Mark Boat, Find Sword

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Informant: David Huang, 22, M

Date Collected: 5/25/14

Genre: Proverb

Informant Data: David Huang was born in Wuhan, China, moved to Kentucky, and then to Florida and grew up there. He speaks Chinese at home, and is fluent. He occasionally attended local weekend Chinese school as a child, but as a youngster studied Chinese on his own. His parents are Chinese immigrants, and he learned of this proverb from a book he read as a child. This interview was collected on Dartmouth campus over Skype (because David was far away on the other side of campus).

Text/Texture 

Chinese: 刻舟求剑 (Kè zhōu qiú jiàn)
Literal Translation: Mark boat, find sword

Free Translation: N/A

Context: This proverb is used in the context of change in order to encourage someone who isn't willing to change with everything that is progressing around him/her. Therefore, this proverb can be used regularly, as society and technology changes drastically every day. 

Meaning/Interpretation: There once was a guy on boat who was trying to cross Changjiang (longest river in China). At the time, it wasn’t uncommon for people to carry swords. The guy gets careless and drops his sword in the river. Since he considered his sword very important, he panicked and was considering whether to jump in or have someone else get it for him; but he then came up with an idea: mark the area on the boat from where the sword fell into the water. Then he said to the boat captain, "Keep driving towards the other side," and he would find the sword using the mark. Obviously, the boat kept moving but the sword stayed in place, so by the laws of physics, the man had a foolish idea. The moral is: using clever tricks is fine, but keep in mind that some of them don’t work because circumstances change. Don’t use a static mindset in a dynamic situation. This proverb possibly hails from Chinese history, in which the Chinese people have a history of being resistant to change, so this story is directly applicable.