The empty boat parable is the Zhuangzi passage most people can retell and fewest have read. Two boats meet on a river; one is empty, and the man in the other does not get angry; then someone appears in the empty boat, and he shouts. The moral you have seen attached to it — that other people’s rudeness is not really about you, that you should “be the empty boat” — is a twentieth-century addition, mostly made in English. The original is shorter, sharper, and addressed to a ruler who cannot stop worrying. Here it is from the text, with the Chinese beside it, followed by an account of how it turned into the version on your feed.
The passage itself
The story is in the Mountain Tree chapter (山木) of the Zhuangzi, one of the “outer chapters” that most scholars think were written by followers rather than by Zhuang Zhou himself. It is not a free-standing fable. It is the closing image of a speech by a man called Yiliao of Shinan (市南宜僚) to the Marquis of Lu, who has just complained that he performs every rite and still cannot escape trouble.
What the text actually says
方舟而濟於河，有虛船來觸舟，雖有惼心之人不怒；有一人在其上，則呼張歙之；一呼而不聞，再呼而不聞，於是三呼邪，則必以惡聲隨之。向也不怒而今也怒，向也虛而今也實。人能虛己以遊世，其孰能害之！
“Suppose two boats are crossing a river side by side, and an empty boat drifts over and strikes them. Even a short-tempered man will not be angry. But if there is someone aboard, he will shout at him to steer clear. If one shout goes unheard, and a second, then by the third he will be cursing. He was not angry before and he is angry now, because before the boat was empty and now it is occupied. If a person can empty himself and so wander through the world, who is there who could harm him?”
《莊子・外篇・山木》 · Check the original at ctext.org
Three things in the Chinese do not survive most retellings. First, the boats are 方舟, two boats lashed side by side, which is why the collision is a real nuisance rather than a glancing knock. Second, the man is explicitly 惼心之人, “a person of narrow temper”: the point is that even he stays calm, so the calm is not a virtue of the man but a property of the situation. Third, and most important, the conclusion is not about the man in the boat at all. It is 人能虛己以遊世: a person who can make himself empty, and wander the world in that condition, cannot be harmed — because there is nobody aboard for the world to shout at.
Who is speaking, and why it matters
Read on its own, the image sounds like advice on managing your reactions: do not take the collision personally. In context it is advice on managing your existence. The Marquis of Lu is a target. He holds a state, a title, a lineage and a reputation, and Yiliao’s whole speech is an argument that he should put them down — leave, shed the trappings of rank, go to a place the speech calls the land of established virtue, and stop being the kind of thing that troubles attach to. The empty boat is the last and plainest picture of what that would look like. It is not a technique for staying serene while people are rude to you. It is a recommendation to become someone nobody has a reason to be rude to, which is a far more radical and far less comfortable idea.
That reading is the one the tradition has always given the line. 虛己, “emptying the self”, is a technical term in the Zhuangzi and in the Daoist commentaries that followed: it means letting go of the self that has interests to defend, not learning to feel calm. The modern paraphrase keeps the boat and quietly swaps the sailor.
How the boat reached English
The version most people have read is not a translation. It is a poem by the Trappist monk Thomas Merton, printed in his 1965 collection The Way of Chuang Tzu, and titled “The Empty Boat”. Merton was candid about his method: in his note to the reader he explains that he did not know Chinese and worked from the existing Western translations, and he calls the results “readings” or “imitations” rather than translations. His empty boat is built from the passage above, but it runs on for another forty lines, drawing on the rest of Yiliao’s speech — the man who frees himself from achievement and from fame, who “descends and is lost amid the masses of men” — and it ends by naming the ideal figure of the chapter the perfect man, whose boat is empty. Those lines are Merton paraphrasing the surrounding text, not inventing; but a reader who meets them as “Chuang Tzu” is reading Merton’s arrangement.
From Merton the poem passed into anthologies and, from the 2000s, into the mindfulness and self-help literature, where it lost the Marquis, the speech and the second half, and gained a new moral. The popular English forms are recognisable by their opening — a man crossing a river, an empty boat, “even the most bad-tempered person” — and by their ending, which is almost always some version of “the other boat is empty; the anger was in you”. That is a defensible lesson. It is simply not the one the text draws.
Chinese-language business writing has done the same thing in parallel. Taiwanese magazines and blogs teach the 空船理論, the “empty boat theory”, or the 虛舟效應, and use it to counsel readers not to attribute intent to colleagues who cut them off in traffic or in meetings. The Chinese versions usually quote the original, which is to their credit; the moral they attach is still the modern one.
What the popular version leaves out
Set the two side by side and the differences fall into a pattern.
| Zhuangzi, Mountain Tree | The internet’s empty boat | |
|---|---|---|
| Who is told the story | The Marquis of Lu, a ruler with everything to lose | You, the reader |
| What the calm proves | That anger needs a target; even a bad-tempered man has none | That anger is a choice you can decline |
| The conclusion | Empty yourself and no one can harm you | See the other boat as empty and you will not be harmed |
| What you are asked to give up | Rank, reputation, achievement — the self that can be struck | The habit of taking things personally |
| Where the passage ends | With a rhetorical question addressed to a prince | With a lesson about inner peace |
None of this makes the modern moral wrong as advice. It makes it wrong as attribution. The Zhuangzi is not a manual for staying unbothered; it is, in this chapter, a sustained argument that being somebody is the problem, and that the only sure way to be left alone is to stop being a somebody. That is bleaker than the meme and, read carefully, funnier: the text’s example of a person who cannot be harmed is a boat with no one in it.
How to quote it
If you want the parable, quote the passage above, name the chapter, and stop at 其孰能害之. If you want Merton’s poem, quote Merton and say so; it is a fine poem and he never pretended otherwise. What the site’s verification standard will not support is the hybrid — a smoothed English paragraph, attributed to “Chuang Tzu”, that ends in a sentence the Zhuangzi does not contain. The same rule applies to the Tao Te Ching, where the most-quoted English is likewise a version rather than a translation; our guide to the translations explains how to tell the two apart, and Dao or Tao explains why the names themselves come in two spellings.
The word this parable is usually filed under, 無為, has a history of its own — a rule for rulers in the Laozi before Zhuangzi made it a way of being; see wuwei was political before it became self-help.
For another passage that circulates in English without a source, see Huineng on correcting a fault.
FAQ
Where is the empty boat parable in the Zhuangzi?
In the outer chapter Mountain Tree (山木, chapter 20), in the speech of Yiliao of Shinan to the Marquis of Lu. It is nine short clauses in Chinese, ending with the line about emptying oneself to wander the world.
Did Zhuangzi say “the other boat is empty, the anger is in you”?
No. The text says a bad-tempered man does not get angry at an empty boat, and does at an occupied one, and concludes that a person who empties himself cannot be harmed. The sentence about anger being “in you” is a modern gloss.
Is Thomas Merton’s “The Empty Boat” a translation?
By Merton’s own description, no. He did not read Chinese and called his versions readings and imitations. His poem is faithful to the drift of the chapter but is his own arrangement of it, and roughly four times the length of the passage.
What does 虛己 mean?
Literally “to empty oneself”. The Ministry of Education’s dictionary glosses it as 虛心不自滿 — open-minded, not self-satisfied — and gives this very line of the Zhuangzi as its first example, which is how the phrase came to be used in later Chinese. In the Zhuangzi passage itself it is stronger than humility: it means letting go of the self that has a position, a name and interests to defend, so that there is nothing aboard for the world to strike.
The same borrowing runs the other way as well: the straw-dog passage in Zhuangzi “Revolution of Heaven” is what gives Laozi’s chapter 5 its bleakness in English. We follow that thread in Heaven and Earth Are Not Benevolent: Laozi’s Straw Dogs.
For the other end of the Zhuangzi — the passage where the argument is the point rather than the image — see the happiness of fish, and the pun in its last line.
The same refusal to be flattered turns up in the butcher’s workshop: when Duke Wenhui compliments his technique, the cook answers that technique is not what he is interested in. Cook Ding and the Ox follows that sentence through the chapter and through the two idioms Taiwan’s dictionaries built on it.
The same move — feel the thing, then look hard at where the feeling came from — drives Zhuangzi’s answer when his own wife died, a passage whose key gesture later flipped meaning inside Chinese.
The empty boat comes from the same chapter as the tree in the mountains that the woodcutters would not touch — and the goose that was killed for being no good. On that pair, and on the half-line that later got welded onto the parable, see Zhuangzi’s useless tree.
For another passage where Zhuangzi rates the removal of strain above the heroic bearing of it, see Zhuangzi: Forget Each Other in the Rivers and Lakes.
Sources
- 《莊子・外篇・山木》 — 中國哲學書電子化計劃：市南宜僚見魯侯章，「方舟而濟於河……人能虛己以遊世，其孰能害之」（accessed 2 Sep 2026）
- 教育部《重編國語辭典修訂本》「虛己」 — dict.revised.moe.edu.tw：「虛心不自滿。《莊子・山木》：『人能虛己以遊世，其孰能害之？』」（accessed 2 Sep 2026）
- 天下雜誌〈空船〉 — cw.com.tw：台灣通俗管理書寫對「空船」的引用範例（accessed 2 Sep 2026）
- 方格子〈虛舟效應〉 — vocus.cc：「虛舟效應」一詞的通俗用法（accessed 2 Sep 2026）
- Thomas Merton, The Way of Chuang Tzu (New York: New Directions, 1965), “A Note to the Reader” and “The Empty Boat” — the author’s own account of working without Chinese, from existing translations
- Awakin, “The Empty Boat, by Chuang Tzu” — awakin.org: example of the Merton text circulating under Zhuangzi’s name (accessed 2 Sep 2026)
