盲人摸象
- Literal
- blind men feeling an elephant
- Figurative
- To judge the whole from one small part and end up with a badly mistaken conclusion.
Where does 盲人摸象 come from?
The scene comes from a Buddhist text, the 《大般涅槃经》 (Nirvana Sutra). A king has an elephant brought in and asks several blind men to touch it and say what it is like. The one who feels a tusk compares it to a radish root; the one at the ear, to a winnowing fan; the one at the trunk, to a pestle; the one at the leg, to a wooden mortar; the one at the tail, to a rope. Each describes exactly what he touched, and not one of them gets the whole animal right. The sutra uses the image for those who mistake a part for the whole, and from there it passed into ordinary Chinese as a rebuke to conclusions drawn from far too little evidence.
Source (出处): 《大般涅槃经》
How is 盲人摸象 used? Two examples
- 只看一份报告就下结论，无异于盲人摸象。
Drawing conclusions from a single report is like the blind men feeling the elephant.
- 我们对这个行业了解太少，讨论起来有点盲人摸象。
We know far too little about this industry; debating it like this is a bit like feeling the elephant in the dark.
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