Carving a Plow by the Road

The steady scrape of a plane rang out from the edge of a road. Curly wood shavings flew up and drifted down like tiny threads of gold. A faint smell of fresh wood floated on the breeze. This is a fable that grandparents in Vietnam have told for generations, about a carpenter and a log, and about the advice that never stopped coming from the people passing by.

The scholar Nguyễn Đổng Chi collected this fable in his large collection of Vietnamese folktales. It has long been taught in Vietnamese primary school textbooks, and its title became a saying that everyone understands.

A carpenter in the village had just bought a good log, hard and strong, enough to carve into a plow for a farmer. A finished plow meant money earned, and life would be a little easier. So he thought, and his heart was light.

But instead of carrying the log into his workshop, he hauled it out and set it down right beside the road. A village road is busy, he reasoned. Everyone who saw the work would offer a word, and he might gather plenty of good ideas. So he sat down with his chisel and his plane and began to carve at the roadside, in the early sun.

After a while, someone walked by. The man stopped and looked at the log for a long moment, then spoke. "Brother, carve it bigger. A plow has to be big to cut deep into the earth. A small one takes a great deal of effort."

The carpenter listened and thought it made sense. "True enough," he said. "A big plow cuts deep, and farmers like that." So he took up his chisel and carved the plow a little bigger.

Not long after, a second person passed. He looked at the plow and shook his head. "Goodness, who could use a plow this big? If it is too big, it does not fit the hand and cannot be pulled. It must be made smaller."

Again the carpenter thought it made sense. "True, if it does not fit the hand, who will buy it?" So he picked up his chisel and carved the plow smaller again.

Then a third person came by. He looked at the handle and shook his head. A straight handle was not convenient, he said. It had to be curved to suit the hand while plowing. The carpenter nodded and carved it over again to the new idea.

And so it went, one passerby after another. One said the handle must be straight. Another said it should curve gently to be easy to hold. One said the blade must be thick to be strong, and another said it must be thin to be sharp. Every person had a different idea, and every idea sounded right. Each time someone spoke, the carpenter nodded, picked up his chisel, and carved the plow over and over.

The sun climbed slowly to the top of the sky. Morning passed, then noon. The sound of chisel and plane still rang out by the road, but it came less and less often. The shavings on the ground piled higher.

Late in the afternoon, the last passerby stopped to look. He said nothing. He only looked. Then he walked quietly away, without a word.

The carpenter raised his head and looked too. On the ground, shavings lay white all around him. In his hands was a tiny scrap of wood, nearly the size of a finger. The big, hard log, enough to make a plow worth selling, had turned into a heap of shavings on the road.

There was not enough left to carve a plow. Not enough left to make anything useful.

The carpenter sat there with the tiny scrap in both hands, looking at the shavings around him. A day's work, lost. A good log, lost.

The wind blew along the roadside and swept the light shavings away. Only his two empty hands were left.