People Who Rush Without Knowing What They Seek
Chapter 25 of The Little Prince begins after the pilot and the Little Prince discover a well in the desert. Yet its first sentence makes us reconsider human movement before returning to the well. People board express trains and hurry from one place to another, but they do not know what they are seeking. Even the engine driver does not know what they seek.
The people described by the railway switchman cannot be satisfied where they are. They arrive somewhere but cannot remain there and soon move elsewhere. They are certainly moving fast, but no one knows whether that speed has a direction or purpose. If one pursues endlessly without knowing the object of pursuit, busyness itself becomes the content of life.
I therefore do not read the sentence merely as a criticism of modern speed. The problem is our failure to think deeply about what we seek, why we seek it, and what the object called our goal actually is. This is true when we chase visible things such as money and power, and equally true when we chase invisible things such as souls or awakening.
The people the Little Prince met on different planets also pursued what each believed important within a private worldview. The passengers on Earth repeat the same pattern aboard their trains. The chapter’s question finally returns to me: for what am I moving now, and do I truly know whether it is what I seek?
Ora and Param, Desire in Two Directions
In Buddhist terms, human pursuit moves in two broad directions. One is ora: wealth, rank, pleasure, and other things sought within worldly life. The other is param: eternity, immortality, psychic power, and transcendence sought beyond this world. The directions look different, but both are pursuits that try to grasp something and become complete.
Before renunciation, the Buddha lived within worldly life; afterward he searched through extreme asceticism and transcendent answers. As I understand it, Buddhism does not mean choosing one of these directions. Abandoning worldly desire only to cling to transcendent desire changes the object but not the pursuit. One must become free from both ora and param.
Yet even people who speak in Buddhism’s name cannot release param no matter what happens. They believe a soul changes bodies, invisible karma carries reward and punishment into another life, or mysterious relics and powers prove awakening. They speak of impermanence and no-self while presupposing an immortal subject that continues unchanged, and the claims contradict one another.
When an egg disappears and a chick emerges, the egg has not simply changed clothes and continued as the same thing. To claim that an identical bearer of punishment remains even after the chick dies and disappears requires bringing back an unchanging soul. A little thought shows that this conflicts with Buddhism’s impermanence and no-self.
Do Not Believe a Learned Word Merely Because You Heard It
I speak harshly because words such as soul and rebirth are used far too easily. People have never seen a soul or died, yet speak as if these things were facts merely because a book or teacher said so. Teaching what one has neither seen nor known as Buddhism produces obedience rather than thought.
I am not asking anyone to believe the sentence ‘there is no soul’ as a new doctrine. I ask whether anything eternal can exist and what, among disappearing and changing things, could remain identically continuous. We should observe what can be observed and examine the conditions and contradictions of every concept.
Telling people not to follow books or teachers automatically is not anti-intellectualism. It demands a deeper examination of what one has learned. If someone speaks of impermanence while assuming a permanent owner of karma, or speaks of no-self while binding a former and future self into one identity, that contradiction must be questioned first.
The express train whose passengers do not know what they seek also runs through religion. Naming its destinations awakening, nirvana, rebirth, or merit does not mean one knows the direction. Without examining those words, a person has merely transferred from a worldly train to a transcendent one and continues circling restlessly.
The Desert Well and the Temptation of Mysticism
The story now returns to the discovered well. An ordinary well in the Sahara may be little more than a hole in the sand, but this one has a pulley, bucket, and rope as if it stood in the center of a village. With no village anywhere nearby, the pilot feels as though he is dreaming.
Because this is a fable, the scene can be presented like a miracle. I sense a mystical color in the author’s description. People who strongly question worldly values often search in the opposite direction for invisible souls, miracles, and transcendence. After criticizing an old reality, they are tempted to build a new value immediately in mystery.
That does not require discarding the entire scene. Even after someone we love dies, that person continues to affect us through memory. My father is dead, yet memories of him and the legacy of his life still work within me. This differs from saying that an invisible soul roams the world.
From the perspective of dependent arising, even disappearance is not simple. A past person does not remain as the same body, yet relationships, memories, and learned attitudes meet new conditions and produce new results. We can explain the invisible work of relationships without postulating a soul.
The Labor That Awakens the Well and Brings Forth Water
When the Little Prince takes the rope and turns the pulley, it squeaks like an old weathervane awakened after a long sleep. He says they are waking the well and the well is singing. The well was already there, yet it becomes a well from which they can drink only when the two pull up its water.
The pilot worries that the bucket is too heavy for the Little Prince and takes over. He uses the strength of his arms, slowly raises the bucket to the rim, and secures it carefully. The pulley’s song remains in his ears while sunlight trembles in the moving water. This entire process stands before a single sip.
The Little Prince says he wants the water and asks the pilot to let him drink. Only then does the pilot understand what the boy has been seeking. The express passengers do not know what they seek, while the Little Prince knows the water he wants after a long march and has participated in the whole path to it.
The pilot lifts the bucket to his lips, and the Little Prince closes his eyes and drinks. The water is sweet like a feast. It is not merely liquid that removes physical thirst; it was born from a journey under stars, the pulley’s song, the strength of an arm, and labor offered for one another.
A Thirst Pill and Water Sweet as a Feast
An earlier chapter introduced a merchant selling pills that remove thirst. One pill supposedly saves all the time otherwise spent drinking. The Little Prince replied that if he had that time, he would walk slowly toward a well. The water in Chapter 25 turns that reply into a scene.
The pill delivers only the result. It prevents thirst, but the time spent walking, watching stars, searching for a well together, holding a rope, and raising a bucket all disappear. As convenience increases, the relationships and memories formed in the intermediate process may vanish with it.
The well water is not sweet because it contains a materially special ingredient. It warms the heart like a gift because of the time and labor the pilot and the Little Prince shared. Its value cannot be found in the water alone; it arises from the relationships through which the water reached them.
I do not take this as a command to live inconveniently at all costs. It is not a simple morality in which using a pill is evil and walking to a well is good. The important question is what convenience saves, what it removes, and whether the value I seek lies only in the result or also in the path.
What Is Invisibly Contained in a Christmas Gift
The pilot compares the water to a Christmas gift illuminated by festive lights, midnight Mass music, and people’s gentle smiles. These words show that he lived within a Christian culture. Yet the point here is less a particular faith than the time and care contained in a gift.
A Christmas gift is not merely the object inside the wrapping. It includes the giver’s attention, preparation, expression, and relationship at the moment of giving. The same object does not carry the same meaning when it is an anonymous product and when someone prepared it while thinking of me.
The well water is similar. Because the long march, the pulley’s sound, the pilot’s arm, and the Little Prince’s desire all enter it, a sip becomes a feast. Water is what the eyes see, but the conditions that make it special spread far beyond the water itself.
This is a question of name-and-form and value. Materially, water is water and a rose is a rose. Yet human beings name, remember relationships, and form meanings. I do not think meaning inhabits an object like an independent soul, but neither do I say that meaning is unnecessary in human life.
Five Thousand Roses and a Single Rose
The Little Prince says people cultivate five thousand roses in one garden yet fail to find what they seek. Quantity does not create value automatically. When roses are everywhere, none may be special to me.
The pilot replies that what people seek could be found in a single rose or one sip of water. The Little Prince agrees but adds that the eyes cannot see it and the heart must seek it. The entire book approaches this conclusion through its journey.
When the Little Prince left his planet and met the king, the vain man, the businessman, and others, each pursued what seemed important within a private worldview. People on Earth continue moving on trains. Yet the Little Prince wishes to return not to a garden with five thousand roses but to the one rose on the planet he left.
That rose is not unique because it belongs to a materially different species. Their shared time, quarrels, regrets, the attachment that remained after departure, and his choice to take responsibility make it singular. Value forms not only through scarcity but through relationships and actions.
Invisible Value and the Promises That Make Society
Hearing that value is invisible easily makes people think again of souls or transcendence. Yet what is meant here is closer to concepts and values humans name and form through relationships than to a mysterious substance separated from matter. In name-and-form, form is material while name includes the labels, meanings, and concepts attached to it.
I have often emphasized the negative side of concepts: they bind people and justify violence. But a concept need not be eliminated merely because it is a concept. Living with friends, lovers, and family requires promises that people agree to keep and loyalty to those promises.
A promise is not a visible object like a stone, yet it forms a foundation of society. Law is similar. It must not be deified as eternal truth, but as an agreement for living together it must be examined continually and honored. Compassion and promise belong to different levels, but no relationship endures without basic trust.
We must therefore distinguish valuing what cannot be seen from believing an invisible mystery as fact. Responsibility, trust, and promise can be confirmed in human behavior and relationships. They cannot be placed in the same category as unverifiable entities such as a soul or transcendent punishment.
Responsibility for the Rose and the Muzzle
After drinking, the dawn sand takes on the color of honey. When they were dying of thirst, the desert sand must have seemed unbearable. Once water is found and drunk, the same color brings happiness. The earlier line that the desert is beautiful because it hides a well returns here.
The Little Prince then asks the pilot to keep a promise: draw a muzzle so the sheep cannot eat the rose. He intends to return to his planet and says he is responsible for the flower there. Loving the rose as a feeling is insufficient; he needs an actual tool to protect her.
The pilot’s drawings of baobabs and the fox are poor, and the Little Prince laughs at them. The pilot protests that he stopped drawing after his childhood pictures of boa constrictors. Yet beneath their jokes, his heart grows heavy when he hands over the muzzle.
He recognizes an unspoken plan behind the request. Eight days have passed since they met, and the anniversary of the Little Prince’s fall to Earth is approaching. He has returned to the place where he first arrived and is waiting for the moment when his planet can be reached again.
Taming Includes the Risk of Tears
When the pilot realizes that the Little Prince intends to leave, he feels a sadness and fear he cannot fully explain. The boy tells him to return to his broken machine, finish his work, and come back the next evening. He will be waiting, but the pilot cannot feel reassured.
He remembers the fox’s warning: once one has been tamed, one risks having to cry. Two beings who once meant nothing to each other appointed times, waited, and formed a unique relationship. At the same moment, the possibility that this relationship could be broken arose.
I think this can be expressed in Buddhist language as the suffering of separation from what one loves. Once we meet someone we love, the pain of eventual separation becomes possible. Alongside meeting what we hate and failing to obtain what we seek, it is a form of suffering human beings cannot avoid.
Refusing all taming might reduce the pain of separation, but then shared time and the value of one rose would not arise either. The Little Prince does not speak only of the beauty of taming. It shows that a relationship’s joy and the risk of tears come as one package.
Love Presupposes Separation
When this suffering becomes unbearable, people create imaginations. Believing that the dead continue in another world or that everyone will reunite forever can provide temporary comfort. Yet the fact that an imagination comforts us does not make it a fact.
We should try to see things as they are. People we meet separate from us, those we dislike return, and what we desperately seek may remain unobtainable. This is not because the universe punishes us but because everything arises, changes, and disappears according to conditions.
Impermanence and dependent arising do not deny love. They show that love cannot be fixed forever. From the moment love begins, the possibility of separation begins with it. Parents, siblings, friends, lovers, spouses, and children are no exceptions.
That is why the present encounter matters. Rather than postponing today under the fantasy of being together forever, we must exchange love now with people who will someday change and part from us. Impermanence does not make relationships trivial; it prevents us from treating the present relationship as guaranteed.
The Conclusion of Gratitude and Contentment
The Little Prince’s journey is approaching its conclusion. He has traveled among planets, observed what people believe important, and met five thousand roses, the fox, and the pilot on Earth. Through the well and one sip of water, he now understands more clearly what he desires and where he must return.
Within this flow I turn to gratitude and contentment. People board express trains searching for what they lack while failing to see what they have received. Even five thousand roses do not satisfy, and one sip of water means little if we fail to see the labor through which it arrived.
If references to God are set aside from the Lord’s Prayer and we look at its attitude toward life, gratitude remains. Buddhist reflection on dependent arising likewise recalls the countless conditions through which a bowl of food reaches us. The explanations differ, but they meet in refusing to consume life as though it were automatic.
Breathing, sharing with others, and being able to eat are so familiar that we rarely experience them as valuable. Gratitude is not an incantation for ignoring real suffering. It is an observation of the conditions that make life possible and a temporary release from chasing only what is absent.
A Bhikkhu’s Alms-Round and the Rule of Seven Houses
At this point I think of Buddhist offerings and alms-going. I explain bhikkhu as one who lives by receiving food and connect it etymologically with the English word beggar. A renunciant is not an economically independent owner but someone dependent on food offered by villagers.
The early community is said to have followed a rule limiting an alms-round in one village to seven houses. If no food was obtained after all seven, the mendicant did not pressure additional homes but went hungry that day. The rule placed a boundary against endlessly demanding from the village.
There could be many reasons for receiving nothing. The village might be suffering famine, war, or epidemic; everyone might be poor; or the residents might be hostile to wandering ascetics. Through the failure to receive food, the mendicant directly learns the village’s condition.
Alms-going is therefore not an escape from society but an intimate connection with it. When harvests and feasts are plentiful, offerings are plentiful; when the public suffers, the community of monks goes hungry as well. The image of renunciation as a leisurely withdrawal from worldly stress runs against this spirit.
Ignoring Public Life Means Ignoring Renunciation
Some may enter a temple because worldly life is complicated and exhausting and they want to rest. That desire cannot be identified with the Buddhist spirit of renunciation. The livelihood of an early mendicant was tied directly to public life, making the monk necessarily sensitive to poverty, disease, and war.
A bowl of rice does not arise by itself. Sunlight, rain, soil, farm labor, transport, cooking, and the giver’s care meet through conditions before food enters my mouth. The object of gratitude in the monastic meal is not an invisible god but the actual conditions that made the food possible.
This connection weakens when a monastic organization accumulates property and no longer depends on food from the public. Power and capital become stable patrons while suffering in the streets becomes inconvenient news. When renunciants no longer feel social conditions through their bodies, religious speech drifts away from ordinary reality.
I locate the present Jogye Order’s distance from public life and its repeated nonsense precisely here. Saying that it no longer goes on alms-rounds does not merely complain about the loss of an old ritual. It criticizes the order for forgetting whose life supports it and whose pain it should share.
The Itaewon Memorial That Revealed a Religion of Power
I use the Jogye Order’s conduct after the Itaewon disaster as an example. Although many people died, the order did not center bereaved families and victims; it held a memorial attended by Yoon Suk Yeol and Kim Keon Hee. Even photographs, names, and memorial tablets of the victims were scarcely visible.
If Buddhism holds a memorial or forty-nine-day rite, it should not mean that an actual soul comes to receive the ceremony. Just as a bereaved person remembers a parent for a period and slowly steadies the mind, ritual should serve the living. It should honor the victims and help their families loosen the grief knotted in their hearts.
When those families are ignored while the officials who bear responsibility for the disaster are invited, whom does the memorial serve? I criticize it as little different from the historical Christian sale of indulgences. Religion provides a scene in which powerful figures appear at a ritual and have their responsibility symbolically washed away.
My language becomes harsh here. I call the Jogye Order rotten for neglecting public wounds and clinging to power. If superstition about consoling dead spirits prevents it from seeing living families, it is neither compassion nor Buddhism. It is only a religion of power utterly removed from public life.
Ordinary Things Recognized Only After They Are Gone
My anger at the Jogye Order erupts in the middle of speaking about gratitude, but I return to everyday gratitude. Without ignoring a painful reality, we can still notice that we breathe, have people with whom to speak, and are able to eat.
The problem is that whatever stays close feels guaranteed. A spouse, child, or parent seems simply to belong there, and we first notice whatever displeases us. Only after accident or death removes someone do we recognize how great a condition that shared presence was.
With ten fingers intact, we rarely feel gratitude for having them. After losing five, the remaining fingers and the memory of an intact hand acquire new weight. Human beings search for what is absent while failing to see what has already been given, then recognize its value after it disappears.
Gratitude is not a command to endure injustice and be satisfied with everything. Criticizing the Jogye Order’s pursuit of power does not contradict gratitude for relationships beside me. We should condemn wrongdoing directly while refusing to consume the countless conditions that sustain us as though they were automatic.
What Do You Consider Valuable?
The problem running through The Little Prince is ultimately value and concept. The king considers power important, the businessman ownership, and the vain man praise. Express passengers race toward destinations they cannot name. Each moves according to the names and values placed over the world.
The Little Prince also reexamines his values through travel. Only after seeing five thousand roses does he understand that his rose was not biologically the only one in existence. By being tamed by the fox and pilot and walking to the well, he learns that relationship and labor make a being unique.
The task is therefore not to choose either the visible or the invisible. Chasing only wealth and power is a problem, and chasing only souls and transcendence is another. We must observe the conditions that produced our concepts and values and the consequences they create for others.
I end the lecture by asking again: what are you pursuing? Whether it is wealth, power, scholarship, or awakening, why do you call it important and spend your present time for it? Before boasting about the express train’s speed, ask whether you know the destination and whether you are already passing one rose and one sip of water.
This article was edited by AI solely from the supplied video captions and description. No external sources were used.