The drop and the dust

When have you been humbled — by another person, by a failure, by something larger than yourself? And what was left in your hands afterward?

There is a strange relief in being made small. Not the small of shame, which crouches, but the small of proportion — the kind that arrives when you stand at the edge of an ocean, or beside a person who knows more than you, or in the wreckage of something you were sure you could control. Humility, in the wisdom literatures, is rarely the meek virtue it has become in casual English. It is something stranger and more bracing: a clear-eyed knowledge of one's size. A right relation to what is larger.

Before what is vast

The oldest forms of humility are cosmological. They begin with scale.

"Be not rash with thy mouth," says Ecclesiastes, "and let not thine heart be hasty to utter any thing before God: for God is in heaven, and thou upon earth: therefore let thy words be few."^[1] Job's questioner asks the same in sharper form: "Canst thou by searching find out God? canst thou find out the Almighty unto perfection? It is as high as heaven; what canst thou do? deeper than hell; what canst thou know?"^[2] The Qur'an puts the lesson in a single image: "walk not proudly on the earth, for thou canst not cleave the earth, neither shalt thou reach to the mountains in height."^[3] You are not tall enough, and the ground will not split for you.

Pirkei Avot is the most unflinching. "Know from where you come, and where you are going, and before whom you are destined to give an account and reckoning. From where do you come? From a putrid drop. Where are you going? To a place of dust, of worm and of maggot."^[4] It is meant to deflate, and it does. But the deflation is in service of a request — that you might "number our days, that we may apply our hearts unto wisdom."^[5] Knowing your size is the precondition for spending what you have.

What is vast, in these texts, is not always God. Sometimes it is simply what is hidden — including from yourself. The Qur'an warns of a day when "we have taken off thy veil from thee, and thy sight is becoming sharp this day,"^[6] and of another when "none of your hidden deeds shall remain hidden."^[7] Even your own interior, the texts suggest, exceeds your grasp. Someone larger sees it more clearly than you do.

Not claiming what isn't yours

If smallness is the first movement of humility, the second is restraint about ownership. The fruit of your work, these traditions keep insisting, is not entirely yours.

The Tao Te Ching returns to this almost obsessively. The Tao "produces them and does not claim them as its own; it does all, and yet does not boast of it; it presides over all, and yet does not control them."^[8] And again: "When its work is accomplished, it does not claim the name of having done it... it is through his not making himself great that he can accomplish them."^[9] Lao Tzu's instruction for the successful is almost startling in its asceticism: "When the work is done, and one's name is becoming distinguished, to withdraw into obscurity is the way of Heaven."^[10]

The rabbis of Pirkei Avot say something close, in a different idiom: "If you have learned much Torah, do not claim credit for yourself, because for such a purpose were you created."^[11] The achievement was the assignment. To take credit is a kind of category error. King David, they remind us, says it plainly: "for everything comes from You, and from Your own hand have we given you."[^canon:718f37d8-b86a-4c17-8e84-3c0503370220) The gift returned was not the giver's to begin with.

The Qur'an's prophets repeat one refrain through their entire careers: "I ask of you no reward for this, for my reward is of the Lord of the Worlds alone."^[12] The work is real; the wage is not collected here.

This is not modesty as performance. It is a particular description of what is actually happening when something good gets made. The self that says "I did this" has, on these accounts, misread the situation.

Seeing yourself clearly

Humility, in the Confucian and Buddhist registers, turns inward. It becomes mostly a problem of perception — of seeing yourself accurately rather than seeing yourself well.

"The fool who knows his foolishness, is wise at least so far," says the Dhammapada. "But a fool who thinks himself wise, he is called a fool indeed."^[13] The Tao Te Ching sharpens the same edge: "To know and yet (think) we do not know is the highest (attainment); not to know (and yet think) we do know is a disease."^[14] Confucius, in one of his most often-quoted lines, defines knowledge itself as this self-honesty: "When you know a thing, to hold that you know it; and when you do not know a thing, to allow that you do not know it;-- this is knowledge."^[15]

The opposite is not stupidity. It is what 1 John names plainly: "If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us."^[16] The Qur'an makes the same warning to the religiously confident: "Assert not then your own purity. He best knoweth who feareth him."^[17]

Confucius adds an unexpected twist. The trouble is not that others fail to see us. "I will not be afflicted at men's not knowing me," he says. "I will be afflicted that I do not know men."^[18] And again: "I am not concerned that I am not known, I seek to be worthy to be known."^[19] Humility here is not a downward gaze. It is the willingness to be unrecognized while you do the patient work of becoming recognizable for something real.

There is even, in Pirkei Avot, a description of what humility looks like in conversation: one who "does not speak before one who is greater than he in wisdom, and does not break into his fellow's speech; and is not hasty to answer... and concerning that which he has not heard, he says: I have not heard; and he acknowledges the truth."^[20] It is almost a portrait of someone simply trying to listen.

Wanting less

Then there is the humility of appetite — knowing your portion, and not wanting more than it.

The Dhammapada is direct: "Health is the greatest of gifts, contentedness the best riches; trust is the best of relationships, Nirvana the highest happiness."^[21] Even victory is suspect: "Victory breeds hatred, for the conquered is unhappy. He who has given up both victory and defeat, he, the contented, is happy."^[22] The Tao Te Ching offers its image of the model creature: "The highest excellence is like (that of) water. The excellence of water appears in its benefiting all things, and in its occupying, without striving (to the contrary), the low place which all men dislike."^[23]

The Qur'an catches a more familiar human movement — the way we keep score with whatever happens to us. "When his Lord trieth him and honoureth him and is bounteous to him, then saith he, 'My Lord honoureth me': but when he proveth him and limiteth his gifts to him, he saith, 'My Lord despiseth me.'"^[24] We read good fortune as endorsement and hardship as rebuke, and both readings are too quick. The wiser response, when the gift arrives, is Solomon's in the same book: "This is of the favour of my Lord, to try me whether I will be thankful or unthankful."^[25]

These voices do not entirely agree. The Buddhist sets victory and defeat aside together; the Qur'anic voice keeps a thankful heart turned toward the giver. But they share a suspicion of the relentless wanting that mistakes itself for living.

The low seat

Humility, finally, is a posture. You lower yourself, not because you are nothing, but because the low place is where learning happens.

"Let thy house be a house of meeting for the Sages," Pirkei Avot urges, "and sit in the very dust of their feet, and drink in their words with thirst."^[26] And: "Be of humble spirit before all men."^[27] The dust of the feet is not abasement; it is the angle from which you can hear. The same text places the bar astonishingly low — and high — for gratitude to teachers: "One who learns from his fellow one chapter, or one halakhah, or one verse, or one word, or even one letter, is obligated to treat him with honor."^[28]

The Qur'an addresses the same posture to one's aging parents: "defer humbly to them out of tenderness; and say, 'Lord, have compassion on them both, even as they reared me when I was little.'"^[29] The remembered smallness of childhood becomes a present moral posture.

And what does this lowness make of a person? Pirkei Avot answers: "the Torah clothes him in humility and reverence, and equips him to be righteous, pious, upright and trustworthy."^[30] Humility, here, is not what gets sacrificed for strength. It is what makes strength bearable to be near.

What pride does to itself

The traditions agree, finally, on one practical observation: pride is its own undoing. "Pride goeth before destruction, and an haughty spirit before a fall,"^[31] says Proverbs, and the Gita lists among the virtues of the godly "humbleness, uprightness... a mind that lightly letteth go what others prize."^[32] Its catalog of right qualities is itself a kind of slow exhalation: "an ever-tranquil heart in fortunes good and fortunes evil... loving all solitudes, and shunning noise of foolish crowds."^[33]

The Gita has a corresponding diagnosis of the self-enclosed life. The man who refuses to "help the rolling wheels of this great world, glutting his idle sense, lives a lost life, shameful and vain. Existing for himself, self-concentrated, serving self alone, no part hath he in aught."^[34] The proud man's punishment, in the end, is that he gets exactly what he wanted: himself, and nothing else.

Lao Tzu suggests an inverse, almost paradoxical movement: "the sage puts his own person last, and yet it is found in the foremost place; he treats his person as if it were foreign to him, and yet that person is preserved. Is it not because he has no personal and private ends, that therefore such ends are realised?"^[35] The self that stops grasping at itself somehow remains.

Questions for the reader

• When you were last humbled — by a person, by a failure, by something vast — what did you discover you had been overestimating? What had you been underestimating?
• Is there a piece of work in your life whose credit you have quietly been collecting? What would it feel like to set it down?
• Whose feet, today, could you sit at the dust of — and what would you have to give up in order to do it?