How I Intend to Read The Little Prince
The Little Prince will be read differently by different readers. Rather than treating it only as praise for childhood innocence, I want to read it as a text about name-and-form, mental images, and what conditions us. I am not claiming to establish Saint-Exupéry’s intention. I am using the pictures and sentences to examine how human feeling and judgment arise.
The Boa Constrictor That Swallowed an Elephant and the Hat
As a child, the pilot sees a picture of a boa constrictor swallowing a wild animal in a book of true stories about the primeval forest. The book explains that the boa swallows its prey whole, then sleeps without moving for six months while digesting it. After thinking deeply about adventures in the jungle, the six-year-old draws his first picture with a colored pencil: the outside of a boa constrictor containing an elephant.
The child shows the drawing to grown-ups and asks whether it frightens them. To him it depicts a dangerous snake holding a huge elephant and is naturally frightening. The grown-ups ask why a hat should be frightening. The child’s intention and what the adults saw were entirely different. He had to draw the inside of the boa to explain that an elephant was there.
We ordinarily imagine adults explaining things to children. In The Little Prince, the child must repeatedly explain things to grown-ups. The world is reversed from the child’s standpoint. Grown-ups cannot understand for themselves, and even after an explanation they value geography, history, arithmetic, and grammar over imagination.
The adults advise the child to abandon boa drawings and study useful subjects. Thinking that pictures one and two have failed, he gives up a promising career as an artist at six and later becomes a pilot. Geography proves useful for distinguishing China from Arizona while flying, but living among serious adults does not improve his opinion of them.
Whenever he meets a grown-up who appears somewhat intelligent, the pilot tests the person with his first drawing. Everyone answers that it is a hat. He then avoids boa constrictors, primeval forests, stars, and dreams and speaks instead about bridge, golf, politics, and neckties. He accommodates the adult’s level. The adult is satisfied to regard him as a reasonable person, while the pilot lives without anyone with whom to share his sincerity.
What Something Looks Like Depends on Experience
Why did a drawing intended as a boa constrictor look like a hat? A familiar shape comes first to someone who has often seen such hats. But would a person in Korea’s Joseon or Goryeo period necessarily have called it a hat? Without experience of a similar object, the person might have seen something entirely different.
We look at clouds and say they resemble people or animals. A child interested in dinosaurs sees a dinosaur. Someone familiar with a Western dragon sees a winged creature, while someone familiar with an East Asian dragon imagines a long, serpentine body. Once a stain on wallpaper appears to be a human face, the same face keeps appearing. As a person familiar with a soft-shelled turtle may mistake a pot lid for one, sensory information calls up similar images from memory and experience.
When I first saw the famous drawing, I too thought it was a hat. Only after seeing the drawing of the inside did the first picture begin to look like a boa constrictor. New information changed my image. The drawing did not suddenly change; my framework of experience and interpretation did.
From Sensation to Judgment
This does not apply only to sight. Hearing the same sound, one person may identify a human voice and another an animal. Smell, taste, and touch also differ according to past experience and bodily condition. The instant we name sensory information, judgment and inference have already entered.
A newborn cannot identify what appears to the eyes as a book, finger, mother, father, black, or blue. Only by repeatedly hearing names and having experiences does the child learn to judge what something is. Through experience, we construct images and standards in the mind and compare new information with them.
Therefore the judgment of what I saw is not automatically a one-hundred-percent answer. The child drew a boa, but the grown-up judged it to be a hat because their experience differed. People live in different times, regions, cultures, educations, bodies, and relationships. They can judge the same object differently.
What It Means Not to Judge
The Sermon on the Mount says not to judge, for one will be judged by the measure one uses. Judgment arises from certainty that my standard is right. The Catholic authorities who burned Giordano Bruno judged his ideas heretical because they differed from doctrine. The belief that they possessed truth became the act of burning another human being.
In Buddhist terms, it means knowing an image as an image and not clinging to a doctrine. The Cave Chapter of the Atthakavagga says that a person becomes angry and declares a view because the person considers oneself right. Certainty that I am right, my standard is highest, my side is good, and the other side evil forms the basis of anger and violence.
This does not mean abandoning every judgment. I judge Yoon Suk Yeol’s declaration of martial law to have been profoundly wrong and deserving of judgment. I reject a false equivalence that refuses every conclusion. The important point is knowing through which experience, information, doctrine, and mental image I reached the judgment. We should ask why one person saw the same martial law as wrong and another considered it acceptable.
A Different Culture Changes the Meaning of the Same Scene
I once smoked together with my father. In Korea, someone seeing a father and son smoke as equals may condemn the son as disrespectful. In a culture where the scene is ordinary, the observer may not understand the problem. Someone without a standard concerning tobacco and father-son conduct has no reason to judge it. Good and evil do not simply reside inside the visible action; it acquires meaning through the observer’s experience and norms.
Nor can we guarantee that people in Joseon or Goryeo would find today’s idol stars beautiful in the same way. Standards of beauty, family etiquette, political good and evil, and religious precepts arise in societies and experiences. If I read the precept against killing and declare killing a mosquito to be absolute evil, I have turned a rule placed in my mind into objective truth.
My Judgment Is an Inference Made Inside a Well
The time and space experienced by one person are tiny beside cosmic history and the whole world. I have lived only a few decades, moved through a few regions, and encountered a limited number of people, books, films, and broadcasts. I judge the world through standards built in that small well and nevertheless imagine myself objective.
I cannot live the totality of another person’s standpoint. If eight billion people exist, how could I possess perfect objectivity without living all eight billion lives? What I see and feel is an interpretation and inference based on my experience, rather than the fact itself. Under different conditions, it may appear differently.
Without this understanding, a person becomes bound to private images and doctrines. One refuses to hear others and uses status and authority as proof of awakening or truth. Professors, politicians, grand masters and patriarchs of the Jogye Order, scientists, and religious figures can all fall into this illusion. The opening question of The Little Prince—what does this look like?—is therefore not trivial. The difference between hat and boa leads us to question the grounds of every judgment we believe to be right.
Judge Without Becoming Bound to Judgment
We cannot avoid judgment in life. We must criticize martial law, stop violence, and distinguish falsehood from fact. Yet we need not treat judgment as unconditional absolute truth. We should examine what we saw, which experiences made it feel that way, and whether new information can revise it.
Just as seeing the inner drawing allowed me to see a boa where I had seen a hat, judgment can change. Buddhist wisdom does not consist in eliminating every image. It consists in knowing an image as a temporary standard formed by experience, refusing to confuse it with the fact itself, and continuing to revise it through wider observation and dialogue. I read Chapter 1 of The Little Prince as the beginning of that question.
This article was edited by AI solely from the supplied video captions and description. No external sources were used.