The Wild Elephant Analogy: A Buddhist Guide to Mind Training
- A chapter from the book Mindfulness, A Guidebook to the Present Moment -
‘The mind acts like and enemy for those who do not control it’ – The Bhagavad Gita
What follows may appear a touch terse to the modern ear, but nonetheless it does provide a good likeness to the approach we are undertaking with our minds when we practice mindfulness. So, if you find this section obtuse or emotionally impactful, I encourage you to use the skills gained in the previous section ‘Addiction, Emotions, and Conflict’ to investigate those feelings.
There is a traditional Buddhist analogy that relates the meditative process of calming the mind with the task of taming a wild elephant. As you would imagine, a wild elephant is a large and powerful animal. If left to run around a village untamed it could cause tremendous damage. Similarly, an untrained, untamed mind is equally wilful, wild, and dangerous. Yet, just as a tamed and trained elephant obeys its master, so too does the trained mind obey its master. The result being a reduction in suffering, for the self and for the world.
The analogy continues. To tame an elephant, it is tied to a tree with good strong rope. At first the elephant will struggle, but eventually it will settle down and you can start to feed it, first from afar, and then by hand. In time it will become easier to handle, eventually allowing itself to be safely used for village work without the need for the rope. In other words, the elephant is now tamed.
In this analogy, the elephant is your untamed wild mind, the rope is mindfulness, and the tree is the object of your meditative focus, traditionally the breath.
The analogy concludes that just like a tamed elephant can be extremely useful in village life, so too can a tamed mind be extremely useful for your life. With the improved focus and clarity a tamed mind brings we can then get onto the real work of our mindfulness practice. We can start to expand our scope of focus beyond the breath, sound, or physical sensations and onto the more subtle aspects of the human condition. We can begin investigating the nature of our thoughts, emotions, or moods. We can turn attention upon itself or direct it to investigate consciousness as a whole; investigating what it is, what it contains, what it means to know, and how it is knowing it. We can use it to explore the fundamental nature of our existence, and attempt to answer one of the deepest philosophical and traditional questions; is the ego an illusion?
We use mindfulness to stable the mind, then we can use that stable mind to investigate the nature of consciousness and the self.
This chapter is from the book Mindfulness, A Guidebook to the Present Moment
