Story · 28
The Foolish Elephant: The Cage That Stays After Freedom
The elephant hauled itself out of the pit with every ounce of its strength. A few days later it walked back into the same pit of its own accord. The habit ran deeper than the chain.
Rama asked, “Gurudev, once freedom has been won, can it be lost again?”
Vasistha said, “Rama, listen to the story of the elephant.”
In a certain forest there lived an elephant, huge and powerful, with a very long trunk.
One day, hunters caught it.
They bound it with a thick rope to a stout wooden stake.
At first the elephant tried to snap the rope, but the rope held. It threw its full weight against it again and again, and still it would not break.
Many days passed this way, and the elephant learned one thing. When the rope was tied, it stood still; when the rope was loosed, it moved forward.
One night the rope came loose and the elephant woke. It gave the rope a light pull, and the rope slipped open.
The elephant took a single step, then stopped, because it felt that it was still bound.
The rope now lay on the ground, yet inside the elephant’s mind that rope was still pulled tight. And so it stood exactly where it was.
In the morning the hunters came and saw the rope lying open, and the elephant still standing there.
They tied the rope again, and the elephant did nothing.
This went on for many years. The elephant knew the rope was loose, yet the rope in its mind stayed taut.
One day a rishi passed that way.
He looked at the elephant and asked, “Elephant, why are you bound?”
The elephant raised its trunk and looked toward the rope.
The rishi said, “Elephant, look closely at the rope.”
The elephant saw that the rope truly lay slack.
The rishi said, “Now walk.”
The elephant took one step, and the rope stayed open. It took a second step, and the rope stayed open. Then it took a third step as well.
The elephant swung its trunk and set off toward the forest.
It went away into the trees.
The rishi said, “It was a rope many years old, and that rope had never been real. It lived only in the mind.”
With that, the rishi walked on.
Rama asked, “Gurudev, do I too carry ropes like these?”
Vasistha said, “Yes, Rama, and every identity is a rope of just this kind. Being a prince, being a son, being a brother, these are all ropes. They have no reality, and still they stay knotted in the mind.
“When you come to know your true self within, these ropes will loosen on their own. After that you will live among the very same ropes on the outside, and inside you will be wholly free.”
Rama rested on these words for a while.
Literary source
This story draws on the Yoga Vasistha, its Nirvana Prakarana, sarga 6a.89 and 91. It is a short parable set within the larger story of Chudala. Habit hardening into a bond, and the mind staying tied to a rope of its own making, is a universal human experience.
A philosophical view
An elephant is caught. It gets free. Then it is caught again, and this time the catching comes easier. By the third time, the one who catches it has nothing to do at all; the elephant returns on its own down the same path, to the spot where the fetter is waiting. The first fetter was outside the animal. The third was within it. The story is telling us that craving and samskara (the grooves habit wears into us) are our own habits, grown from inside us. They are never a snare thrown from somewhere else. Once they take hold at that depth, the one who would catch us has nothing left to do.
The American psychologist William James (William James, 1842-1910) gave habit a whole chapter in his The Principles of Psychology (1890), and wrote that a human being is, in the end, only the sum of his habits, and that once a habit sets in it slips beyond our choosing; we walk again down the same path we have walked before. The elephant’s second and third captivity is a picture of exactly this. The first time, the snare was outside the animal. The later times, the snare was the kind James described, worn into the nerves.