, he said, “I found the elephant’s shape to be like a pillar.”Another laid his hand on its back: he said, “Truly, this elephant was like a throne.”Similarly, whenever any one heard (a description of the elephant), he understood (it only in respect of) the part that he had touched.On account of the (diverse) place (object) of view, their statements differed: one man entitled it “dál,” another “alif.”If there had been a candle in each one’s hand, the difference would have gone out of their words.
- First attested
- 1278No autograph survives. The oldest witness to the Mathnawī is the Qoniya manuscript, dated 677 A.H. — 1278, five years after Rūmī died — which Nicholson designated G and judged “the most authoritative text of the Mathnawi”. His printed Persian is founded on it only “from Book III, v. 2836, to the end of Book IV”, a stretch beginning well after this story, so his text at III.1259 rests on later copies while the poem's oldest surviving copy remains the 1278 codex. Rūmī dictated the Mathnawī at Konya across roughly the last decade of his life: Lewis places Book I about 1262 and Book II about 1264, with Books III to VI following before his death on 17 December 1273. Every English phrase quoted here is Nicholson's, from his 1930 translation of Books III and IV.
- Claimed
- the 1260sasserted by Franklin D. Lewis, Rumi: Past and Present, East and West, for the sequence and dating of the six books — Book I from about 1262, Book II resumed about 1264, Books III to VI before Rūmī's death in 1273. Book III carries no internal date, and no manuscript survives from Rūmī's lifetime.
Sanāʾī and al-Ghazālī made the men blind; Rūmī made the place dark — a change Nicholson names in his 1940 commentary — so the fault moves from the seers to the missing light, and where Ghazālī had concluded that each man spoke the truth so far as his knowledge reached, Rūmī concludes that a candle would have ended the argument.
Men feel an elephant in a dark house — Ghazālī read it as each man's partial truth; Rūmī blames the dark.
The story is older than Rūmī and older than Islam. Its earliest surviving form is Udāna 6.4 in the Pali canon: a king in Sāvatthī has people blind from birth shown an elephant, and the Buddha's target is the teachers of rival sects. Al-Ghazālī (d. 1111) tells it in the Iḥyāʾ and Sanāʾī (d. 1131) in the Ḥadīqa, both with blind men; Nicholson's 1940 commentary names Rūmī's change. At Mathnawī III.1259 the elephant stands in a dark house and the men are not blind, only unable to see. “If there had been a candle in each one's hand, the difference would have gone out of their words” (III.1268). Ghazālī had concluded that every man spoke the truth so far as his knowledge reached; Rūmī concludes that a candle was missing.
Light
A quarrel that looks like a clash of convictions may only be a shortage of light. Rūmī puts the remedy within reach — not a better argument but a candle — and III.1269 keeps the humbling image: the eye of sense-perception is only a palm.
Shadow
Quoted as a charter for pluralism, it was never used as one: Ghazālī told it against his critics, and Rūmī closes at III.1270 — leave the foam, look with the eye of the Sea. The remembered line, “each was partly in the right”, is Saxe's.
