The Geographer Who Never Explores
On the sixth planet, the Little Prince meets an old geographer writing an enormous book. The geographer introduces himself as a scholar who knows where the seas, rivers, cities, mountains, and deserts are. Yet he does not know whether his own planet has a sea, a mountain, a river, or a desert. He says that he is not an explorer and is too important to leave his office.
The geographer receives reports from explorers, questions them, and records their findings. Because an explorer’s lies would bring disaster to a geography book, he first investigates the explorer’s moral character. Nor does he accept reports from drunkards, because an intoxicated person might see two mountains where there is only one. Even after deciding that an explorer is trustworthy, he does not immediately write in ink. He records the report in pencil and makes the explorer submit evidence—such as a large stone from a newly discovered mountain—before creating an official record.
The setting is comic, but it also reveals how books and knowledge are produced. The geographer at his desk has seen almost nothing directly. He hears what someone claims to have observed, evaluates the person, judges the evidence, and transfers the result into a book. The book is then read as authoritative knowledge. At every stage, questions intervene: What did the explorer really see? Was the memory accurate? Did the explorer lie? Was the evidence sound? Did the geographer understand and record the report correctly?
The key words of this chapter are book, lie, and ephemerality. Its main concern is ephemerality, but before reaching that subject we must examine how much confidence can be placed in human books and transmitted words.
Is Truth Written in Books?
A book is ultimately written by a human being. An author has intentions, and even without a deliberate agenda, the author cannot see from outside his own perspective. People make mistakes, misperceive, alter memories, and write conjectures as though they were facts. We therefore cannot guarantee that a book contains truth. A book includes the portion of the world visible from the author’s well, together with guesses about what lies beyond it.
The geographer investigates an explorer’s moral character because the explorer may lie. Yet a person who does not lie can still see incorrectly. Alcohol may make one mountain look like two, but people often make perceptual errors while sober as well. A composite drawing based on a crime witness’s memory may resemble someone entirely different from the actual criminal. We do not simply retrieve what we saw; we remember it and then speak. That memory can be wrong and can change.
Evidence does not end every problem either. Evidence can be manipulated. A person can see a dream or hallucination and become convinced that he met Avalokiteshvara, a god, or an ancestor. A report of experience, another person’s record of the report, and the evidence said to support the record can all be mistaken. Repeating “someone saw it,” “thousands remember it,” “it is written in a book,” or “the Dalai Lama said so” does not automatically produce a fact.
I argue against rebirth in several ways. I examine the problems that arise when rebirth is assumed, ask how rebirth stories project human thought, and point out conflicts with other Buddhist claims. Yet many replies to those arguments simply cite past-life memories and books that the speaker has not verified. In a human population of eight billion, the claim that a few thousand people have supposedly seen something does not establish rebirth as fact. Error, false memory, lying, and manipulation remain possible throughout the processes of seeing, remembering, speaking, and transmission.
Seeing Only White Swans Does Not Prove That Black Swans Do Not Exist
Experience itself has limits. Even if every swan I have seen is white, I cannot be certain that all swans are white. A black swan may exist beyond what I have discovered, and even if none existed yesterday, one might be born today. The absence of an exception in my experience tells us about the range of that experience; it does not close every possibility in the world.
The geographer’s book consists of an explorer’s reported experience interpreted and recorded by the geographer. Most human books do not depart far from this structure. Authors sometimes write about what they did directly, but much writing receives and rewrites the words and records of others. Buddhist scriptures, textbooks, magazines, government publicity, scientific works, literature, documentaries, films, novels, and the Bible are all made by people. No god held the pen.
Do not accept human books, transmitted words, videos, and rumors as truth and follow them without question. This is the foundation of Buddhism.
Questions Stop When Authority Is Believed
This is the foundation of Buddhism because it opens the possibility of reconsidering the images, common sense, laws, standards, concepts, and language we have learned to believe. Ideas such as marriage is beautiful, romance is wonderful, love is good, sexual desire is bad, and love can be completely separated from desire accumulate through books, videos, dramas, and other people’s words. From these concepts, we assume that one thing is good, another bad, and that obtaining a certain thing will make us happy.
To reconsider an image in the mind, we must first admit that it may not be truth. No reconsideration occurs while I remain certain that what I know is fact and what I believe is real. Critical thought and questioning stop the moment we become absorbed in statements such as: it is written in a book; the Buddha or Jesus said it; my parents or professor taught it; a politician, scholar, or supreme patriarch said it; a documentary or the news reported it. We cease examining our own thoughts and feelings and run inside a wheel built from prior conditioning.
I read the opening portion of the first verse of the Cave Chapter in the Atthakavagga, the fourth chapter of the Sutta Nipata, in this way:
Bound within the cave, covered by countless things, and hardened solid, one is immersed in delusion.
The cave is the environment in which I saw, heard, and grew up—the familiar thoughts and standards I no longer question. It is filled with judgments about good and evil, right and wrong, liking and disliking, importance and insignificance. A person looks through those tinted glasses without knowing that he is wearing them. He believes his own view is right and speaks truth, while remaining unprepared to receive any other thought. He becomes a rigid old fogey.
To begin Buddhism, we must ask of familiar thoughts, “Is that really so? Where did this come from?” The same applies to what we desire. We suffer because marriage, sex, status, toys, or success have not been obtained without first asking why we learned to regard them as good. The mind that makes such questioning possible can be called hasim, lowering the mind. I lower it because I am a frog in a well and do not assume that I know truth and reality completely. The more one learns Buddhism, the more fundamental this humility must become.
The Lie of Recording What Is Eternal
The Little Prince says that his planet has three volcanoes and one flower. The geographer records the volcanoes but refuses to record the flower. The flower is ephemeral and at risk of disappearing soon, whereas geography books supposedly record only eternal things such as mountains and seas. Yet even an extinct volcano can awaken. Mountains, seas, and continents move and change. Over the long history of Earth, landmasses have repeatedly joined and separated.
Something is not eternal merely because it appears almost motionless during a short human lifetime. A mountain continues changing even if it seems to remain in the same place from my birth until my death. Volcanoes, land, and Earth are not eternal. The geographer’s claim that he excludes ephemeral flowers and records eternal things is itself a lie. What he calls eternal simply changes much more slowly than a flower.
Ephemerality and Impermanence Do Not Remove Meaning from Life
To be ephemeral is to exist for a while and eventually disappear. In Buddhist language, it is to be impermanent, not constant. What we cut out from a process and call a single flower is one part of many gathered conditions. It appears to be an individual, fixed entity, but it does not last forever.
Perhaps life has meaning precisely because it is impermanent. Meaning is something human beings assign. If we could live forever, the urgency and preciousness of what we do today would change. Because a flower blooms and withers and a person disappears, we assign meaning to a day and a relationship that will not return. A book, a saint, or another person need not determine that meaning for us. What they provide is the meaning they assigned. Rather than repeating the meanings I inherited, I can reconsider what meaning I will give my life.
I may choose work that is physically painful and difficult. If the work is necessary and meaningful to me, the body can be tired while the mind remains at ease. Grief at the death of a lover, spouse, child, neighbor, or fellow citizen can also be a part of life that I consciously accept. The problem is failing to distinguish suffering I understand and accept from a condition in which I torment myself without even knowing that I am doing so.
Understanding impermanence changes the way we meet today. Today may always be the healthiest and best day among those available to us. We stop risking our lives over matters that could go either way and reduce the needless thoughts with which we continually torment ourselves. Only then does the Little Prince remember the rose he left alone. Because the flower is not eternal and has only four thorns, he feels his first regret at having left her.
Rose-Colored Glasses Put on Us by Others
The tinted glasses made by books and words also shape how we see romance, marriage, sex, childbirth, and parenting. These are important parts of human life, but they do not guarantee a future that is always beautiful, happy, and rose-colored. Before dating, marriage, sex, childbirth, or parenting, we learn about them through other people’s words and images. We therefore look through fantasies at lives we have never experienced, as though we already knew them.
Reality also contains betrayal, divorce, sexual problems, and difficulties in childbirth and parenting. Saying this is not a curse that someone’s future must be unhappy. It is an attempt to reveal the rose-colored glasses. Korean dramas frequently pair a chaebol man with an ordinary woman, mixing admiration for wealth, class, success, and romance. The question of whether a chaebol is actually happy disappears from the story.
People quickly treat what they already have as natural. Gaining 100 million won may bring joy at first, but after a few days it becomes an ordinary condition. The same is true of one billion or one hundred billion won. Just as we do not feel happy every day because we can breathe and see, what we possess soon becomes the background. We then think that only what is not yet in our hands can make us happy and repeatedly impress upon ourselves that we are unhappy now because we lack it. We shoot arrows at ourselves again and again, sinking into depression, anxiety, resentment, and stress.
Buddhism Is the Direct Study of How the Mind Works
Someone else might be overjoyed to possess just one of the things I already have, yet I do not feel happy because of it. If one finger is missing, will I look only at the absent one or see the nine that remain? This is not an attempt to turn gratitude into a compulsory morality. It is an invitation to observe how the mind erases what it has into the background, concentrates value on what is absent, and uses that thought to torment itself.
Buddhism is the study of how a human being works and the observation of how my mind, thoughts, feelings, and moods move. Learning what has conditioned me and what tinted glasses I wear is Buddhism and wisdom. The Little Prince is one source material for that inquiry. Buddhist scriptures are also source material to me. In my view, most Buddhist scriptures are filled with fiction, lies, and nonsense, while correct statements make up less than ten percent. I still use them because they can generate questions about human beings and the mind, not because I want anyone to believe in their authority.
The same applies to my words. They are not answers that listeners must believe. I only hope they may become signals and information that work one day when someone observes his own mind. Do not even turn my warning against believing books into another belief. Question what people write and transmit, inspect the glasses through which you see, and rethink today in light of the fact that everything is ephemeral. This is the Buddhist path that can be found on the geographer’s planet.
This article was edited by AI solely from the supplied video captions and description. No external sources were used.