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Guest post! The story behind the classic Chinese idiom (成语 [pinyin]cheng2 yu3[/pinyin]) "Blind People Touch an Elephant" ("盲人摸象" [pinyin]mang2 ren2 mo1 xiang4[/pinyin]), was contributed by the content team over at <a href="http://duchinese.net">Du Chinese</a> - thank you guys. As I say often, I always struggle to find Mandarin reading appropriate for newbies, as most writing won't come together without some higher-level words, but if you're just getting started and these posts are too hard for you, Du Chinese has more HSK 1 and 2 materials than I'll ever have, since they write their own Chinese content, so they can control the difficulty level. 

The idiom 盲人摸象 refers to only having a surface-level understanding of something, or to only understand part of something but think you have the whole story. It is believe to have originated from a Buddhist sutra, the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mah%C4%81y%C4%81na_Mah%C4%81parinirv%C4%81%E1%B9%87a_S%C5%ABtra" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Mahayana Mahaparinirvana Sutra</a> 《大般涅槃经》, to be precise, which is over 1500 years old. This is not the original text of the sutra - the original Sanskrit version was lost, and this story has been re-told a zillion times in a zillion ways, but it's still cool to get a glimpse into what is essentially a Buddhist story from antiquity. 

<h4>Some language stuff</h4>

长什么样 [pinyin]dan3 zi[/pinyin] - The character 长 has many meanings and two pronunciations. The one we usually learn first is [pinyin]chang2[/pinyin], which means "long", as in the opposite of "short". But pronounced [pinyin]zhang3[/pinyin], it also means "appearance", or "what something looks like" (and about a billion other things, so don't get married to that definition). 

原来 [pinyin]yuan2 lai2[/pinyin] - I just went over this in a recent post, but again, this means "turns out that", as in, "Turns out she was here to see someone else."

只不过 [pinyin]zhi3 bu guo4[/pinyin] - Is nothing more than / is nothing but. 

才能 [pinyin]cai2 neng2[/pinyin] - My dictionary pop-up generator has this wrong, it displays the definition as "ability" or "talent". As a noun, that is indeed what 才能 means. However, this is actually not a single noun made up of two characters, but two separate characters, 才 and 能, which together mean "only then can one _____". I always found 才 to be a pain-in-the-butt character, because it has so many amorphous meanings that don't translate well into English, and you can only really figure out which one is being used in context, and some of those meaning are direct opposites. Blogger Jenna Wang does a good job of explaining all of them <a href="http://blog.tutorming.com/mandarin-chinese-learning-tips/cai-in-chinese-grammar">here</a>. 
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<h4>盲人摸象</h4>
很久很久以前，有四个盲人很想知道大象<span class="hightlightText">长什么样</span>，可他们看不见，只能用手摸。

第一个盲人摸到了大象的牙齿。他就说：“我知道了，大象就像一个大萝卜。”

第二个盲人摸到的是大象的耳朵，他大叫起来：“不对，不对，大象就像一把大扇子！”

“你们说的都不对，大象只是一根大柱子。” <span class="highlightText">原来</span>第三个盲人摸到的是大象的腿。

第四个盲人却不同意，他说：“大象哪有那么大，它<span class="highlightText">只不过</span>是一根绳子。”<span class="highlightText">原来</span>他摸到的是大象的尾巴。

四个盲人争吵不休，都说自己摸到的才是大象真正的样子。而实际上呢？他们一个也没说对。

“盲人摸象”告诉人们看问题不能只看一部分，要看全部，那样<span class="highlightText">才能</span>真正地了解问题。
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A long long time ago, four blind people wanted to know what an elephant looks like. But they couldn't see it, and could only touch it with their hands. 

The first blind person touched the elephant's teeth. He said: “I know! An elephant looks like a big radish.” 

The second blind person touched the elephant's ears. He yelled out: “No no, the elephant looks like a big fan!” 

“You're both wrong, the elephant is just a large pillar.” Turns out the  third blind person was touching the elephant's leg. 

The fourth blind person disagreed, and said: “The elephant isn't that big at all, it's just a rope.” He was touching the elephant's tail. 

The four blind people argued endlessly, and they all said that the part they touched was the elephant's true appearance. And in reality? None of them were correct.

“Blind people touch an elephant” teaches us that we shouldn't just look at one part of a problem. We should look at all of it, and only then can we truly understand the problem. 
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