The Man Who Lights and Extinguishes a Lamp Every Minute
The fifth planet visited by the Little Prince is the smallest he has seen. It has room for only one streetlamp and one lamplighter. It is difficult to understand the purpose of lighting and extinguishing a lamp on a planet with no houses and no other people. Even so, the Little Prince finds the lamplighter less ridiculous than the king, the vain man, the drunkard, and the businessman. When he lights the lamp, it seems as though he makes a star or flower bloom; when he puts it out, he sends that flower or star to sleep. The Little Prince believes that beautiful work is useful work.
When asked why he has just put out the lamp, the lamplighter answers that it is the rule. The reason he lights it again moments later is also the rule. The planet spins so rapidly that he says good morning and then good evening almost immediately. In the past, he put out the lamp once in the morning and lit it once in the evening. He could rest during the day and sleep at night, so the rule was reasonably suited to its circumstances. But the planet has gradually accelerated until it now completes a rotation every minute. The lamplighter must light and extinguish the lamp each minute and cannot rest at all.
The rule has remained unchanged while the situation and conditions have changed. The lamplighter himself says that this is precisely the problem, yet he does not consider revising the rule. The Little Prince suggests walking slowly around the tiny planet to remain in daylight and rest. The lamplighter replies that this would not help because what he loves most is sleep. He looks for ways to rest while obeying the rule but never asks why the rule must still be obeyed.
The Circular Logic of “The Rule Is the Rule”
“The rule is the rule” means that the rule must be followed because rules are things that must be followed. It is a circle that explains neither cause nor purpose. Asked why he lights and extinguishes the lamp, the lamplighter answers that it is the rule; asked why the rule must be obeyed, he answers that rules must be obeyed. The message is effectively that the question itself should not be asked.
When circumstances remain stable, a rule may serve a purpose reasonably. But applying a rule made when the planet rotated once a day to a planet rotating once a minute forces the lamplighter to work 1,440 times a day without sleep. A formerly reasonable rule now produces unreasonable labor. If conditions change, the rule must also change.
The sentence “An unjust law is still the law,” which many Koreans learned in ethics classes, has the same structure as “the rule is the rule.” Textbooks attributed it to Socrates, but Socrates did not say it. Textbooks also contain falsehoods and misinformation. More importantly, the sentence makes rules absolute and blocks the question of why a bad law should not be changed. It does not suit a Socrates grounded in doubt and questioning—one who said that he neither knew nor thought he knew—to turn absolute standards into unconditional commands.
Are Rules, Morality, and Precepts Absolute?
Other words for rules include discipline, morality, law, and precept. Justice and good and evil also function as standards that move people. Are these standards absolute? I do not regard even impermanence and dependent origination as truths we can declare absolute. According to what we have observed so far, the world appears to operate in those ways. The fact that it has done so until now does not guarantee with absolute certainty that it must do so tomorrow.
The lamplighter’s planet can also be read as the worker’s planet. The people encountered earlier are absorbed in power, status, wealth, and addiction. Unlike them, the lamplighter performs work that creates an actual change in the world. Lighting and extinguishing the lamp at least produces a visible result. Yet he is confined to the smallest space, unable to rest, repeating only what he has been ordered to do. His willingness to spend everything on obeying the rule makes him a poignant image of a worker.
The problem is not that labor itself is bad. The problem is the inability to ask what the work is for, whether the same method remains necessary after conditions have changed, and whether a rule should be preserved at the cost of destroying a person. Rules are made for people and communities. When people are sacrificed for rules, means and ends have been reversed.
The Buddha Changed Precepts as Conditions Changed
Buddhist precepts did not descend as a complete set of absolute commands. The story that the Buddha knew the whole future and made every rule perfectly suited to every person in a single act is nonsense. The Buddha was human. He made and revised precepts as actual problems arose within the community.
The story of Rahula provides an example. The renunciant community followed a rule of eating one meal a day, but the young Rahula could not eat a large amount at one sitting and soon became hungry because he was still growing. One day, the Buddha saw Rahula crying and holding his stomach. When asked why, Rahula said that he was hungry. The Buddha then created an exception so that children, the elderly, and the weak did not have to follow the one-meal rule in the same way. He did not impose the identical rule on everyone; he looked at the body and circumstances of the person and changed it.
Discipline is an agreement for living together. If defecating beside the sleeping area makes others suffer, a community may agree to go farther into the forest and bury the waste. That is an agreement about how to live together, not cosmic good and evil. If the environment changes and a better method becomes available, the agreement can change. Applying the clothing and footwear of an Indian renunciant unchanged to a Korean winter would kill people. Detailed rules cannot remain identical across different climates, regions, and ways of life.
They Heard “Revise the Minor Precepts” but Failed to Ask What Was Minor
According to tradition, before the Buddha died, Ananda asked what should be done with the precepts after his departure. The Buddha answered that minor ones could be revised to suit circumstances. The answer makes the character of precepts clear: when the conditions of a community change, its agreements must also be remade.
A problem arose when practitioners gathered after the Buddha’s death. Ananda reported that he had heard, “Revise the minor precepts.” The others asked which precepts were minor, and Ananda answered that he had not asked. They then concluded that because they could not know what was minor, they should change nothing and preserve every rule. They avoided the responsibility of judgment and made the whole body of rules absolute.
In reality, the precepts did change. Different schools, regions, and communities had different rules, and countless new rules were created and revised. They could not remain identical under different conditions. Yet communities claimed not to have changed the precepts but merely to have preserved them. A contradiction arose between actual change and official doctrine.
The fact that the Buddha appointed no successor and instead spoke of being a lamp unto oneself and taking the Dharma as a lamp is also worth considering. Buddhism is not supposed to be a religion of believing and following a teacher. One must awaken rather than make a particular person’s commands absolute. This does not mean awakening in isolation; people learn through relationships and networks. It means that no individual authority should become absolute.
Wisdom Disappeared as Buddhism Became a Religion of Precepts
We must also ask whether people who could not judge which rules were minor had really attained the same awakening as the Buddha. Tradition speaks of five hundred or 1,250 arhats and says that the five monks became arhats one after another after listening to the first teaching for several days. But if people with the Buddha’s awakening actually existed, would they have scolded Ananda for not asking which precepts were minor and then preserved all rules indiscriminately? Their response looks more like an absence of wisdom.
Precepts are communal agreements not to stab one another, commit violence, falsely claim awakening, or become too intoxicated to practice. In later Buddhism, however, they were absolutized through the formula that keeping precepts leads to concentration and concentration leads to wisdom—the threefold training of precepts, concentration, and wisdom. Why would observing rules that vary across time, place, and circumstance automatically produce concentration? People say this because they do not know what concentration is.
When Buddhism changes from a path of wisdom into a religion of rules, observance itself becomes the supreme value. Dualistic good and evil, rebirth and karma, reward and merit take the center, while questioning and wisdom are pushed aside. A bhikkhu originally means a renunciant who lives on alms. Someone who accumulates property, drives expensive cars, gambles, and plays golf while invoking the authority of precepts is a bhikkhu in name only. The original purpose of the rule disappears, leaving only the status that wields it.
The Unit Next Door Treated the Exact Opposite as Common Sense
An experience my younger brother had in the military reveals the relativity of rules with striking clarity. In his company, a private was called insolent if he put his combat boots on the floor while polishing them. Only a sergeant was allowed the comfort of setting boots down; a private had to hold them in his hands.
Then my brother visited the neighboring company and saw a private polishing boots placed on the floor. When he asked how a private could do that, a soldier from that unit replied that it would be insolent for a private to hold his boots while polishing them. In their unit, a private had to bend over boots set on the floor, while only a sergeant possessed the privilege of holding them.
Two adjacent units had completely opposite rules, and each insulted a private who failed to follow its own rule. Which method was inherently appropriate to a private? Neither. Each unit had built a different convention around comfort and hierarchy and then treated it as morality and common sense.
Questioning the Countless Rules in Our Heads
Our minds also contain countless rules. We learn that men must behave one way and women another; sex must be conducted in a certain way; parents and children, professors and students, spouses and lovers must speak and act according to prescribed forms. Etiquette and custom, statutes and constitutions, religious disciplines and precepts accumulate through each person’s time, place, and experience.
Honorific speech is taken for granted in one society, while another language uses the same pronoun for one’s father, professor, and president. Calling one’s father or president “you” in Korean may be condemned as rude, whereas another society may have no Korean-style honorific system at all. Such rules are not absolute standards inherent in humanity.
Most rules are agreements that vary with conditions and are sometimes trivial customs. Yet we become bound to them after naming them law, common sense, morality, or precept. I am not saying that rules should be abolished. I am saying that we must ask why a rule was made, whether it still serves that purpose, and whether changed conditions now cause people to suffer for it.
Whenever someone says, “The rule is the rule,” that is precisely when questioning must begin. Why must it be followed? Who benefits? If it is a bad law, why should it not be changed? A wise life neither violates every rule nor obeys every rule blindly. It observes rules and conditions and can create a better agreement when one becomes necessary.
This article was edited by AI solely from the supplied video captions and description. No external sources were used.