“Hlan Nann Dha Htit” (literally: Marking the Boat’s Side with a Knife)

This is a well-known Burmese proverb, though only a few know its origin. It comes from an old folktale:

• A trader was traveling along the river in his boat.
• One day, his long knife accidentally fell into the water.
• Unable to dive in immediately, he decided to mark the exact spot where the knife had fallen by carving a notch on the side of the boat with another knife.
• Later, when the boat was docked, he jumped into the river at the place aligned with the mark on the boat’s side to search for his knife.
• Of course, he found nothing but a piece of sickle. He assumed his knife had been in the cold water so long that it had rusted and bent out of shape.

Meaning of the Proverb

The satire lies in the absurdity: the man marked the boat instead of the river, forgetting that the boat moves while the river stays.

The lesson is clear:

• If you cling rigidly to a fixed method or assumption without considering changing circumstances, you will make mistakes.
• In other words, “Rigid thinking leads to error.”

So, in English, the proverb “လှေနံဓားထစ်” can be expressed as: “Marking the boat to find a knife” — a satirical saying that warns against blindly sticking to fixed ideas without adapting to reality.

In Chinese version:

“Marking the boat’s side with a knife” is the central action in the ancient Chinese fable “Carving a Boat for a Lost Sword” (刻舟求劍). The story is a metaphor for a foolish, rigid, and inflexible approach to problem-solving, specifically the failure to adapt to changing circumstances. 

The Fable

In the story:

• A man from the state of Chu is crossing a river in a moving boat when he accidentally drops his valuable sword into the water.
• Instead of jumping in immediately to retrieve it, he calmly takes out a knife and carves a mark on the side of the boat exactly where he dropped the sword.
• He tells his confused fellow passengers that when the boat reaches the shore, he will jump in from that marked spot to find his sword.
• When the boat docks and he jumps in at the mark, he is unable to find his sword. 

The Moral

The man in the story fails because he ignores the fact that while the sword sank to the riverbed in a fixed location, the boat continued to move. The mark on the moving boat is a fixed reference point relative to the boat, but a completely incorrect reference point relative to the river and the lost sword. 

The idiom serves as a warning against: 

• Inflexibility Applying a fixed, pre-set method to conditions that have changed.
• Stagnation Being resistant to change and new ways of thinking.
• Wrong reference points Using an incorrect basis for locating an object or solving a problem. 

The story emphasizes the importance of seeing the present moment and adapting one’s methods to the current conditions and context.