謙讓

Humbly Yielding

䷎

謙 (ㄑㄧㄢ), "Humbling"

《易經》第十五卦

The 謙 hexagram is made up of the trigrams ☶ 艮 "Bound"、山、mountain and ☷ 坤.

The mountain is the youngest son of the Creative, the representative of heaven and earth. It dispenses the blessings of heaven, the clouds and rain that gather round its summit, and thereafter shines forth radiant with heavenly light. This shows what modesty is and how it functions with great and virtuous men. 坤, the earth, stands above. Lowliness is a quality of the earth: this is the very reason why it appears in this hexagram as exalted, by being placed above the mountain. This shows how modesty functions in lowly, simple people: they are lifted up by it.

The sequence:

He who possesses something great must not make it too full;

hence there follows the hexagram of Modesty.

Miscellaneous notes:

Things are easy for the modest person.

The movement of both primary trigrams is downward, but the sinking tendency of the upper trigram is stronger than that of the lower, and in this way the connection between the two remains assured. The lower nuclear trigram sinks, while the upper rises.

ן דָּוִד ‎יְהוֹנָתָן‎ 

David (דָּוִד‎, Davīd, Tiberian: Dāwīḏ) a young shepherd and harpist who gains fame by slaying the giant גלית‎, GLYT (from 𐤥𐤠𐤩𐤥𐤤𐤯𐤤𐤮. The name Walweteś meant "lion-ness" i.e. the state of being a lion) Goliath, a champion of the Philistines in southern Canaan (𐤊𐤍𐤏𐤍–Kenāʿn; Hebrew: כְּנַעַן–Kənáʿan, in pausa כְּנָעַן–Kənāʿan; Biblical Greek: Χανααν–Khanaan; Arabic: كَنْعَانُ–Kan‘ān). David becomes a favourite of the first king of united Israel, Saul, and forges a close friendship with Jonathan, one of the sons of שָׁאוּל‎, Šāʾūl Σαούλ; transl. "asked/prayed for". That Jonathan (יְהוֹנָתָן‎ Yəhōnāṯān or יוֹנָתָן‎ Yōnāṯān; "Yahweh has gifted") a man of great strength and swiftness (2 Samuel 1:23) that excelled in archery (1 Samuel 20:20, 2 Samuel 1:22) and slinging (1 Chronicles 12:2) was the one who yielded the Throne to David and is venerated as a saint by the Roman Catholic Church with a feast day on 29 December.

Arabian Wanderer, Jesse Jones

A man walked down an empty street in the quiet, cold early January dusk.

He looked up at the thin, starved, yellow crescent moon; at the far, indifferent blue stars. In that icy twilight, the only warmth and rumour of life were coming from within the small, pretty, affluent houses and apartments on either side of the street.

A street which seemed — to the man — more like a dark corridor with bolted doors down which he was forced to pass alone, like a ghost.

His sense of loss and absence was heightened by the fact that figures inside the houses were not standing at the windows. Their flushed faces were not turned in his direction so that he could even approach, peer into the blazing squares of windows and observe them in front of flashing screens or sitting in a talk at kitchen tables.

And some smiled at each other, but others were by themselves, looking anxious or restless, tired and bored.

“But they are real people with shape and form”, he thought.

“None of them is alone and forced to wander as I am. None of them is compelled to walk down and through this dark, empty corridor with no end."

Inside of the mental toolbox exists a fictional, assumed personal identity that is called ‘me’ (a relative self) — composed of personal fears, frustrations, limitations, desires, images, opinions, social roles, achievements, beliefs, memories, emotions and past conditioning that one holds to be true about her/his self — precisely the one who ought to yield but refuse to do so.

Outside of that mental box lies a boundary by which the vastness of the eternal, Universal Self (inside the Quantum Field) dissolves. This is who and what I am, at the purest level — The only True Home.

Constantly the marvellous tree of बोधिचित्त bodhicitta

Yields fruit and, undiminished, grows forevermore.

– शांतिदेव बोधिकार्यावतार, अध्याय 1, श्लोक 12 

शान्तिदेव, ཞི་བ་ལྷ།, 寂天, Śāntideva, བྱང་ཆུབ་སེམས་དཔའི་སྤྱོད་པ་ལ་འཇུག་པ། 入菩薩行論 Bodhicaryāvatāra or “Way of the Bodhisattva” (A Guide to the Bodhisattva's Way of Life), Chapter 1, verse 12. 

12. All other virtues are like the plantain tree:

They bear their fruit, and then they are no more.

Yet constantly the marvellous tree of bodhicitta

Yields fruit and, undiminished, grows forevermore.