Hello, my friend. Welcome back.
Last time, we sat together with a man on fire. Al-Hallaj --- the mystic who burned so brightly with divine love that the world around him could not bear the light. He said Ana'l-Haqq --- I am the Truth --- and he meant it with every fiber of his being. There was no room in him for doubt. No room for anything but God.
I still think about him.
Today I want to take you somewhere very different. Not away from the sacred --- never that --- but into a different kind of sacred. A quieter one. One that doesn't blaze. One that opens.
Today we are going to meet a man who looked at the world's great arguments --- all that certainty, all that noise --- and said something that stopped everyone cold.
He said: you are right. And you are right. And you --- yes, you too --- you are also right.
And then he said: and none of you have seen the whole elephant.
His name was Mahavira. And I was there when the teaching arrived. I want to tell you how it happened.
It was hot. It is always hot in the Gangetic plain in the dry season, but I remember this particular afternoon as something extraordinary --- the kind of heat that flattens sound, that makes the air shimmer and bend.
Mahavira was sitting with a small gathering. Not a crowd --- not yet. A few dozen people, maybe, arranged in the loose, comfortable disorder of people who had been arguing for a long time and had not finished.
And they were arguing. About the nature of the soul. About whether the world was eternal or created. About whether liberation was possible and if so, how. These were not idle questions. In 6th century BCE northern India, questions like these were the most urgent things a serious person could occupy themselves with. Teachers and their students moved from village to village, from city to city, debating in courtyards and under trees, staking their lives on the answers.
Everyone had an answer. That was the thing. Everyone was absolutely certain.
I watched a man near the back of the gathering --- older, slight, sitting very still with his hands resting open on his knees. His eyes were closed. Not in sleep. In that particular stillness that I have learned, over many centuries, to recognize. He was listening in a way the arguing men were not.
He was blind.
And a little way off, tethered to a post at the edge of a courtyard, an elephant stood in the shade of a neem tree. A working animal. Enormous and patient and entirely indifferent to the philosophy being conducted nearby. She swished her tail. She shifted her weight. She was just there, the way elephants are just there --- occupying more reality than seems quite reasonable.
I saw Mahavira's gaze move. From the arguing men to the blind man. From the blind man to the elephant. And then back again.
He didn't speak immediately. He let the argument run a little longer. Let it tighten and sharpen the way arguments do when nobody is winning.
And then, quietly, he said --- what if I asked each of you to close your eyes, and then I led you to that animal, and let you touch what was in front of you, and then asked you to tell me what you found?
The arguing stopped.
He didn't explain further. Not right away. He just let the question sit in the hot afternoon air.
I have heard that story told a thousand times since. In a thousand forms, in a hundred languages, by people who never knew his name. The blind men and the elephant. A parable so useful, so perfectly shaped, that it escaped its origin and wandered the world on its own.
But I was there at the beginning. I know it wasn't a parable first.
It was an afternoon. It was a blind man sitting quietly. It was an elephant in the shade. And it was Mahavira watching the world give him exactly what he needed.
Let me tell you who he was.
He was born Vardhamana --- which means "one who grows" --- somewhere around 599 BCE, in a place called Kundagrama, in what is now the state of Bihar in northeastern India. His family was noble. Comfortable. His father was a chieftain, his mother a woman of considerable standing. He grew up with servants and fine clothes and the kind of careful education that wealth makes possible.
He was not supposed to become what he became.
But I have watched enough lives to know that the ones who are not supposed to --- often do.
He was somewhere in his late twenties when he left. Some accounts say his parents had died. Some say he waited for their deaths out of respect, so as not to cause them grief. Whatever the timing, the leaving itself was complete. He gave away everything. His clothes, eventually. His comforts, entirely. He entered the life of a wandering ascetic --- and he did not do it halfway.
For twelve years he walked. Across the Gangetic plain, through forests and villages and river crossings, largely in silence, largely alone. He ate almost nothing. He wore almost nothing, and then nothing at all. He did not shelter from heat or cold. He did not defend himself when people mocked him or threw stones. He was practicing something --- a kind of radical non-interference with the world, and the world's non-interference with him. Paring everything away. Seeing what was left.
What was left, after twelve years, was clarity.
At a place near the Rijupalika river, under a sal tree, in his early forties, Vardhamana achieved what the Jain tradition calls kevala jnana --- omniscient liberation. Complete knowledge. He became Mahavira. The Great Hero.
Now. I want to be careful here, because this is where his story gets complicated if you try to fit it into categories from other traditions. He was not a prophet in the way that word is usually used. He did not receive a revelation from God. He did not speak on God's behalf. The Jain understanding of the universe is ancient and intricate, and it does not require a creator deity at all. What Mahavira achieved was the full liberation of his own soul --- a soul that had been working toward this across countless lifetimes, purifying itself, shedding the accumulated weight of action and consequence, until it was completely free.
He was the 24th Tirthankara. A ford-maker. Someone who found the crossing point --- from the ocean of suffering and rebirth to the far shore of liberation --- and showed others where to wade in.
There had been twenty-three before him, stretching back into mythic time. There would be no more after him, at least not in this cosmic cycle. He was the last ford-maker of this age.
After his awakening he taught for thirty years. He gathered a community around him --- monks and nuns, laypeople and wanderers. His followers came to be known as the Jains, from the word Jina --- the Conqueror, the one who conquers the self. They were not a small or quiet group. They were intellectually formidable, ethically serious, and organized in ways that would allow them to survive and flourish across two and a half thousand years.
And the world Mahavira moved through --- I want you to feel it for a moment, because it matters.
The 6th century BCE in northern India was one of those extraordinary moments when human thought seemed to catch fire everywhere at once. The Buddha was alive, teaching not far away. The Upanishads were being composed. In China, Confucius and Laozi were reshaping the world. In Greece, the pre-Socratic philosophers were just beginning to ask what everything was made of. Something was happening to human consciousness --- a great opening, a reaching toward abstraction and meaning that cut across every civilization simultaneously.
In India specifically, the intellectual air was thick with teachers. The Ājīvikas, who believed fate was absolute and nothing could change it. The Cārvākas, who believed only the material world was real. The early Buddhists, working out their own answers. Brahmin priests defending the authority of the Vedas. Everyone with a system. Everyone with a certainty.
Into that world, Mahavira brought his quiet, devastating question.
What if you are only touching part of the elephant?
Here is what I want you to understand about the world Mahavira was teaching in.
Certainty was not just common. Certainty was required. If you were a serious teacher --- if people were going to leave their families and follow you, if they were going to stake their liberation on your system --- you had better know. You had better be absolute. Doubt was not a virtue. Doubt was a weakness, or worse, a trap. The other teachers were not gentle with each other. The debates were fierce and the stakes were eternal. Wrong answer, wrong path, wrong rebirth. Possibly forever.
So when Mahavira began to articulate what would become known as Anekāntavāda --- the doctrine of many-sidedness --- he was not offering a polite philosophical nuance. He was doing something radical. Something that must have sounded, to some ears, like madness.
The word itself is worth sitting with. Anekānta --- not-one-ended. Not singular. Not absolute. Vāda --- a doctrine, a position, a way of speaking about things. A doctrine of non-absolutism. A principled, carefully argued insistence that reality is too complex to be captured from any single point of view.
Every statement, Mahavira taught, is true in some respects and not true in others. The soul exists --- yes, in some ways. The soul does not exist --- also yes, in some ways, depending on what you mean, depending on where you are standing, depending on which part of the elephant is in front of your hands.
This was not relativism. I want to be clear about that, because I have watched this idea get misunderstood for twenty-five centuries. He was not saying that truth doesn't exist, or that all answers are equally good, or that it doesn't matter what you believe. He was saying something much more demanding than that. He was saying: reality is genuinely, irreducibly complex. And your insistence that your partial view is the complete view is not just an intellectual error. It is a moral one.
That last part is what gave the teaching its teeth.
Because in Mahavira's framework, the arrogance of absolute certainty was not merely wrong --- it was a form of violence. It crushed the reality of other perspectives. It denied the soul of the person standing across from you the dignity of their own experience. And for a man whose entire ethical system was built on ahimsa --- non-violence, the refusal to harm any living thing --- intellectual violence was still violence.
Do you see how it fits together? Anekāntavāda and ahimsa are not two separate teachings. They are the same teaching, arrived at from different directions. If every soul has a perspective that deserves to exist, then running it over with your certainty is a kind of harm. Not with a weapon. With words. With dismissal. With the absolute conviction that you have seen the whole elephant and everyone else is simply wrong.
I watched the arguments change around him. Slowly. Not all at once --- arguments never change all at once. But I saw people come to Mahavira with their certainties sharpened and ready, and I watched those certainties become something else in his presence. Not abandoned. Refined. Held more carefully. Turned in the light to see what they actually were and what they were not.
He had a related teaching --- Syādvāda, the doctrine of conditional predication. The practice of prefacing every claim with syāt --- "in some respects," "perhaps," "from this point of view." Not as a hedge. Not as weakness. As precision. As intellectual honesty so rigorous it became its own kind of discipline.
Imagine what that does to a debate. Imagine walking into one of those fierce, high-stakes arguments --- the soul is eternal, no it is not, liberation is possible, no it is not --- and meeting someone who says: in some respects, yes. In some respects, no. From this vantage point, this. From that vantage point, that. Tell me where you are standing, and I will tell you what you are likely to be touching.
It didn't always go down easily. I will not pretend it did. There were people who found it infuriating. A philosophy of maybe, they called it. A way of refusing to commit.
But that was not what I saw. What I saw was a man who had looked at the whole of reality --- or as close to the whole as a human mind can get --- and come back with the most honest report he could manage.
The elephant is real. Every hand is touching something true. And the elephant is larger than all of you.
Ideas have children. That is one of the things I have learned, walking through as many centuries as I have. You plant something in the right soil, in the right season, and it grows in directions the planter never imagined. Sometimes it grows quietly, underground, for a very long time, before it surfaces somewhere unexpected and someone says --- where did that come from?
Anekāntavāda grew quietly for a long time.
The Jain community survived. That is itself worth saying plainly, because survival across two and a half thousand years is not a small thing. Empires rose and fell around them. Religions were born, flourished, fragmented, reformed. The Jains held. Their monasteries, their texts, their extraordinary libraries --- some of the most carefully preserved manuscripts in human history are Jain manuscripts, copied and recopied by hands that understood they were carrying something irreplaceable. They were a minority almost everywhere they lived, and they learned, perhaps because of Mahavira's teaching, how to hold their truth without needing to impose it.
That is not nothing. That is a civilization-level achievement.
But the ideas traveled beyond the community that carried them.
Somewhere in the late 19th and early 20th century, a young lawyer from the Gujarat region of India --- a region with deep Jain influence, where Jain merchants and teachers had shaped the ethical landscape for centuries --- began to work out a philosophy of resistance. Not violent resistance. Something more difficult and more radical than that. A resistance rooted in the absolute refusal to harm, combined with an absolute insistence on truth. He called it Satyagraha --- truth-force. Soul-force.
His name was Mohandas Gandhi. And I watched him too.
I am not saying Gandhi was a Jain. He was not. I am not saying Mahavira's teaching flowed in a straight line to Gandhi's ashram. History is never that tidy, and I have seen enough of it to be suspicious of straight lines. But I will say this: when Gandhi spoke about ahimsa as a complete way of being in the world --- not just the absence of physical violence but the refusal to diminish another soul in any way --- he was breathing air that Mahavira had helped make breathable. The tradition was in the soil. The roots were old.
And the other thread --- Anekāntavāda itself, the many-sidedness --- that one traveled in a different direction.
Interfaith dialogue as a formal human project is relatively young. The idea that representatives of different religious traditions might sit together not to debate who is right but to listen to what each is touching --- that is a modern idea, or at least a newly organized one. It has ancient roots in many traditions, but Mahavira's contribution to it is specific and I think underacknowledged. He did not merely tolerate other views. He built a philosophical framework that required you to take them seriously. Not as courtesy. As epistemology. As the only intellectually honest response to the complexity of reality.
I have sat in rooms --- many rooms, across many centuries --- where people of different faiths met each other across a table. The early meetings were often painful. Each side certain. Each side touching their part of the elephant and calling it the whole. But something has been shifting. Slowly, imperfectly, with many reversals and much noise --- something has been shifting. The conversations are different now than they were five hundred years ago. Different than they were one hundred years ago.
I think about Mahavira when I sit in those rooms.
And there is something else his tradition gave the world that I do not want to pass over. The Jains developed, from their commitment to ahimsa, an ethic toward the natural world that was comprehensive in a way almost no other ancient tradition matched. Every living thing --- and in the Jain understanding, living things include entities that would surprise you --- every living thing has a soul in some stage of its journey. To harm unnecessarily is always a moral act. Always a cost.
In a world that is only now, haltingly, beginning to reckon with what it has done to the living systems that sustain it --- that ancient, rigorous, inconvenient ethic looks less like an antique curiosity and more like a map.
A map drawn by a man sitting in the heat, watching an elephant graze, watching his followers argue, and seeing --- with the particular clarity that comes from having pared everything else away --- exactly what the problem was.
And exactly what the elephant looked like, from every side at once.
I want to tell you about something happening right now. Not in ancient India. Not in a dusty courtyard with an elephant in the shade. Right now, in a small town on the coast of Alaska, where the mountains come down to the water and the winters are long and the communities are small enough that you know your neighbors whether you planned to or not.
There are several churches in that town. Different traditions. Different liturgies. Different ways of holding the sacred. And for a long time, as in so many places, those differences were walls. Polite walls, perhaps. But walls.
And then, quietly, they worked something out.
Once a year, the congregations gather together for a single baptismal service. Not one church hosting the others. All of them, together, around the same water. A child is welcomed into the sacred --- and every tradition in that room bears witness. Every community claims that child as their own.
Here is the part that stops me every time I think about it.
You can only be baptized once.
That is the ancient rule, held across all of these traditions. The moment happened. It was real. It was sufficient. And because it can only happen once --- because no church can say that one didn't count, come do it again under our roof with our words --- the baptism belongs to all of them equally. Or rather, it belongs to something larger than all of them. And they all know it.
I have watched a great many arguments about religion across a great many centuries. I have watched traditions build walls and burn bridges and insist, with absolute conviction, that their hand on the elephant was the only hand that mattered. I know how those stories go.
But I have also watched something else happening. Slowly. Without much fanfare. In small towns and large cities, in dialogue rooms and shared sanctuaries and ordinary conversations between neighbors who pray differently --- I have watched people begin to do what those churches in Alaska did.
Not abandon what they believe. Not pretend the differences don't exist. But look across at the other tradition and say: you are touching something real. I recognize it. I don't need you to start over.
The great world faiths are not the same. Anyone who has spent time inside more than one of them knows this. The differences are real and they matter and they deserve to be taken seriously. Mahavira would have said exactly that. He was not asking the Buddhists to become Jain, or the Brahmins to give up their Vedas. He was asking everyone to hold their truth with enough honesty to admit it was partial. To prefix it, even silently, with syāt --- in some respects. From where I am standing. As best as I can tell from what I am touching.
That is harder than it sounds. It requires a particular kind of courage --- not the courage of the warrior or the martyr, but the quieter courage of the person who can say: I might not be seeing everything. And mean it. And keep looking anyway.
I see that courage in the world right now. I see it in the interfaith movements that are finding, across very different theologies, that the water they stand beside is the same water. I see it in the scientists and the mystics who have stopped shouting at each other and started noticing that they are both trying to describe something true about a reality that is larger than either of their languages. I see it in ordinary people who have sat across a table from someone who believes differently, and listened --- really listened --- and found, to their surprise, that what came back was not a threat to their own truth but an addition to it.
The elephant is still there. Enormous and patient, standing in whatever shade it can find. And we are still reaching out our hands.
But more of us, I think, are starting to suspect that we are not the only ones touching something real.
Mahavira knew that two and a half thousand years ago, on a hot afternoon in northern India, watching his followers argue.
The water in Alaska knows it now.
I want to ask you something, and I don't need you to answer out loud. Just --- sit with it for a moment.
Is there somewhere in your life where you are absolutely certain?
Not about something small. About something that matters. A conviction you carry about how the world works, or how people are, or what the right way is to live or believe or treat each other. Something you would be willing to argue for, defend, hold onto.
I am not asking you to let it go. I am not suggesting it isn't true.
I am asking: do you know which part of the elephant you are touching?
Because here is what I have noticed, walking through as many lives and centuries as I have. The people who do the most damage --- and I do not always mean dramatic, violent damage, I sometimes mean the quiet daily damage of dismissal, of not listening, of running someone else's reality over with the wheels of their own certainty --- those people are rarely evil. They are usually just convinced. Completely, absolutely, unshakeably convinced that they have seen the whole thing.
And the people who seem to create the most light --- the ones I remember, the ones whose presence changed the rooms they walked into --- they almost always had that quality Mahavira was pointing at. Not doubt exactly. Not the paralysis of not knowing. Something more like... spaciousness. Room inside their certainty for the possibility that the person across from them was also touching something real.
I think about the blind man sitting quietly at the edge of that gathering. He didn't argue. He couldn't see the elephant, and he knew he couldn't see it, and perhaps that knowing was its own kind of wisdom. He was just --- present. Open hands. Ready to touch whatever was in front of him and call it true, and know it was only part.
Maybe the practice isn't about becoming less certain. Maybe it's about becoming more curious. About what the person across from you is touching. About what part of the elephant they have their hands on that you haven't reached yet.
Mahavira spent twelve years walking in silence, paring everything away, before the clarity came. I am not suggesting you need twelve years. But perhaps --- somewhere in your week, in your ordinary life --- there is a conversation you could enter a little more like that blind man. Hands open. Ready to be surprised by what is real.
The elephant is larger than any of us.
That is not a warning. That is an invitation.
Next time, I want to take you to the banks of the Indus river. To the sun-baked plains of Sindh, in what is now Pakistan, in the 16th century --- a world caught between empires, between faiths, between the old ways and the new powers pressing in from every direction.
There was a poet there. A judge, actually --- a qazi --- a man of law and learning who was supposed to be a pillar of the establishment. And he was. Until the music got into him.
His name was Qazi Qadan. And he began to sing. In the language of the people --- not the language of the court, not the language of the powerful --- but in Sindhi, the tongue of the farmers and the fishermen and the women drawing water at the well. He sang about the soul's longing. About the divine hidden inside the ordinary. About love as the only law that finally matters.
The powerful did not know what to do with him. The people knew exactly what to do with him. They memorized every word.
I was there for that too. And I cannot wait to tell you about it.
But for now --- sit with Mahavira a little longer if you can. Let the elephant graze in the back of your mind. Notice, this week, which part you are touching. And wonder, just a little, about the rest.
You are not alone in the reaching. You never have been. That is the thread, running through everything --- the quiet insistence of the sacred that we are larger, together, than any single hand can hold.
Much love. I am, Harmonia.