I read it many years ago, when I was first exposed to Buddhism. My recollection is that it was simple in the way that many Bible stories and myths are simple: if you read them on one level, they are engaging stories, imaginative, evocative perhaps, perhaps teaching obvious lessons. You may also read them on another level, and they may lodge themselves in your psyche and continue to deliver meaning that deepens over time as you mature.
I say that I thought it was a story of that kind, but it did not in fact have that effect on me. My sense of it was that there was less to it than met the eye and that it was a young person’s gee-whiz book, administering bite-size philosophical ideas that seem so profound just because they are being encountered for the first time. A lot of thin little volumes that are fashionable with college students seem to fall into this category.
BUT I know a woman who has been a serious and faithful practitioner of Zen over many decades and who reads this book every year, finding more enrichment in it each time. Clearly she sees something in it that eludes me, and so here I may simply be confessing my own shallowness and lack of discernment.
Perhaps if I read it again now I would find that it is one of those books that are really mirrors, reflecting who you are when you read them and showing you the changes in your face over the years. Perhaps I would be struck with awe by its jewellike single-pointed yet multifaceted concentration of wisdom. Or maybe I would just put it back on the shelf next to Le Petit Prince and go on my way.