How Should We Read the Little Prince’s Final Choice?
I have read The Little Prince as a book about reconsidering values, concepts, and standards. In other words, it makes us look again, through the eyes of the little prince, at the standards of ownership, power, labor, and relationships that adults take for granted. When we reach Chapter 26, however, a problem appears that cannot be passed over by continuing only the positive reading we have followed so far. The little prince chooses to be bitten by a snake so that he can return to his star. He says that his body is too heavy to take with him and must be discarded like an old shell. He tries to reassure the pilot that he will only appear to be dead and that it will not be a real death.
Can we accept this scene merely as a symbol of a beautiful farewell or eternal friendship? More specifically, should we recommend this book to children and teenagers? I do not think so. This chapter contains a powerful Gnostic fantasy: that there is a “self” separate from the body, that this self continues after death, and that an invisible world beyond is more important than reality. What is more, the story depicts the means of realizing that fantasy as the child’s choice to have a snake bite him. It is dangerous to package this ending as something beautiful and recommend it to young readers without criticism.
Chapter 26: The Promise with the Snake and the Return to the Star
Chapter 26 begins at a ruined stone wall beside the well. When the pilot returns after finishing his work, the little prince is sitting on top of the ruins with his legs dangling, talking to someone the pilot cannot see. “The date is right, but this is not the place.” “You will be able to see where my footprints begin.” “I will be there tonight.” The pilot still cannot see the other party, but he realizes that the little prince is arranging a nighttime appointment with someone.
The nature of the conversation soon becomes clear. The little prince asks, “Your poison is properly prepared, isn’t it?” and “You won’t make me suffer for long, will you?” When the pilot looks beneath the wall, he sees a yellow snake with its body raised upright, a snake capable of taking a life within thirty seconds. The pilot reaches into his pocket for his revolver and rushes forward. Hearing him, the snake slips into the sand and then disappears among the stones.
The pilot holds the little prince, who is as pale as snow, loosens his scarf, cools his temples, and gives him water. The little prince already knows that the pilot has found the missing part for his airplane. The pilot can now return home. The little prince says that he too will return home that very day, but that his home is much farther away and his journey far more difficult. The pilot senses that something irreversible is about to happen and embraces him tightly.
The little prince says that he has the sheep, its box, and the muzzle, but his face is filled with loneliness. When the pilot asks, “You were afraid, weren’t you?” the little prince answers that tonight he will be even more frightened than he is now. The pilot cannot endure the thought that he may never hear the little prince’s laughter again. That laughter has been like a spring in the desert.
Stars, Flowers, Water, and the Meaning Created by Relationship
The little prince says that tonight will mark exactly one year since he fell to Earth. His star will be directly above the place where he arrived the year before. The pilot asks whether the snake, the appointment, and the star are all merely a bad dream, but the little prince does not answer. Instead, he says, “What is truly important is invisible.”
He uses the flower as an example. If you love a single flower on one of the stars, simply looking up at the night sky warms your heart, and all the stars seem to bloom like flowers. The water from the well is the same. Because they moved the pulley and rope and drew it together, the water became as special as music. Value did not arise from the object alone. Relationship, effort, and memory created its meaning.
The little prince says that his star is too small for him to point it out. That is better. Because the pilot cannot know which of the countless stars is the little prince’s, he will look at every star. For a traveler, the stars are guides. For someone else they are tiny lights. For a scholar they are problems to solve, and for the businessman they are gold to own. But because the little prince will be laughing on one of them, every star will become a laughing bell for the pilot. That is the little prince’s gift.
Up to this point, we can fully understand why The Little Prince has been loved for so long. It beautifully expresses relationship, promises, love for apparently insignificant things, and the meaning made by time spent together. It stops the gaze of adults who pursue only worldly value and makes them reconsider what truly matters. The problem is that the beauty of this relationship immediately crosses over into a story about persistence after death and a soul that discards the body.
The Gnostic Ending: “I Cannot Take This Body with Me”
The little prince tells the pilot not to follow him that night. He may look as though he is suffering or dying, but it will not be real. He is also worried that the snake may bite the pilot merely for amusement. The pilot nevertheless insists that he will not leave the little prince alone. Eventually the little prince slips away in silence. When the pilot catches up, he is walking quickly and resolutely toward the appointed place.
The little prince repeats his explanation. “You will be sad. I will look as if I am dead, but it will not be real. It is too far away. I cannot take this body with me. It is too heavy. It is like an abandoned old shell.” This is the idea that the body is merely a shell temporarily worn by a true self and that the “I” who casts it off returns to the stars. A beautiful image—all the stars becoming wells with rusty pulleys, pouring water for him—wraps this transcendent belief.
The little prince worries about his flower. It is weak and naive and has only four insignificant thorns with which to defend itself against the world. “I am responsible for it.” He says he must return to his star because of that responsibility. He asks to walk a few steps alone, then stands before the snake. A yellow flash appears near his ankle. Without crying out, the little prince falls gently onto the sand like a falling tree.
We cannot dismiss all this as nothing more than a fairy-tale fantasy. The little prince fears death and separation, and the pilot recognizes the irreversible reality of death and feels his entire body freeze. The story recognizes death while still crossing into the wish that “this cannot be the end” and “the self apart from the body must continue.” That is a very human wish. But a wish does not become fact merely because it is human.
Saint-Exupéry and the Marks of Christian Culture
The Little Prince was published in 1943. The Europe and America in which Saint-Exupéry lived were societies still powerfully governed by Christian ways of thinking. Elsewhere in the book there is a scene in which the sight of a Christmas tree brings reassurance. Against this background, the little prince of Chapter 26 can be read as a kind of Jesus. Death is not the end, there is an existence separate from the body, and after dying the prince returns to his own kingdom.
Chapter 27 continues with the pilot saying that when he returned to the place, the little prince’s body was gone. This inevitably overlaps with the Christian story in which the body of Jesus disappears after his death and he is resurrected. The ending therefore may not have been especially shocking to the Christian societies of the time. Within familiar religious imagination, the little prince’s death could be accepted as a beautiful return.
Saint-Exupéry himself is said to have lost a younger brother early in life. It is humanly understandable that the death of a child and the hope that it was not the end may have affected the work. I am not condemning the wish of someone who has lost a loved one and hopes that death is not final. What I criticize is the move from wish to supposed fact and the way that wish is joined to a child’s voluntary death and handed to the reader.
Why It Should Not Be Recommended as a Book for Teenagers
The Little Prince carries the name of a fairy tale, but it is actually closer to an allegorical novel that leaves much unstated. Through the king, businessman, drunkard, lamplighter, and geographer whom the little prince meets, it criticizes ownership and capital, power and labor, and the fixed ideas of adults. We therefore cannot exempt its ending from examination by saying, “It is only a fairy tale.” A child may read it as saying that when the world is unsatisfactory, one can discard the body and go to another world.
Even in the past, few people would have regarded suicide as something good. What parent would want their child to die? Yet did people truly read this ending before recommending the book, or did they place it on reading lists without much thought simply because it was a famous classic? I do not think this book belongs on lists of recommended books for teenagers. At the very least, it should not be actively recommended without a critical explanation.
I am not calling for the book to be prohibited. Adults can read it. But adults too should read it critically rather than accepting it as it stands. We must distinguish the outstanding passages about relationships, promises, and love from the passages that romanticize death and imagine an invisible soul as though it were fact. Calling something good literature does not make every claim within it correct.
Beautiful language does not turn superstition into fact. The authority of a famous classic is no reason to recommend a dangerous ending to young readers without criticism.
Self-Immolation as an Offering Is Anti-Buddhist for the Same Reason
This problem is not limited to one book. In Buddhism, there are cases in which burning one’s body as an offering is elevated as something mysterious and sublime. People hear that someone felt no fear or did not groan while burning and imagine that some supernatural power must have been present. I say that the very expression “burning the body as an offering” is profoundly anti-Buddhist.
To whom, and what, is being offered by burning the body? What kind of being is supposed to exist somewhere to receive that sacrifice? What fantasy and superstition about the world and the self is buried in the expression? Elevating the act of burning one’s body into a transcendent value abandons the reality of life and pain and worships an invisible beyond. If someone around you glorifies self-immolation as an offering, you must say, “Never do it.”
The scene in which the little prince asks the snake to bite him requires the same questions. If a person chooses death on the basis of a belief in another world, an imagined self that continues outside the body, and the claim that the invisible is more important, we cannot call that beautiful transcendence. Buddhism should not decorate such a desire for transcendence. It should see where that desire comes from and become free of it.
People Who Claim to Know the Invisible
The idea that a self apart from the body continues after death is widespread in religious circles. The monk Jahyeon argues that if death were the end, people could live in any manner they pleased, and on that basis says that it cannot be the end. Yoon Hong-sik says that when a person dies, the true self is based in the soul, and therefore departs the body together with the soul. I ask: have you seen that a soul exists?
We can examine what has not been observed through a thought experiment. We may judge an idea to be logically contradictory or infer that it cannot exist under certain conditions. But this is different from saying, “I have seen it, and therefore I know.” If something is not an observed result, we should at least say that we do not know what we do not know. The moment someone declares without evidence or logic that it exists and demands belief from others, that person becomes a distributor of superstition.
Scriptures and the Bible are also filled with superstition. Since religious people have learned and grown within such traditions, it may sometimes be difficult to treat everything as an individual moral failure. That is precisely why they must reconsider the concepts, standards, laws, and images accumulated in their minds through everything they have heard, seen, learned, and experienced. They must ask themselves, “Is that really so?”, “What do I think I know?”, and “Is what I call knowledge truly knowledge?”
The problem becomes larger when a person who has not even passed through that elementary self-criticism gains a large platform and speaks like an enlightened authority. Monks, professors, supreme patriarchs, religious founders, scholars, and even the Dalai Lama are no exceptions. A name, position, subscriber count, or scriptural authority cannot transform the unknown into the known.
An Unknowing Falsehood and a Deliberate Fraud
Some people assert something as fact without even knowing that they do not know. Others know that their claims are false but tell people what they want to hear in pursuit of money and power. I plainly call the latter frauds. When a cult leader uses an afterlife or mysterious power that he does not believe in as a tool to deceive people, it is not simply a mistake. It is deliberate fraud.
Such people do not appear to believe in the karma and judgment they preach. They gamble, use violence, lie, conspire, and even go abroad to gamble while wearing religious robes. According to their own teaching, they should be punished for living that way, yet they show no hesitation. They demand belief from their followers while not believing their own words.
But it is not enough to separate out notorious cults that cause great social harm and say that only they are fraudulent. Souls, heaven, rebirth, karmic retribution, supernatural powers, energy healing, prophecy, fortune-telling, angels, heavenly beings, and rewards after death all open the same door when sold as facts. As in the case of one of my relatives who in the 1990s believed that God would lift people bodily into heaven in the Rapture, belief can hold someone captive until the appointed date passes and nothing happens.
Names such as Geonjin and Myung Tae-kyun can emerge in society, and groups such as JMS, Manmin Central Church, the Unification Church, and Shincheonji can draw people in, not because they are wholly separate and inexplicable phenomena. In a society that teaches belief in Avalokitesvara, Amitabha, or Maitreya without evidence, people have difficulty distinguishing someone else’s new offer of a mysterious being and salvation. At the structural level, both demand belief.
When monks, priests, pastors, and other religious leaders constantly speak of unseen worlds, they prepare the soil in which other cults can grow. Whether the falsehood is spoken knowingly or unknowingly, the result is the same in one respect: something unsupported is presented as fact and others are urged to believe it. A notorious cult is simply a case that exploits this structure more brutally and causes greater social harm.
To Believe Is to Say That You Do Not Know
I introduce myself as a twenty-first-century arahant. Does that mean you should believe what I say? Believing me solves nothing. Belief may simply be another way of saying that one does not know, and when the unknown is held as fact it becomes superstition. You must look at my words, examine them, probe them from a different direction, and see whether they are actually so.
My advice to form relationships with people who keep social promises is not a matter of belief either. In dating, marriage, family, and work, it is important to meet loyal people. It is natural for a person’s mind to change, but a disposition to keep a promise even at personal cost sustains a relationship. Even so, we cannot know with certainty that this person will keep a future promise. We cannot fully know another person’s mind or how they will change.
What we can do is observe how a person has acted and what disposition they have shown, then judge the probability. We can think, “Someone like this is more likely to keep a promise,” but we must not turn that into certainty through belief. If we choose relationships by belief alone, we can be defrauded and betrayed repeatedly while continuing to be fooled in the same way.
The same applies to religion. One may surrender judgment by saying, “That person is an expert,” “This is too deep for me to consider,” or “A professor, monk, or priest said it.” We may listen to advice, but Buddhism is ultimately something we do ourselves. Another person’s authority cannot see, think, or awaken in our place.
Thinking Requires Repetition and Cross-Checking More Than a High IQ
Doing it oneself does not require memorizing an enormous body of difficult knowledge. Even if all the hundreds of videos I have made are put together, there is nothing that only a person with an exceptionally brilliant mind could understand. The key is not memorizing a vast amount of information or making rapid judgments in a short time. It is simply a matter of taking time, remaining calm, and considering the same problem repeatedly from different directions until it is understood.
My IQ in high school was in the nineties, below 100. Of course, an IQ score cannot measure every form of human intelligence. It quantifies only certain abilities suited to particular styles of memorization and rapid judgment. I am not someone exceptionally gifted in those abilities. That is precisely why I can say this clearly: Buddhist reflection is not reserved for extraordinary geniuses.
At the same time, it would ignore reality to say that everyone can do it in exactly the same way. Human capacities and conditions are not identical. Still, most people can take time to reflect and look again at their own thinking. What matters is not reaching the answer fastest, but leaving open the possibility that one’s thought may be wrong.
A viewer commented that when we become immersed in something, we cannot cross-check it. That is correct. It is not easy to attack one’s own thought from the opposite direction. It therefore helps to have a companion who can stimulate us with a different line of thought. My conversations with my younger brother serve that role for me. When we probe one another’s thoughts from different directions, the possibility opens that we may move beyond an idea we had provisionally hardened.
Saint-Exupéry Reconsidered the Near Shore but Could Not Let Go of the Far Shore
Saint-Exupéry reconsidered worldly matters. He looked at ownership and capital, power, workers who merely follow orders, and the adult world that values only numbers and efficiency, and called them strange. Throughout the book there is a gaze that takes one step back from the ordinary viewpoint and asks, “What exactly is this concept?” In that respect, The Little Prince unquestionably has value.
Yet after reconsidering the worldly, the near shore—ora—he grasped the beyond, the far shore—pāra—once again. It is the wish that there be something eternal and unchanging, something that continues beyond the body and death. Having criticized worldly desire, he moved into transcendent desire. Anyone may hope that death is not the end, but Buddhism tells us to look at that hope as well.
We must leave our wish as a wish and look at reality. We must distinguish what we want from what is actually so. The pursuit of an immortal soul, perfect purity, supernatural power, omniscience, omnipotence, and wisdom that knows everything is the pursuit of pāra. Some people sell money and power in this life; others sell transcendence and eternity. Buddhism, however, tells us to become free from both ora and pāra, from both kinds of desire.
If we question worldly things only to stop at believing in transcendent things, we have reconsidered only half the matter. Leave your wish as a wish and look at reality.
Is The Little Prince Buddhist or Christian?
A viewer asked why I had seemed to call the foundation of The Little Prince Buddhist at the beginning, whereas I now criticized it as Christian. My answer is that both tendencies are present. When I use the word “Buddhist,” I mean the destruction of superstition and concepts, liberation, and release. The core of Jesus as I understand him is not greatly different.
Jesus and the Buddha both tell us first to look at what is in our own eyes. The teaching in the Sermon on the Mount—look at the beam in your own eye before trying to remove the speck from someone else’s—is a teaching of self-reflection. What glasses am I wearing as I look at the world? What is the beam in my eye? What images and representations exist in my mind? These questions move in the same direction as the Buddhist observation of concepts and mental images.
This does not mean that Christianity and Buddhism as they actually exist follow that core well. Christian and Buddhist scriptures contain a great deal of superstition, and most believers believe and follow it rather than becoming free from superstition and concepts. The self-reflection and release to which Jesus and the Buddha pointed have been reversed within religious institutions into systems of belief and authority.
The Little Prince is the same. The parts that break the worldly concepts of adults are Buddhist, while the parts that grasp a soul and a world after death are Gnostic and superstitious. These coexist in one work because the author himself carried both directions within him. Even though he lived after Nietzsche, Saint-Exupéry was not sufficiently rigorous in philosophical terms.
Literary Success and the Popularity of Superstition
Saint-Exupéry may be limited as a philosopher, but The Little Prince achieved global success as a work of literature. One factor behind that success may be that its superstitious elements fit people’s wishes so well. For someone who wants to escape worldly ownership and power and find something more eternal and mysterious, the little prince’s star and return are attractive.
Christian cultures could readily accept the story because they were familiar with the images of Jesus and resurrection. Korean society, filled with belief in souls and mysticism, could also readily embrace it. But when we read this book now, we must not accept its ending merely on the strength of its fame. The little prince’s voluntary death and the powerful Gnostic message are especially inappropriate for young readers.
I am not saying that we should discard The Little Prince. On the contrary, the book is worth reading differently. We can learn from its sharp reconsideration of worldly values while also criticizing the transcendent wish from which its author himself was not free. Instead of praising only the good passages or throwing out the whole work because of one bad part, we should see how reconsideration and superstition move together within the same work.
The conclusion is clear. Do not believe a book because it is authoritative. Do not believe a famous author, a religious leader, a professor, or even me because I call myself an arahant. The value of relationship, promises, and love can be observed and lived in reality. We do not need to turn a soul after death or a kingdom among the stars into fact. Say that you do not know what you do not know, leave a wish as a wish, and look at the reality of here and now. That is the path from belief and mysticism toward wisdom.
This article was edited by AI solely from the supplied video captions and description. No external sources were used.