Familiar Things Become Visible at Departure
Chapter 9 begins as the Little Prince prepares to leave his planet. Planning to use the migration of wild birds, he puts the planet in order. He cleans two active volcanoes and one extinct volcano and pulls the last baobab shoots. These would ordinarily be routine chores, but when he imagines that he may never return, each task feels unusually tender. The value of familiar beings often becomes clearer at the moment of departure than while they remain beside us.
He waters the rose one last time and tries to place the glass globe over her. Unexpectedly, she admits that she has been foolish, asks forgiveness, and wishes him happiness. At last she says, “I have loved you. It was my fault that you did not know.” Only when he is truly about to leave does she directly express the feeling that she had hidden behind vanity and difficult demands.
The rose also refuses the glass globe. The cool night air will be good for her; she must endure a few caterpillars if she wants to see butterflies; and if large animals come, she has her thorns. When the Little Prince hesitates, she urges him to go. She does not want him to see her cry. Love, pride, fear, and regret are all present in this short farewell.
Loving Someone and Communicating Love Are Different
The rose certainly loved the Little Prince, but she did not express that love in a way he could recognize. To her, boasting and complaints may have been forms of attention. To him, they sounded like words and actions that made his life difficult. A benevolent intention inside the speaker does not guarantee that the listener receives it accurately. There is always a distance between one person’s intention and another person’s experience.
We often think, “Surely this much is enough for them to know.” Parents believe their sacrifices must have communicated love, and partners suppose that time spent together makes their feelings obvious. Yet a parent can commit violence “for your own good” and still expect the child to understand it as love. Calling an act love does not transform the fear and injury experienced by the other person into love.
Effort and result must be distinguished in communication. Speaking sincerely is effort; having the meaning arrive is the result. The effort matters, but it does not guarantee success. That the rose loved him and that the Little Prince felt loved are separate questions. Once we accept this distinction, we can leave the resentment of “Why can’t you understand my heart?” and examine what was actually communicated.
People Who Come from Different Planets
People have different bodies, personalities, environments, memories, and languages. The same smile can be courtesy to one person and a signal of attraction to another. Someone with almost no romantic experience may mistake a friendly smile for love. The expression is the same, but the experiential dictionary used to interpret it differs.
When I first entered the military, I could not immediately recognize anger in the voices of colleagues from Seoul and Jeolla Province. Their intonation differed from what I had learned growing up in Busan, so their anger did not sound like anger to me. Conversely, a tone that sounded ordinary to me could sound harsh to someone else. Even when dictionary meanings match, intonation, relationship, and regional experience can turn them into different messages.
Something similar happened with my then-girlfriend, who is now my wife. My family expressed displeasure by raising our voices, while her family expressed it by becoming quiet and visibly upset. I had learned that a raised voice brought a problem into the open, but to her it felt like a frightening threat to the relationship. Neither side lacked love; we had learned different emotional grammars in different homes.
For couples, siblings, parents, and children, living together is a long process of tuning two frequencies. We cannot confidently read an entire mind from one expression. We must learn over time which words hurt someone, how they behave when angry, and what they want to share when joyful. Understanding is not the mystical power to feel exactly what another person feels. It is the practice of observing differences and repeatedly checking them.
Translation Always Preserves Something and Loses Something
The Little Prince we read is itself a translation from French into Korean. A translator tries to convey meaning, but languages mark relationships and emotions differently. Korean levels of respect, forms of address, and subtle pronouns may all become the single word “you” in English. Artificial intelligence does not make this problem disappear. Every translation involves choices, and every choice brings some loss of information.
Even in face-to-face conversation, we are effectively translating. We turn another person’s sounds and expressions into concepts drawn from our own experience. Text messages remove tone, facial expression, and surrounding context, creating still more misunderstanding. It becomes difficult to know whether the same sentence is a joke, an attack, resignation, or consideration. The conclusion “I said it clearly, so it was clearly conveyed” is therefore dangerous.
Understanding another person requires more than analyzing sentences. We should ask what they intended and confirm by returning what we understood. Communication is not a broadcast completed by a single transmission. It is a round trip in which misaligned frequencies are gradually adjusted. Perfect translation may be impossible, but checking and revising reduce misunderstanding.
The Fantasy of Direct Transmission Without Words
Buddhist tradition tells of the Buddha holding up a flower and Mahakasyapa smiling, supposedly transmitting truth directly from mind to mind. Mystical accounts also claim that awakening was conveyed by striking a staff three times or moving an eyebrow. But if minds could truly transmit meaning directly, why would long sermons, scriptures, questions, and debates be necessary? There is no reason to treat symbolic stories as literal communications technology.
Language produces misunderstanding, but it is also one of humanity’s most important tools. Language allowed one person’s discovery to be shared and later generations to build new concepts upon it. It is difficult to imagine someone born alone, without language or human relations, independently constructing complex Buddhist concepts and attaining awakening. Wisdom is not a mystery that suddenly falls into an isolated mind. It grows in a network of accumulated information and questions.
Understanding Buddhism does not mean abandoning concepts, language, and communication. It means closely observing how concepts are made, how words are misunderstood, and how distinctions such as self and world operate in relationships. Saying that words cannot capture truth perfectly is completely different from saying that words are useless.
Political Opponents Also Live on Different Planets
After the presidential election, I considered why more than forty percent of voters supported a choice connected to the People Power Party and Yoon Suk Yeol. At first they may appear impossible to understand. Yet this conclusion might not mean that they are incomprehensible. It may mean that I have not tried hard enough to understand the environments, information, and interpretive habits that shaped them.
People live within different information networks and experiences. They see the same event yet identify entirely different dangers and hopes. Like the Little Prince traveling between planets, we can stand on the same earth while thinking as though we inhabit different worlds. Conversation ends as soon as we classify the other side as merely evil or ignorant. Even when we disagree, communication becomes possible only when we investigate the conditions that produced their judgment.
Understanding is neither agreement nor absolution. We can criticize violence and falsehood while asking which fears and information generated support for them. If we regard only our own frequency as normal, every signal from the other side becomes noise. Acknowledging difference is not the abandonment of judgment; it is the beginning of more accurate judgment.
Scriptures and Videos Also Fail to Communicate Perfectly
Scriptures, the Bible, textbooks, and this video are no exceptions. The original message may be false, the transmitter may have learned it incorrectly, or the listener may interpret it through a different experience. Recording a sentence does not freeze one meaning and deliver it identically to everyone.
When I made videos arguing that rebirth does not exist, I believed I had explained myself clearly enough. Yet viewers received the videos through beliefs and concepts they already possessed. People heard the same words and reached very different conclusions. I realized both how difficult communication is and how little face-to-face dialogue I had undertaken with people who held opposing views.
One hundred percent communication may be impossible. That is no reason to give up. Someone who knows failure is possible speaks more slowly, asks what the other person heard, and changes the expression when misunderstanding appears. What arrived in the listener matters more than the speaker’s satisfaction at having sent an intention.
Love Is a Frequency We Tune Together
The rose and the Little Prince loved each other, but they differed in how they communicated and interpreted love. The rose hid her feelings behind vanity and complaints, while the Little Prince was hurt by the surface of her words and left. Only at the farewell does she say directly that she loves him. It is a beautiful confession, but also a communication that came too late.
We cannot experience another person’s pain exactly or enter another mind. We can, however, learn when they are hurt and what brings them joy. We can ask, listen, confirm what we understood, and tune our frequencies. Love is not merely confidence in the goodness of my heart. It is the continuing act of examining what my intention became in the other person’s experience.
The wisdom of Chapter 9 is that we should not wait for others to read our minds. We come from different planets. Therefore we must speak, confirm the meaning that was heard, and try another expression when the first one fails. Perfect communication may be impossible, but better communication is possible. Acknowledging difference and continuing to tune our frequencies is a path of love and wisdom.
This article was edited by AI solely from the supplied video captions and description. No external sources were used.