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Tied the boat to his waist
The boat took a few days of effort, and he is confident in his craftsmanship as he pushes into the water. On the far bank, a thought creeps in as he prepares to continue his walk: what if there are more rivers like this one ahead? The boat might stay useful.
So he ties a rope to the boat, loops it around his waist, and starts walking again. Every step feels extremely difficult, much harder than it should.
After a mile, he looks back. The river is no longer in sight, and the realization crushes him: he has been holding onto the boat long beyond its core use.
Why does a Buddhist parable also use a raft?
A comparable parable appears in the Alagaddupama Sutta, a discourse preserved in the Pali Canon. In it, a man crosses a river on a raft he built from branches and reeds, then wonders whether to carry the raft on his head or shoulders for the rest of his trip. The text answers that a raft is for getting across, not for holding on to, and it applies the image to teachings themselves. The sutta belongs to the Majjhima Nikaya, the collection of middle-length discourses.
Why do people keep using a tool past its purpose?
In 1945 the psychologist Karl Duncker described functional fixedness, the tendency to see an object only in the use it was first put to. In his candle problem, people received a candle, matches, and a box of tacks and had to fix the candle to a wall. Many missed that the tack box itself could serve as a shelf, because it had been presented as a container. In later versions of the experiment, people solved the problem faster when the box was presented empty.
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