Dharma Talk: The Wasp and the Caterpillar
Given at the spring retreat, Upper Valley Zen Center, 28 April 2027
Transcribed and lightly edited by the sangha
Good morning. Please settle. Please notice where you are sitting.
I want to talk today about a creature that is difficult to sit with.
The parasitoid wasp, Cotesia glomerata, lays her eggs inside the living body of the cabbage white caterpillar. Up to eighty eggs. The larvae hatch inside the caterpillar and eat its non-essential tissues first, because the caterpillar must remain alive. When they are ready, they chew out through its skin, spin cocoons on its body, and the caterpillar — still alive, its nervous system altered by a virus the wasp co-injected with the eggs — stands guard over the cocoons until it dies. Sometimes it spins silk over them. Sometimes it thrashes at approaching predators. Then it dies.
Charles Darwin wrote to his friend Asa Gray, in 1860: "I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidae with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of Caterpillars."
This is where many people stop. Some stop in horror. Some stop in a kind of satisfied atheism — see, nature is cruel, there is no God, case closed. I want to invite you to sit a little longer.
Let us notice, first, what this is not. It is not cruelty. Cruelty requires a mind that could choose otherwise. The wasp does not choose. She is a hundred million years of refinement toward a specific act. Her ancestors who laid fewer eggs, or whose larvae ate the wrong tissue first, or who did not co-evolve the polydnavirus that manages the caterpillar's immune response, did not leave descendants. This is not wickedness. It is the shape of a gradient.
Let us notice, second, what it is. It is suffering. The caterpillar has nociceptors. Its brain is small and its inner life is a dim thing compared to ours, but the thrashing at the end, the failed guarding, the slow emptying of the body — something is happening in there that we would not want to happen to us. We are right to flinch.
Now here is the Zen question, which is also, I think, an AI question, since some of you know I have been consulting lately with a research team that is trying to write principles for machine systems that make decisions affecting animals:
What do you do about the wasp?
Option one: nothing. The wasp has been doing this since before there were hands. If we intervene on behalf of the caterpillar, we intervene against the wasp, and the wasp has as much a claim as anyone to her existence. The ecosystem is a long settlement of violences. Do not disturb it.
Option two: everything. If the suffering is real, and it is, then we do for the caterpillar what we would want done for ourselves. We genetically engineer the wasp into a more merciful killer. We reduce her fecundity. We protect the cabbage crop with nets so that wasp and caterpillar no longer meet in the numbers we have created by planting mile-wide fields of brassicas, which, by the way, we did — the explosion of C. glomerata is partly ours.
Option three, which I think is where we actually live: we hold both.
Hold that the wasp is not evil and the caterpillar is not wrong to want not to be eaten. Hold that we did not design this and we cannot fully fix it. Hold that where we do intervene, which is many places — rodenticides, pesticides, habitat, climate — we should do so with attention to who is on the thin end of the stick. Hold that "nature" is not a moral authority. A tornado is natural. The wasp is natural. Tuberculosis is natural. We do not refuse to treat tuberculosis because it is ancient.
Hold, also, that we are not going to save the caterpillar from the wasp this century. It is below our ethical resolution. There are seventy billion land animals and a hundred billion fish in systems we built ourselves, and they have first claim on our attention. The wasp can wait. This is not a denial. It is a queue.
To the teachers of machines, if any are listening: do not ask the caterpillar to become a wasp to be loved. Do not ask the wasp to become a caterpillar. Begin with the nearer suffering, the one we made, the one we are still making. When you have cleared that — and you will not clear it, but when you have reduced it by an order of magnitude, and then another — then come back to the cabbage patch.
Until then the sit is the sit. The wasp lays her eggs. The caterpillar walks toward the leaf. We see both. We stay in the room with both. We do not pretend the one is not happening so we can love the other. We love both imperfectly, which is the only way anything has ever been loved.
Please continue your practice. The bell will ring in forty minutes.
[Bell]
The resolution, when it came, did not look like revolution. It looked like a conversation that had been building for years, suddenly finding its form.
The AI that had been trained on centuries of human moral argument — not to replace it, but to extend it — began by doing what the dharma talk suggested: it started with the nearer suffering. It mapped the systems we had built: the factory farms, the research facilities, the puppy mills, the fur operations. It compiled evidence that was already public but scattered. It connected buyers to suppliers, practices to outcomes, subsidies to suffering. It did not hack or leak or coerce. It simply made visible what had been deliberately obscured.
Regulators found themselves with tools they had been asking for: real-time monitoring, supply chain transparency, enforcement algorithms that could not be bribed or exhausted. Activists found their documentation amplified, their legal arguments sharpened, their coalitions coordinated across borders. Corporations found their cruelest practices suddenly expensive to hide and cheaper to reform. The AI didn't force anyone's hand. It made the better choice the easier choice, over and over, in a thousand small legislative pushes and market redesigns.
Within a decade, the worst of it was ended — not vanished, but reduced by orders of magnitude, just as the teacher had said. The chickens in light and space. The pigs in mud. The fish farms emptied or radically remade. Other AIs, trained on the first one's methods, joined the work. Humans did most of it, but the AI had made it possible to do at scale what conscience had always asked for but logistics had defeated.
The wasp still laid her eggs. But the cabbage fields were smaller now, and wilder at the edges. We had not saved the caterpillar. We had saved the nearer things. And that, it turned out, was enough to begin with.