The blind men and the elephant is best known in the West through the Buddhist Udana and a nineteenth-century American poem, but it is used most systematically in Jainism, as the standard teaching illustration for anekantavada. Each man touches a different part and describes it accurately — the trunk is a snake, the ear is a fan, the leg a pillar, the side a wall, the tusk a spear, the tail a rope — and each is right about what he has hold of and wrong to universalise. The Jain reading is specific and differs from the Buddhist one: the point is not that all views are inadequate and should be abandoned, but that each represents a valid naya, a standpoint, and that the elephant genuinely has all those aspects. Truth is achieved by combining standpoints with the syat qualifier, not by transcending them. Applied philosophically, this is how Jain logicians handled rival schools — Buddhist momentariness is true from the standpoint of modes, Vedantic permanence is true from the standpoint of substance, and reality has both. It is a methodological commitment to taking opponents seriously, and it makes Jain doxographies unusually reliable summaries of other people's positions.