PROVERB’S ORIGIN A MYSTERY

Re: Debra Denker’s review of “Afghanistan: The Great Game Revisited” (Book Review, Feb. 21). Please advise Denker that the “proverb” of the blind men describing an elephant appears in numerous Buddhist Scriptures, many of which already had been reduced to written form some 500 years before the birth of the Sufi poet Rumi. The true author or origin of the story probably is lost in the unchronicled history of India’s oral literature.

WILLIAM BODIFORD

TARZANA, CALIF.