Katie Knight
INLS 121
Dr. Sturm
Bibliographic:
His Kou, Louise and Yuan (1976).
“Three Blind Men and an Elephant.” Chinese Folktales, Celestial Arts:
Ethnic Origin
Running Time:
Approx 5 minutes
Anticipation, haughtiness
Characters:
Tsu, Hua, Gi (3 blind men)
Merchant
Elephant
Scenes:
3 men under tea tree
Merchant with Elephant
Tsu and Elephant (feels legs)
Hua and Elephant (feels tail)
Gi and Elephant (feels trunk)
3 men arguing under tea tree
Stones in forest
Synopsis:
3 blind men want to know what elephant looks like. Merchant overhears them and takes them to feel an elephant. They each touch a different part and argue over what the elephant really looks like. To understand the whole you must first know the sum of its parts.
Flavor:
Fun language, seeing something with your eyes closed
Audience
Young (any age would do, I think)
Other bibliographic info:
http://www.his.com/~pshapiro/elephant.story.html (prose)
In
this version (a well-known fable from
http://www.noogenesis.com/pineapple/blind_men_elephant.html (poem)
John Godfrey Saxe's (1816-1887) version of the famous Indian legend in verse. This version begins in a similar way to the Chinese one- though like the prose version there are 6 men instead of 3, and again they are labeled “wise”. However they encounter the elephant via unspecified means as opposed to the zoo or a merchant. Their arguments are the same as the prose version above and as the Chinese version (though because there are more of them they have additional ideas about what the elephant looks like), and just like the Chinese version I use these men don’t settle their dispute. I like the way the poem ends:
So oft in theologic wars,
The disputants, I ween,
Rail on in utter ignorance
Of what each other mean,
And prate about an Elephant
Not one of them has seen!
I
didn’t use much of these versions for my own telling, but rather
researched the Southern landscape of