Once, the Buddha’s disciples asked, “Why do the scholars and the hermits in Savatthi always argue about the eternal nature of the world, the soul and so on?” The Buddha explained, “Imagine what would happen if we gathered a group of blind men and tried to show them an elephant. Each one would be able to feel only one part of the animal; thus, one could feel the head of the elephant, another would feel its ear, a third its tusk, and so on. If we ask the blind men to describe the animal, each would describe only the part that he had touched. Then they would argue about which one of them was correct. But actually, none of them knows the complete truth. Preachers and scholars are like the blind men, who do not see the whole animal, but fight unnecessarily.”
Moral: We should not fight when we don’t know the whole truth.
