The Elephant Epiphany Poem by Suzanne Hayasaki

One day the Great Buddha
Brought several blind men
Into the presence of an elephant
And asked them all to touch it.

One felt a leg and one felt its tail.
One touched a tusk and one its trunk.
Each one, equally amazed, began to imagine
How the entire pachyderm must appear.

The one who touched the trunk
Described a boneless snake.
The one who touched the tusk
Described a vicious beast.
Another thought it must be cow.
Yet another imagined a bat.

Then the Buddha lectured the men
As he let them use their hands to explore
The entire elephant and had it lift them
One by one with its trunk to demonstrate
Both its strength and its gentleness.

Most went home chastened but grateful
For what they had learned at the feet of the Great One.
But one had not come to sit and listen to another.
One had come to set himself on his own path to fame.

This one concocted a tale of a three-headed beast
With poison-tipped scales and a barbed club-like tail
And teeth that could be ground into powder
And imbibed to achieve eternal life.

Then he set out on a journey dressed as a mendicant.
And to every person he met who seemed gullible enough
He described his encounter with the three-headed beast
Leaving each one with the unspoken impression
That he was passing on the Buddha’s teachings
Exactly as he had received them at their meeting.

And as the days and months passed, he expanded his story.
And as the tale was passed along it became transformed
Into pictures and myths and ballads and chants.
In which, just as he planned, at some point he had become,
Not just the messenger but the precious friend of the Buddha.

So that when he returned to the capital
And set down his begging bowl in the chowk
It did not take long for people to begin to talk
And soon word passed from mouth to mouth
That the great sage had returned to his people.

He was greeted with solemn reverence
And led to the softest bed in the finest house
Of the richest man in the kingdom
And lived out his days sitting on a dais
Being fed the very best of everything
And occasionally deigning to grace his patron
With the Higher Truths that only he knew.

His presence has grown into legend.
His words have been preserved in verse.
His portrait adorns many a sacred place.
His body rests in the Temple of the Elephant

And you, too, can pay obeisance, if you choose.
Touching his tomb is said to open the eyes
Of even a true believer to the kind of lies
Upon which religions like this are founded.