“If the water is not deep, it has no strength to carry a great boat.” The sentence appears in Zhuangzi's “Free and Easy Wandering”. The Chinese Text Project reads “to carry a great boat”; some transmitted versions add a pronoun before “carry”. The next lines say that a cupful of water in a hollow can carry a blade of grass, but a cup placed there becomes grounded, because the water is shallow and the vessel large.
Zhuangzi then uses deep wind carrying the great bird's wings to show that the scale of an action must match its supporting conditions. When a goal stalls today, the first response need not be to push harder. We can also ask whether knowledge, time, institutions or cooperation are sufficient to carry it. A foundation does not guarantee arrival; it makes departure possible.
https://ctext.org/zhuangzi/enjoyment-in-untroubled-ease/zh
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