The Elephant Hunter

There’s a story in the Canon. A brahman goes to see the Buddha and is very impressed. He comes back home, and on the way back home, he runs into a friend. He tells the friend, “I’ve just been to see the Buddha. He’s pretty amazing. He’s really awakened.” The friend says, “How do you know that?” The brahman says, “I see other people coming, trying to disprove the Buddha’s teachings. They listen to his Dhamma, and they’re converted. That’s a sign of an awakened person—just as when you go into the forest and you see the footprints of an elephant, you know that that’s an elephant, a big, bull elephant because the footprints are large.” So the friend says, “In that case, I’d like to meet with the Buddha someday.”

So he goes to see the Buddha and he tells him what the brahman had said. The Buddha says, “That’s the wrong use of the elephant footprint simile. Would you like to know the right use?” The man says, “Of course.”

The Buddha says, “Suppose there’s an expert elephant hunter. He goes into the forest looking for a big bull elephant. He comes across some large elephant footprints but he doesn’t jump to the conclusion that those must be the footprints of a bull elephant. Why is that? Because there are dwarf females with large feet—the footprints might be theirs.

“But the prints looked likely, so he follows them. He comes across some scratch marks way up in the trees, but he doesn’t jump to the conclusion that those must be scratch marks made by a big bull elephant. Why is that? Because there are tall females with tusks—the scratch marks might be theirs.

“But again, they look promising, so he follows them. Finally, he gets to a clearing, and there’s the big, bull elephant. When he sees the elephant directly, that’s when he knows that he’s got the big, bull elephant he wants.”

Then the Buddha makes a comparison. He says, “You practice the teachings and you get into the four stages of right concentration. Those are like footprints.” Think about that. For those of us who haven’t gotten into right concentration yet, we’re still wandering around in the forest and we haven’t even seen any footprints at all. Someone tells us there are footprints, and we say, “Well, that sounds good. Let’s keep looking for them.”

But the footprints correspond to the four jhanas. The scratch marks correspond to the different psychic powers you can gain from the jhanas. Still, they’re not proof that the Buddha’s awakened, that his teaching is true. But they look likely, so you follow them. Finally, you gain your first glimpse of the deathless, what they call the Dhamma-eye. You see that there really is something deathless that can be attained through following the path. That’s when you know that the Buddha is awakened, because you’ve had your taste of awakening by following his path, too.

Here the Buddha’s talking about the property of conviction. Conviction isn’t confirmed until you’ve gained awakening. But that means you have to commit yourself to the path first. Even before you’ve seen the footprints and seen the scratch marks, he’s asking that you commit to the path in order to test it, because it seems reasonable and because it’s a responsible thing to do.

Some people have trouble with the teaching on kamma and rebirth. But the Buddha’s teaching on kamma is different from the teachings of kamma that were generally given back in those days. In his case, kamma is all about the power you have to shape your experience.

Even the Jains who taught kamma taught that you were totally determined by your past kamma. There wasn’t much you could do right now but accept it and endure it. When there was pain, you had to sit with the pain and not react. That was going to burn off your old kamma, they said. And for them, the main kamma was your physical kamma, what you do with your body, what you say with your speech. But the Buddha’s saying, “No, you start with your intentions.” The quality of your intentions, mental kamma, determines the quality of the results.

In other words, he’s asking you to take responsibility from the very beginning with your intentions—what you intend to do, what you intend to accomplish, what you expect will be the results of your actions, in terms of harming yourself or harming others. You aim at not causing harm. Then you develop the qualities that you need in order to test his teachings. So there has to be an element of trust, of giving the Buddha the benefit of the doubt.

Some people say they can’t really commit themselves until they know for sure that something is true. But how many things do you know without committing? The Buddha himself, when he tested different teachings, looked to see what qualities were required—as when he studied under the two ajaans. They required conviction, persistence, mindfulness, concentration, and discernment. So he developed those qualities. When he found that the results were not what he’d hoped for, he moved on. But he committed himself first, then he reflected. That’s what he asks you to do, too.

Conviction is basically taking on, as a working hypothesis, the teachings that you are responsible for your actions and that the quality of your intentions determines the quality of the results. But simply good intentions are not good enough. You want to develop skillful intentions, and for that, you have to learn from your mistakes. Sometimes you act on good intentions and it turns out there’s some delusion involved in what you think is good. When you see that the results are not good, you have to turn around and look back at your intention to see where the delusion was. You take responsibility.

This is what the Buddha is asking you to do all the way along the line—you take responsibility, which is why conviction is a virtue and not just a wager. He says that if you take on the teaching that your actions give results and that the results go beyond just this lifetime, you’ll be more responsible for your actions. That’s called a pragmatic proof. He says he can’t prove these things to you empirically, but you will find pragmatically that if you take these principles on conviction—he doesn’t use the phrase, “as a working hypothesis,” but that’s what he means—you find that you’re a better person.

Now, think about what kind of person would find that argument convincing: someone who has some integrity, someone who’s happy to take on responsibility, which is why conviction is a virtue. It’s not just a matter of saying, “I believe these facts are true or not true.” You’re taking on responsibility for the actions that come from your beliefs. And the Buddha is placing some trust in you—in the principle that anyone who follows the path, who develops the qualities of mindfulness, concentration, discernment that are required by the path, is going to come to the same conclusion that he did—which is not just believing what he had to say, but actually finding what he found: that there is a deathless element that can be attained this way. It may take more than one lifetime, but you’ll find it. That’s what confirms your conviction.

I was reading someone say the other day that the Buddha simply asked for conviction in the Buddha, the Dhamma, and the Sangha, and that you follow the precepts, and that would constitute stream entry, the first level of awakening. That’s really dumbing down the path and the noble attainments, because what would you be basing your conviction on? Just that it makes sense? As the Buddha said, though, just because something makes sense doesn’t mean it’s true. It requires further testing.

And he didn’t just say that a streamwinner just had conviction in the Triple Gem. He said such as person had confirmed conviction in the Triple Gem. Confirmation comes only with the deathless. Everything else you know in life falls under the pattern of the dependent co-arising, where things that you see through the six senses, even things you directly experience through those senses, are colored by the perceptions you’ve had in the past, thoughts you’ve had in the past. So there’s always some bias in ordinary sense perceptions.

But the awareness of awakening is something outside of that pattern. As he said, it’s not known through the six senses. So it’s not biased like our ordinary knowledge that’s known through the six senses. That knowledge from outside the six senses is the only kind of knowledge that’s really reliable. That’s the elephant hunter seeing the bull elephant directly, not mediated through footprints or scratch marks.

So it’s important that you understand what the Buddha is talking about when he talks about confirmed conviction.

Conviction is a virtue—in that you accept responsibility for shaping your present-moment experience. This is another area where the Buddha differed from the Jains. They said everything you experience is determined by the past. The Buddha said that if that were the case, there’d be no path to the end of suffering. There would be nothing to do in the present moment, because everything you would do in the present moment was already determined.

So the people who reject the teaching on kamma, thinking that it’s teaching determinism, really misunderstand the Buddha. Belief in determinism was one of the few beliefs that he actually would go out and actively argue against, because he said it’s so wrong, it’s so obstructive to putting an end to suffering.

What he taught was: There are tendencies that come from the past kamma. But your experience in the present moment is composed of your present intentions as they take that raw material from the past—which means that you can develop skills in the present moment so that no matter what the raw material is, you can make something good out of it—like a cook who can make good food even out of bad ingredients.

When the Buddha says, “Open the doors to the deathless; let those with ears show their conviction,” he’s asking you to take responsibility for your actions. That’s a call that appeals to people of integrity. So he’s expecting you to have the integrity to take on this teaching and give it a fair test. And he trusts that you can do that.

Now, whether you will do that is up to you. But he trusts that you have the capability of doing that. So it’s a virtue to take on that call—the call to your conviction—and carry it through to find within yourself the footprints and the scratch marks and then, finally, the big elephant. Only then will you know how true his teachings are. And your conviction will have been truly confirmed.