The Little Prince Climbs a High Mountain
After meeting an unnamed flower in the desert, the Little Prince continues his journey and climbs a high mountain. The only mountains he knew on his own planet were three volcanoes roughly as high as his knees, and he used the extinct one as a chair. He expects that the summit will allow him to see the whole Earth and all its people at once.
But from the summit he sees only sharply rising rock peaks. When he shouts, “Hello,” the reply “Hello, hello” comes from somewhere. He asks, “Who are you?” and the same words, “Who are you, who are you?” return.
The Little Prince does not know what an echo is. He therefore never questions the assumption that an invisible person is repeating his words. He says, “Please be my friend. I am alone,” but receives only, “I am alone, I am alone.”
He finally judges Earth to be “a very strange planet.” It is entirely dry, entirely pointed, and its people lack imagination and merely repeat what others say. The rose on his planet always spoke first and said things different from his own, whereas here only his own words return.
The Little Prince does not stop when the first reply repeats his words. The same thing returns after a second question, and his request for friendship is answered only by a repetition of the last words, yet he still assumes that an invisible person is replying. The same phenomenon repeats, but he does not search for another explanation—an ordinary pattern in human thought.
The rose spoke first and said things different from him. She was another being because she expressed thoughts and desires he had not supplied. The echo, by contrast, returns only words already inside the Little Prince. Without recognizing the difference, we can believe our own voice to be another’s and mistake our judgment for the world’s answer.
“Salty” or “Only Children”?
One Korean translation of this scene contains a sentence meaning, “It is entirely salty as well,” which feels strange in context. In the 2015 translation by Lee Jeong-seo that I consulted, the French word is interpreted not as saltiness but as an old use related to “children,” producing the translation, “It is full of children.”
The Little Prince has seen a desert in the preceding chapter, so he judges everything dry. He sees pointed peaks from the mountain and calls everything pointed. Because he hears only a young voice like his own repeated, it fits the sequence better that he concludes only children live on this planet.
That does not make this translation a one-hundred-percent certain answer. Translation is ultimately a conjecture made by comparing context with multiple possibilities of a word. We can ask which rendering better connects the surrounding scenes while acknowledging that certainty remains unavailable.
The day’s theme already appears in this small translation problem. If we repeat a wording merely because it is printed and has long been translated that way, we become an echo. Translation becomes living thought only when we compare it with context and ask, “Does it really mean that?”
A translator already makes a choice when moving a source word into another language. One may choose the first dictionary definition, search for an obsolete historical meaning, or decide according to surrounding sentences. If this choice is hidden and presented as a correct answer, the reader hears the translator’s judgment as the voice of the original.
Established translations should therefore be examined rather than treated as authorities. My view that Lee Jeong-seo’s rendering fits better is not a declaration of final truth. It proposes a more persuasive conjecture within the context and possibilities presently considered. Such reservation and questioning are attitudes of wisdom.
Buddhism Is Wisdom, and Wisdom Begins with Inquiry
If asked what Buddhism is, I answer that it is wisdom. Buddhism is a path toward living wisely. What, then, must we do to live wisely? Its foundation is inquiry.
Inquiry is not the end. The foundations of Buddhist practice I repeatedly emphasize are inquiry, observation, and dependent reasoning. We first question what we accepted as obvious, observe what is actually occurring, and think about the relationships of causes and conditions through which it arose.
The Little Prince’s echo shows why inquiry is the first step. He turns his limited experience of what he has seen and heard into an immediate conclusion about the entire Earth. He does not know the possibility of an echo and never doubts his judgment.
A Strange Planet, or a Planet That Felt Strange?
The Little Prince says Earth is strange. But the judgment “strange” already contains a standard of “normal.” What was familiar on his planet is normal, while the desert, mountains, and voices that differ from it feel strange.
Is Earth actually strange, or did Earth feel strange to the Little Prince? The sentences are entirely different. The first appears to name a property of Earth itself; the second reveals a feeling produced by the Little Prince’s experience and standards.
Human beings have great difficulty escaping their own standards. We live through colored lenses, conditioned by ideas of what is normal, natural, and average. When we encounter different clothing, speech, bodies, cultures, or family forms, a feeling of strangeness often rises before the recognition of mere difference.
Consider Columbus reaching the American continent while attempting to travel to India. The language, clothing, and way of life of indigenous people would have felt strange from a European perspective. But were they actually strange beings? Europeans were judging others through standards conditioned by their own time and place.
Conditioning Cannot Be Erased, but It Is Not the Same as Fact
A person cannot entirely eliminate their conditioning. We cannot reset every memory and become a blank page, nor erase at will the traces left in the brain by experience and learning. An immediate grimace and judgment of dirtiness when smelling feces is also connected to such conditioning.
A newborn does not judge feces dirty from the start. A one- or two-year-old may touch or play with it. While growing, the child learns standards of hygiene and impurity, and those standards begin to operate as quickly as bodily reactions. Later, even if someone says, “It is not dirty,” it still feels dirty.
I am not demanding that anyone forcibly remove that feeling. A person encountering an alien for the first time would naturally feel strangeness. We cannot require someone to have no reaction to a form of life with an utterly different body and mode of thought. The problem begins when we turn that feeling directly into fact and truth.
The fact that something feels strange and the judgment that it is actually strange are not the same.
We should understand that we are conditioned while recognizing that what we feel according to that conditioning is not reality itself. Without this distinction, feeling becomes judgment, and judgment becomes conduct toward other people and the world.
If memory cannot be erased, practice cannot be a project of eliminating memory. It must notice reactions produced by past experience and create room for a question between reaction and conduct. Something may feel dirty without our concluding from that feeling that a person is a dirty being.
This distinction matters in real relationships. An unfamiliar culture may produce an initial feeling of strangeness, but using that feeling to treat others as inferior or abnormal becomes discrimination. Practice is not a divine state in which no first reaction arises; it is the human capacity not to mistake reaction for fact and to revise it.
The Illusion of Becoming a Rock That Feels Nothing
When told that standards condition them, some try to eliminate every judgment and response. They pursue complete stillness, an immovable mind, and equanimity that remains entirely unaffected. But this would require becoming a blank mind in which thought and memory have ceased.
When Buddhism speaks of escaping illusion and no longer being shaken, it does not mean becoming a stone that will not startle when a passing dog suddenly barks. Human beings sense, evaluate, and react. As long as the mind operates, we feel and judge through some standard.
People casually say, “Just see things exactly as they are,” but that is nonsense. At the moment of seeing, humans already distinguish, assign meaning, and evaluate. The problem is not the appearance of evaluation itself but following it without seeing where it came from.
Understanding equanimity as the complete removal of humanity creates another transcendent desire. Buddhism does not aim to erase sensation and memory but to understand how they work and cultivate wisdom that is not dragged by illusion.
Tens of Thousands of Automatic Judgments Each Day
Thousands or tens of thousands of judgments arise within us every day: strange, dirty, ugly, handsome, pleasant, unpleasant, desirable, unbearable, right. They pass almost automatically.
They arise naturally according to standards learned through everything we have seen and heard. But arising naturally does not make them correct. The fact that I felt something does not prove that the object truly has that quality.
Therefore, inquiry must arise when judgment appears and emotion changes. Is it truly dirty, ugly, or strange? Why did I feel this? What standard informs my judgment, and is that standard valid?
This is the foundation of Buddhism: the refusal to accept the first conclusion arising in the mind as the truth of self and world. We do not eliminate feelings or judgments; we leave open the possibility that they are not facts.
Turning Limited Observation into a Conclusion About the Whole World
The Little Prince’s observations that the desert is dry and the mountains pointed are genuine observations. Yet they cover only the narrow range to which he attended in one time and place. He has not seen the entire Earth or met all its people.
Nevertheless, the mind instantly produces the conclusion, “Earth is a strange planet that is entirely dry and pointed and populated only by children.” A new person or flower may soon overturn it, but in the moment it feels factual.
We do the same. We see one act and judge the whole person, see one case and define an entire group, or watch a short video and conclude a complicated event. Unless we see the limits of our time, space, attention, and experience, observation easily becomes evidence for prejudice.
Observation alone is therefore insufficient. We must ask what we failed to see, whether other explanations exist, and whether new conditions could change our conclusion. Critical thinking does not deny observation; it includes observation’s limits.
What the Little Prince hears on the mountain is not an actual person but his own voice. We too think we hear the world speaking before an event, while often a stored voice inside us is returning. “Those people are always like that,” “This is obviously bad,” and “Success requires this” are echoes whose first speakers have been forgotten.
The more an echo repeats, the more familiar and factual it sounds. When one person’s words pass through family, school, and media countless times, they become common sense without evidence. Questioning is therefore an uncomfortable act that breaks familiarity, and a society full of echoes may regard the questioner as strange.
Human Thought Operates Like an Echo
I do not know whether Saint-Exupéry intended the meaning I draw from this scene. I read the echo as a model of human thought. Without inquiry and criticism, people judge according to what they have absorbed, act according to what they feel, and return words they learned.
If parents, neighbors, books, and society all say that God exists, a child comes to think God exists. Born in medieval Christian society, where everyone speaks of heaven, hell, angels, and God as facts, one experiences that language as unquestionable reality.
This is not limited to religion. We store the words of parents, schools, the state, television, and YouTube, then reflect them when a similar stimulus arrives. We imagine that we thought independently, but an old voice may simply be echoing.
To avoid becoming an echo, we must ask: Where did I hear this? Who said it? Can it be observed? Are there counterexamples? Is it really so? Without questions, a familiar voice returns wearing the face of our own thought.
Memorization-Centered Education Produces Echoes
Korea’s educational system easily produces echoes. Students have no time to doubt what a textbook says, ask questions, research, or observe; they must memorize rapidly and reproduce designated answers. The pattern continues from elementary school through university.
Students memorize what appears on an exam rather than asking why. Doubting a premise or creating a different answer may prevent them from receiving points. After leaving school, they rapidly absorb and retransmit institutions, philosophies, cultures, and claims encountered online.
New thought and creativity do not emerge when judgment always follows the same path. Words such as awakening, breaking through an eggshell, and opening one’s eyes describe a familiar path of thought breaking so that another possibility appears. First, however, we must question the echo.
The sequence for examining a relic claim is not difficult. First ask where the object came from, who preserved it, and through what chain it was transmitted. Next ask whether evidence can establish that it is truly the remains of the claimed person. Finally, even if genuine, ask how anyone reaches the conclusion that it possesses miraculous power.
These are three different questions. We must not cover with a single word, “faith,” the naming of an object of uncertain origin as a relic, the identification of historical remains, and the claim of transcendent efficacy. Fraud becomes easy when a name and authority replace missing evidence.
Are Buddhist Miracle Stories About Relics Also Echoes?
We cannot criticize only medieval Christianity as an echo. We must ask whether Buddhist believers and monks in twenty-first-century Korea operate in the same way. Suppose a temple claims to have received and enshrined relics of the Buddha, promises miraculous energy, and urges people to come pray.
Are the monk making the claim, the Buddhist establishment declining to criticize it, and people bowing in hope of miraculous benefit all echoing an old story? If the name “Buddha’s relic” stops every question, they are reacting to authority and language rather than practicing Buddhism.
We can begin with simple questions. Who in 2025 possesses the Buddha’s genuine remains and distributes pieces to other temples? If someone asked a temple such as Tongdosa, which prides itself on enshrining authentic relics, to cut off and share a portion, would it truly do so? If the object is so sacred and precious, by what path can it be divided and traded?
More questions follow. Is the substance truly a bone or tooth of the historical Gautama Siddhartha? What verification has it undergone? Even if it were his remains, what does it mean to claim that part of a corpse possesses miraculous power? Why should a practitioner’s corpse radiate a special force when mine will not?
The Large-Scale Fraud Surrounding Seongcheol’s Relics
The story of relics after the monk Seongcheol’s death evaded the same questions. The Buddhist establishment circulated as fact the belief that cremating a highly accomplished practitioner produces brilliant and extraordinary objects. I regard this as a model of a large-scale fraud perpetrated within Korean Buddhism.
Scriptures claim that an enormous quantity of relics appeared after the Buddha’s cremation and that various groups divided them. But does a scripture make the claim factual? Can the assertion that spiritual accomplishment produces more extraordinary material withstand observation and verification?
The point is not to insult anyone’s remains. It is to ask why a religion that speaks of inquiry and observation cannot question miraculous stories attached to Buddhist authority. If we criticize Christian miracles but believe Buddhist relics unchanged, we are merely a differently named echo.
When questioning stops before the phrase “the Buddha’s relic,” Buddhism becomes a religion of echoes rather than a path of wisdom.
How much Seongcheol practiced and what material appeared after cremation are separate questions. The fact that he was revered does not establish a transcendent property in the relics. When reverence is mixed with verification, questions are treated as disrespect, and authority expands like an echo in precisely that atmosphere.
If the Buddhist establishment does not examine such claims and correct errors itself, it creates greater harm from within than an external critic could. It reveals the contradiction of calling Buddhism a religion of wisdom while blocking questions. Criticism does not damage Buddhism; it retrieves Buddhism from the echo.
My Reactions Are a Mirror of the Inner World
Practicing Buddhism begins by asking, “Am I an echo?” I must examine whether what I feel, judge, desire, and do merely reflects words absorbed from books, parents, society, and YouTube.
If I see through colored lenses, judge according to feeling, and treat it as fact and truth, I rejoice, grieve, and suffer through those judgments. At the extreme, the process can lead to despair and self-destruction. Most people call it their own thought while operating like echoes.
Yet the reaction itself becomes a mirror revealing the inner world. Sorrow, joy, depression, delight, strangeness, dirtiness, and beauty—as well as speech and conduct toward politicians, religious figures, and other people—show what I have absorbed and the standards that condition me.
Jeon Han-gil’s speech and conduct at a party convention reveal his inner world, and my judgments of Kim Keon-hee, Yoon Suk Yeol, or Jeon Han-gil reveal mine. We can lie to other people, but precise observation of our own reactions makes it difficult to evade what has accumulated within us.
The Gateway to the Inward Journey
Begin the journey inward. Its gateway is not far away. My present speech, thoughts, emotions, feelings, conduct, and judgments continually show me to the outside world.
After noticing, “I made this judgment” or “I felt this emotion,” ask why, when, and how it arose. Then the inward journey begins. Before that, we may have heard countless words such as rebirth, soul, karma, retribution, and sacred site without once asking when those concepts entered us.
We can observe why we seek honor, why we want to appear a certain way to others, what we call good, and when we learned that standard. Human beings are not divided into isolated outer and inner domains, so although I use those words for convenience, we ultimately observe the world together with ourselves.
If I attribute an emotion only to an external event, it remains unresolved. Even when I feel miserable because I am poor, I must travel inward to see how I learned standards connecting poverty with happiness and how I judge my life.
Treating reaction as a mirror is not merely a technique for analyzing others. If I easily explain another person’s anger and desire while regarding my own anger as always justified, I become an echo again. Even while criticizing a politician I dislike, I should observe the intensity and evidence of my words and the emotion rising in my body.
Observation is not an interrogation designed to produce guilt. It treats what appears within me as data without concealment. If I hide an embarrassing desire or harsh judgment, I cannot find its cause. Seeing and questioning it as it is allows me to trace the formative process connecting family, education, and society.
Inquiry, Observation, and Dependent Reasoning
Without inquiry there is no awakening, and without observation there is no awakening. If we give no attention to the judgments, emotions, speech, and actions that pass countless times each day, the door to awakening may touch us millions of times without our taking a single step.
To answer a question, we must reason. We need scientific reasoning that searches for causes and effects and dependent reasoning that sees every event arising through relationships and conditions.
Nothing arises independently. My birth, thought, speech, conduct, and feelings emerge through relationships among family, education, culture, experience, body, and environment. Without seeing those relationships, we cannot find causes and simply hear the familiar echo again.
This is why inquiry is the foundation of Buddhism. We acknowledge that humans operate like echoes, observe our reactions, ask “Is it really so?” and search for the conditions that produced them. A wise life begins at that moment.
This article was edited by AI solely from the supplied video captions and description. No external sources were used.