Why Do Thorns Exist, and What Truly Matters?
Before beginning the main lecture, I briefly introduced Artificial Intelligence and Delusion, the book I wrote with my younger brother. It can help readers understand both AI and Buddhism, and it explores in advance how a world transformed by artificial intelligence may unfold. Because it is freely available online, I asked viewers to read it and share it. Then I turned to Chapter 7 of The Little Prince.
In the previous chapter, the Little Prince thought on Earth as though he were still on his own planet. Because he could see another sunset simply by moving his chair there, he assumed the same would be possible here. We forget that we always look from within our own planet and well. In this chapter, the same problem becomes sharper through the question, “What is important?”
The Little Prince asks whether the sheep drawn by the pilot eats flowers as well as bushes. When told that it will even eat flowers with thorns, he asks again: Why do thorns exist? A flower must produce thorns to protect itself, so what purpose can they serve if a sheep ignores them and eats the flower anyway? Once the Little Prince asks a question, he does not let it go.
At that moment, the pilot is repairing the plane that crashed in the desert. A screw in the engine will not come loose, his drinking water is running out, and failure to repair the aircraft may mean death. From his position, nothing is more important than fixing the plane. He answers carelessly and, when the questions continue, becomes angry: “I am doing something important.”
The Little Prince says he is talking like a grown-up. On another planet, he says, there is a red-faced gentleman who has never smelled a flower, looked at a star, or loved anyone. He does nothing but count numbers and announce that he is a serious and important man. The Little Prince’s flower is the only one of her kind in the universe. If a sheep eats her, it will be as though millions of stars suddenly go dark. How can that be unimportant? He argues until he bursts into tears.
Only then does the pilot put down his tools. For a moment, the hammer, the screw, thirst, and even death cease to matter. A Little Prince in front of him needs comfort. He promises to draw a muzzle for the sheep and armor for the flower, but he does not know how to enter the mysterious world of tears and can offer only awkward consolation.
Both Matters Are Important, Yet Each Is Invisible to the Other
The point is not to decide which person is right and which is wrong. For the pilot, repairing the plane is a matter of survival. In a desert where his water is disappearing, he must escape. For the Little Prince, the possibility that the only rose on his planet may be eaten is equally grave. Both are desperate within their respective worlds. Yet the pilot has already judged the Little Prince’s desperation trivial, while the Little Prince places his question ahead of the pilot’s circumstances. This is the difference between positions.
The sentence “I am doing something important” often contains another message: “Your question, your suffering, and the thorn in your throat are not important.”
A person feels most strongly the fire at his own feet and the thorn in his own throat. Anyone who has had a fish bone stuck in the throat knows the pain that returns with every swallow. At that moment, another person’s thorn does not feel equally large. Even the pain of a parent, child, spouse, or friend may feel fainter than one’s immediate suffering. The pain of people on the other side of the world—in Palestine or Israel, Iran, Ukraine, or Russia—feels more distant still.
I am not scolding people for being made this way. We must first understand that this is how humans operate. It is difficult to feel another person’s thorn as we feel our own. If we refuse to acknowledge that limit, we treat our pain as absolutely important and dismiss another person’s questions and life as insignificant.
Why Does Society Fail to Hear Workers Risking Their Lives in High-Altitude Protests?
I examined this difference in position through a contemporary case. Senior figures from religious, social, and labor circles appealed for the lives of Go Jin-su, a dismissed worker from the Sejong Hotel, and Park Jeong-hye, a dismissed worker from Korea Optical High Tech. One demanded reinstatement and the other employment succession. They had continued high-altitude protests for roughly 160 and 560 days. Remaining at a great height for that long inevitably damages health, livelihood, and family life.
I do not know every detail of their cases. Yet if people risk their lives in protest for so long, they must carry a grievance and desperation they want someone to hear. Had anyone listened and tried to solve the issue sooner, there would have been no reason to remain aloft for nearly a year and a half. For them, reinstatement and employment succession are questions of survival, important enough to stake their lives on. Yet their cases are not widely known and do not feel important to much of society.
Special-prosecutor investigations with great political impact or targeted and biased investigations into the family of a famous politician receive broad attention. Those issues matter too. Yet the ordeal of two less-famous workers who remain in the sky for hundreds of days is far less visible. Differences of perspective and power shape the process by which something becomes news and a social agenda.
What If Palestinian Civilians Had Been Korean or American?
The same question can be asked about the war involving Israel and Hamas. Civilians seeking food and journalists doing their jobs continue to be shot and killed. How would the world react if those people were ordinary American citizens? How would South Korean society and its government move if Korean civilians, engaged in no hostile act, were shot by soldiers from another country?
The value of their lives is not actually different. The deaths of people close to us and members of “our nation” simply feel more important. The suffering of distant people becomes numbers and news, while the pain of our group has faces and produces anger. That is how human position operates. If we fail to see this while insisting that our judgment is objective, even the scale of violence is measured differently according to whose side the victims belong to.
Public Officials During Disaster and “What Matters to Me”
I also discussed public officials who sought leave or sang and danced at an event while citizens were dying from torrential rain and extreme heat and civil servants were on emergency duty. It is absurd to see a responsible official enjoying a celebration while flood disasters unfold elsewhere. The scheduled event and the official’s own plans probably felt more important to him. This does not excuse the conduct. The question is why such conduct occurs.
Its structure is the same as the pilot telling the Little Prince, “I am doing something important.” When what matters to me fills my whole field of view, another person’s emergency and question become minor. People make this judgment every day. We call what matters to us objectively important and decide in advance that what matters to another person is trivial.
The Thorn in My Throat Is the Koan of Liberation
Here I turn to a clue about liberation. Holding someone else’s problem does not immediately liberate me. Unless another person’s pain actually arrives as my pain, it is unlikely to become a living question for me. The key to my liberation lies in observing and resolving the thorn in my own throat—the question and suffering I encounter every day.
Why do I suffer? Who am I, and where am I going? Where did the fear and anger holding me come from? These must become my questions and my koan. If the death of a parent, child, lover, friend, or members of my society truly arrives like a thorn in my throat, it too becomes my koan. The point is not to mechanically hold an alien problem assigned by someone else. It is to observe what is genuinely important and painful in my life, ask “why” and “how,” and work through it.
That is why merely holding an old public case or a koan given by a teacher may be of little help. We should not dream that a contrived question such as whether one may kill a mosquito determines enlightenment. Observation, questioning, and dependent thinking are the eyes of liberation and the wisdom of life. Their first object should be my daily life and suffering.
Perfect Objectivity Is Nearly Impossible, but We Must Try to Leave Our Position
Another core of this chapter is that I can see only from my own position. Moving to a perfectly objective viewpoint is nearly impossible. The body into which I was born, what I heard and saw while growing up, and my memories and worldview all affect every judgment. I should therefore not casually claim to have reached absolute truth or objective fact. I may be right, but the possibility of error always remains.
Recognizing this limit naturally produces humility. I realize that I judge from inside my well, on my planet, and through my experience. This does not mean abandoning the effort to be objective. Even if perfect objectivity is unattainable, I can try to step away from my position for a moment and listen to another person.
A Person Who Asks Once More About Another World
Husbands and wives, parents and children, friends, teachers and students all regard different things as important. Conflict arises when those different forms of importance collide. Yet people speak from within their own wells as though they occupied an objective position, announcing, “This is important” and “I am right.”
I had the same thought while watching Jeon Han-gil’s forceful political speeches. He feels his own wounds and disadvantages intensely enough to weep, but when speaking to others he presents his subjective view as the objective truth of the world. If it is a deliberate lie, that is plainly wrong. Even if it is sincere, the problem remains that he claims absoluteness without seeing his own well. The same applies both to someone who condemns all rich people as evil and to someone who denounces poor people as lazy communists. If neither can take a single step outside his position, they remain on eternal parallel lines.
Only when I admit that I know nothing beyond my own worldview can I ask another person: “Tell me your position. I want to hear what makes you suffer, what you love, what matters to you, and what kind of world you have lived in.” Practicing Buddhism means becoming such a person. Someone can practice religion for decades and still torment himself and everyone nearby if he does not know that he is a frog in a well. Religious people who do not understand the words of Jesus or the Buddha nevertheless raise their voices and insist that they are right and enlightened. Wisdom begins by acknowledging the thorn in my throat and the well around me, and from there trying once more to hear another person’s world.
This article was edited by AI solely from the supplied video captions and description. No external sources were used.