The Final Chapter and the Uncertainty Left Behind
Chapter 27 of The Little Prince begins six years after the little prince disappeared. The pilot returned alive to his companions, but he could not tell anyone about the sorrow of their parting. He says that he has now found some comfort and knows very well that the little prince returned to his star. Yet in this statement that sounds certain, I hear the opposite: he cannot be certain. He saw the little prince die and could not find the body the next morning, so he wants to believe that the prince went back to his star.
When we claim to know an unseen event as fact, it becomes superstition. A body disappears after death and the dead person is said to have gone to another world: this resembles the structure of the resurrection of Jesus and many other religious myths. People are easily deified after death. While they are alive, their human qualities and contradictions remain visible; after death, unverifiable stories can be attached to them. If someone deifies himself while alive, I see that as fraud or superstition.
The little prince’s return to his star may not be an established fact but a wish through which a person tries to bear loss.
The pilot says, “I like listening to the stars at night. They sound like five hundred million little bells.” Then he remembers that he forgot to draw a leather strap on the muzzle for the sheep. When he imagines the little prince protecting the rose under its glass cover and caring for the sheep, all the stars seem to laugh. When he imagines that the prince may have forgotten for just one day and the sheep may have eaten the rose, the bells of the stars turn into tears. No one knows whether the sheep ate the rose, yet that single thought changes the meaning of the whole universe. The desert in the final drawing is the place where the little prince appeared and vanished, and the pilot asks readers to tell him if they ever meet a laughing child with golden hair there.
Where Religion, Philosophy, and Science Began
From this final chapter I chose the sentence about listening to the stars at night. Humanity is present in that sentence. Questions seeking to understand nature and human beings are the starting point of religion, philosophy, and science. Humans wondered about nature and themselves, observed, reflected, and asked questions. Their results were given different names—religion, philosophy, and science—according to age and culture.
This does not mean that each name contains one fixed entity. Countless and mutually different things are mixed under the word “religion,” and the same is true of philosophy and science. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, fields now called science were called natural philosophy. Francis Bacon’s 1620 work Novum Organum, “the new instrument,” and the Latin word scientiarum show part of the genealogy of knowledge and science. Even when Bacon discussed the four idols and proposed an empirical method, the present name and form of science had not yet fully settled.
Before they became fixed borders, religion, philosophy, and science were histories of questioning, observing, and reasoning in order to understand nature and humanity.
That is why I have read The Little Prince critically from my own perspective. I do not claim that my reading is the correct answer. The same literature and scripture are read differently by different people. My reading is meant to offer one reference and stimulus. When we read a book from beginning to end, the author’s subjectivity, images, concepts, claims, and experiences emerge. The Little Prince also contains Saint-Exupéry’s gaze asking what we pursue, where we place value, where we are going, and what we desire.
The Gnostic Impulse in “What Is Essential Is Invisible”
The little prince meets and leaves the rose, travels among planets and on Earth, and finally returns to his star because of his responsibility for the rose. Alongside encounter and parting, love and responsibility, another sentence runs through the work: “What is essential is invisible to the eye.” I see in it a Gnostic and metaphysical direction. It sets invisible spiritual value, perfect goodness, and a transcendent realm against the secular world.
The ascetic life of monasteries and temples has often leaned in this direction. Yet Buddhism as I understand it is neither asceticism nor Gnosticism. The core of Jesus and the Buddha as I understand them is also not the pursuit of an invisible, perfect world. Nevertheless, later Buddhists and Christians pursued what cannot be seen, the eternal and the perfect, and moved in the opposite direction. This too is a phenomenon we must see if we want to understand human beings.
Buddhism is not a religion that abandons the secular world and escapes into invisible perfection.
Human Beings Project Their Wishes onto the World
The little prince died, but his body was gone the next day. The pilot therefore imagines that he discarded his body and returned to his star. We cannot know whether that happened. Yet people project onto the world what they wish would happen, together with their experiences and imagination. Human beings continually guess, imagine, and think. When I observe my own mind, countless thoughts and wishes arise by themselves and move back and forth.
I remember reading The Cloud Dream of the Nine in high school. At the time, I read it only as an interesting story. Looking back after studying Buddhism, I saw in it the way humans dream. It is said to have been written for the author’s elderly mother, but it also contains a male fantasy resembling polygamy. Through dramas, novels, films, and webtoons, people enter stories. Saint-Exupéry is not exceptional. Most of humanity, including me, lives while watching dreams.
There is no reason simply to condemn this. It is not uniquely human, either. Other animals possess foundations for prediction, imagination, and learned response; in humans these appear with far greater complexity and intensity. Deciding not to dream does not stop dreams and thoughts. Nor does consciousness control every moment of the heart, intestines, and brain. Human beings who struggle with a little heat or cold imagine that spiritual force or willpower can completely master the body.
The problem is not the ability to dream and guess, but becoming rigid inside those products of the mind without distinguishing them from facts.
Do Not Erase Reactions; Observe How They Work
It is not wrong for the body to react before thought when a dog barks, a loud noise erupts, or metal scrapes. We are made to imagine, infer, and react. The wish to eliminate all reaction and reach a perfect, unchanging condition is another form of transcendence. What is needed is not the removal of reaction but an understanding of how I react.
When watching a mystery film, we guess the culprit from only a few scenes. Sherlock Holmes inspects a visitor’s clothes, face, and stains on the hands, then declares where the visitor has been and what he has done. That is a high-probability conclusion drawn from several clues. However refined it may be, it is an inference grounded in observation, not yet a fact. Human beings nevertheless become absorbed in judgments, wishes, standards, and experiences produced in their own minds and insist that they are facts. It is extremely difficult to look critically at what has absorbed us.
My father died on December 26, 2020. I wish he were still alive, and I want to meet him again. That is my wish. If I turn that wish into a claim that his soul lives somewhere, that he went to heaven or hell, or that he reincarnated, I have changed a wish into a fact. Just as people become absorbed in The Cloud Dream of the Nine or in a drama, they have difficulty distinguishing story from reality and imagination from fact. That is why we must examine our own conclusions, emotional changes, and experiences.
Wishing that something were so and its actually being so are not the same.
Rapid Inference Helps Survival, but It Is Not Truth
There is nothing inherently wrong with rapid prediction and reaction. If it seems likely to rain, we prepare. If something in the brush sounds like a tiger, we move away first. When an object resembling a venomous snake moves, the body reacts before fully confirming what it is. If a certain mushroom once made us seriously ill, we avoid similar mushrooms. Not every similar mushroom is poisonous, but organisms that reacted this way may have had a better chance of survival.
We should therefore understand guessing, imagining, and predicting as features of human operation rather than attempt to destroy them. A judgment may be useful and highly probable, yet still not be fact. Knowing this can let us pause before a thought that suddenly appears hardens into an absolute conclusion.
The Cave Octet and Desire in Two Directions
Buddhism describes the human condition: “Bound in a cave and covered over by many things, the person hardened firm is immersed in delusion.” These are the first two lines of the opening verse of the Cave Octet in the Sutta Nipāta. We absorb the guesses and imaginings of countless people as they are transmitted through language and tradition, and from a few personal experiences conclude that the whole world is a certain way. Then we live submerged in that conclusion.
The repeated phrase ora and pāra in the Discourse on the Snake is often translated as this shore and the far shore, this world and the other world. I read it as an instruction to leave behind both the secular direction and the transcendent direction. On one side, people are colored by money, status, pleasure, and other secular objects and pursue them as good and right. On the other, they pursue soul, immortality, perfect knowledge, immutable purity, and an absolute realm. Unable to accept the impermanence of body and life, they cling to the thought that an unseen and eternal something must exist.
Do not be seized by secular desire, and do not be seized by the desire for eternal and perfect transcendence.
Buddhism sees delusion in both directions. Yet actual Buddhism pursues supernatural power and spiritual perfection on one side, while monks become steeped in worldly profit, power, and desire on the other. Humanity has endlessly repeated the two. Saint-Exupéry was a twentieth-century man who flew aircraft and dealt directly with the material world, yet The Little Prince still contains a deep Gnostic thought: “This cannot be all there is.” Condemning him personally solves nothing. His work shows how difficult it is for human beings to escape the inheritance of an age and their own wishes.
Twenty-First-Century Wisdom Begins with Questions, Observation, and Critical Thought
In the twenty-first century, far more about human beings and nature has been uncovered than in the past. It is time to leave inherited superstition and transcendence behind and try to understand humanity as it is. The most important method is observation. We should examine day by day how our thoughts, emotions, judgments, standards, images, bodies, experiences, and memories operate. Before hurriedly labeling them positive or negative, we should see why a particular judgment and emotion arose.
Observation begins because we are curious. We must therefore keep questions and doubt alive. The more deeply I understand myself, the more readily I can notice when my head and body produce another mistaken judgment and push it forward as fact. We must observe carefully, think through causes and results, and reason deeply and critically.
Questions, observation, and critical reasoning that seek to understand oneself and nature are Buddhism, philosophy, and science—and a path toward a wiser life.
When we understand ourselves, we begin to understand nature in the same way. The deeper that understanding becomes, the wiser life can become. We do not need to discard the beautiful wish in the final chapter of The Little Prince that one can hear the stars. We do need to ask whether that wish is a fact, why we want to believe it, and what we miss while immersed in it. That is the path of wisdom I want to offer at the end of reading all twenty-seven chapters differently.
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