Buddhist thinking has a nice way of capturing the essential virtues that come with awakening. Called the Brahma Vihara's, these are kindness, compassion, generosity, and equanimity. Each has a distant and a near enemy. For example, the distant enemy of compassion is cruelty whereas the near enemy is pity. As one progresses along the path, the path itself transforms cruelty to pity with its unnecessary distance and then to compassion, the wish for all beings to be free from suffering without any need to for the self to defend or to fix things. It seems to me that the distant enemy of humility is bullying: the desire to humiliate another being for the sake of power. The near enemy of humility is niceness, the facsimile of humility. As with compassion, humility can sometimes be fierce, but it takes great wisdom to exercise fierceness as anger denies its essential humility.  Identity formation encompasses dominance hierarchies of one sort or another.  I've lost a lot of sleep sitting inside the processes of inquiry that lead eventually to surrender of a prop for the personality with the consequent arising of unforced humility.  A.H. Almass in the Diamond Heart tradition has said that the task of a human life is the marriage of love and power within wisdom, a nice way to look at humility. 

Looking to humility requires the ability to steady the gaze, the gift of Zen practice. Speaking of learning in school, Simone Weill puts it this way: "There is a way of giving our attention to the data of a problem ... without trying to find the solution" and "a way of writing, when we are writing, for the right word to come of itself at the end of our pen, while we merely reject all inadequate words." Here she looks fixing the gaze as giving birth to "the virtue of humility . . . a far more precious treasure than all academic progress," which we develop by fixing "the gaze, not only of our eyes but of our souls, upon a school exercise in which we have failed through sheer stupidity," whereupon "a sense of our mediocrity is borne in upon us with irresistible evidence. No knowledge is more to be desired."  Brings to mind Dogen's view of awakening as delusion within enlightment as the best we can hope for and as a never ending process of opening up to the truth.

I am grateful for the year I spent contemplating the crucifixion perhaps the ultimate act of fierce humility. Christ entered into conflict standing for love and in this simplicity lay the resurrection. In watching today's political struggles, it is sometimes hard to find humility in the midst of self-righteous and self-justifying (they are the same thing) anger. Some on the right seem given to bullying and some on the left have a hard time with fierceness. We humans are young in the world, but as Martin Luther King says "The arc of history always bends toward justice." In standing for love--the essence of the Quaker peace testimony--we become fierce pointers toward a wiser future. As George Fox the founder of Quakerism says: "As every one hath received Christ Jesus the Lord, so walk in him in the humility which he teaches: and shun the occasions of strife, vain janglings, and disputings with men of corrupt minds, who are destitute of the truth; for the truth is peaceable, the gospel is a peaceable habitation in the power of God; his wisdom is peaceable and gentle, and his kingdom stands in peace."  Fox's words echo the Buddha in the Dhammapada, "From preference arises sorrow, from preference arises fear, but he who is freed from preference has no sorrow and certainly no fear."  And later, Dogen, the founder of the Soto Zen school said in the Fukanzazengi:  "If you show the slightest preference or the slightest antipathy, the mind becomes lost in confusion."  True humility is just one manifestation of wisdom it would seem.