How Should we Approach the Elephant in the Room?

There is a famous Indian parable about several blind men and an elephant. Each of the men attempts to touch a specific part of the elephant (such as the ears, the legs, the tail, etc.) in order to understand what it is. However, after touching the different parts of the elephant, they began to discuss the nature of what the animal was like and soon discovered that they vehemently disagreed about the elephant’s nature. This parable has been used for several different purposes within Jainism, Buddhism, Hinduism, and Islam such as to demonstrate the inexpressible quality of the universe. I argue that this parable might also be qualifiedly applied to religious studies scholars and their study of religion.

J. Z. Smith briefly outlines the evolution of the idea of “religion”; namely, he demonstrates how the concept is virtually a term fabricated by Christians which has expanded and contracted to include and exclude several cultural phenomena (such as Judaism, Buddhism, etc.) at different times. This, development of the term has lead Smith to conclude that “religion” is a synthetic term which scholars are free to define for their own purposes (“Religion, Religions, Religious” 281). In light of the cultural development of the idea of “religion”, this conclusion might appear sound. However, one must also account for the historical influx of information that gradually became available to the Christian scholars who defined the term. Thus, it is better to think about “religion” as a concept which has changed due to a growing body of information rather than Smith’s understanding that it is a term strictly defined by scholars’ ideological and political agendas.

Conversely, Smith is correct in identifying the roots of this concept as emerging out of a Christian world-view. Therefore, the idea of “religion” has often been susceptible to students’ incorrectly assuming that “religion” stems only from “belief”. Certainly, it was this Christian idea that “religion” stems from one’s belief that lead to Colonel Olcott’s (who was raised within the Presbyterian Christian tradition) assumption that authoring a Buddhist catechism would help to oppose Christian missionary endeavours within 19th century Sri Lanka (Lopez 29-34). Certainly, belief plays an important role within many cultural groups, but this is not true for several traditions typically identified as “religious”. Thus, it might be stated that one of the “blind men” or rather many Christian scholars identified the elephant or “religion” with belief; however, belief is, perhaps, not an intrinsic aspect to the phenomenon of “religion” as a whole.

This leads to the issue of classification. How should we classify ideas and concepts? In particular, how might we classify the elephant? Understanding ourselves and understanding institutions and concepts is intrinsically linked to how we understand the “other”. Similarly, “[p]erhaps the most fundamental classification of religions is “ours” and theirs,”” (Smith “Classification” 39). Unfortunately, while classification tends to be generalizing, it is indispensible within any academic discipline. In order to understand the unknown, should we not discuss how it is both like and unlike what is known? Learning comes out of utilizing cultural language and symbols which are already familiar to the learner to understand the unknown. Studying “religion”, therefore, must be done in the context of our own personal cultural backgrounds. Thus, if the blind man from the forest touches the leg of the elephant, he might say that the leg is strong and sturdy like a tree.

The same must be said of those who study “religion” and come from a confessional background (or from any and every background for that matter). Much of the study of religion has been separated into very specific fields such as the New Testament, or Rabbinics, etc. with little reference to the studies of the broader academy (Gill 974), just as the blind men examined different parts of the elephant without reference to other parts of the animal. Thus, a prolegomenon to resolving this issue would be through comparison and discussion of ideas within the broader field of religion. However, the method of comparative religions is not a new method within the study of religion, at least in terms of discussing similarities (969).

Therefore, what needs to be considered is if and how all of these distinctive cultural phenomena (Christianity, Judaism, Buddhism, etc.) relate to one another in regards to the human experience. Are religions related through shared common properties or do they have a family resemblance (Smith, “Classification” 36-37)? Conversely, are religions merely related synthetically due to a constructed and an expanding/contracting usage of the term “religion”?

I contend that the solution to these questions might come about through broader discussions and the “bridging-of-the-gaps” among the various subareas of religious studies. In the parable outlined above, the blind men are all touching the same thing, which, similarly, implies a commonality to the study of religion. Thus, we are all discussing a related phenomenon of “religion”, but what remains is for us to begin examining other parts of the elephant and discussing how these parts fit together into coherent whole. However, since the term “religion” basically developed out of a particular world-view (Christianity), it is up to religious studies scholars to integrate new world-perspectives and information into our developing understanding of “religion”, and, thereby, to change an originally external and mistaken term into a term which accurately describes this widespread human phenomenon.