2 Minute Idioms

A man from the state of Chu was on a long journey. When he was crossing the river in a boat, he accidentally dropped the sword he was carrying into the rapids of the river. Everyone on board shouted, "The sword has fallen into the water!" Immediately, the Chu man carved a mark on the side of the boat with a knife, and then turned around and said, "This is where I dropped my sword." The crowd looked at the knife mark in confusion. Someone urged him, "Go down to the water and look for the sword!" The Chu man said, "Why panic, I have the mark."

The boat continued to move forward, and someone urged him to say: "If you don't go down to look for the sword, the boat will go farther and farther away, and you may not be able to find it back." Chu still confidently said: "No need to hurry, no need to hurry, the mark is engraved there."

Till the boat came to a stop, the Chu man went down to the water to look for the sword, following the place where he had carved the mark. But how could he find it? The mark on the boat was the position of the Chu man's sword in the river at the moment it fell into the water. The sword that fell into the river did not travel with the boat, but the boat and the mark on the side of the boat kept moving. By the time the boat reaches the shore, the mark on the side of the boat and the position of the sword in the water are no longer the same. This man of Chu, who used the above method to find his sword, was not too confused?

He made a great deal of effort to find his sword in the water under the boat on the shore, and in the end he found nothing, and drew ridicule from the crowd.

This fable tells us that to look at the ever-changing things with a static vision is bound to be guilty of subjective idealism divorced from reality.