"Humble to feed oneself" is a sentence from the "Qian" hexagram in the "Book of Changes", and Yinzu often quoted this sentence. "Humble" means humility; "shepherding" means control. What is control? To control arrogance, you must control your arrogance.

The hexagram image of "Qian" has "Kun" on the top and "Gen" on the bottom. "Kun" represents the land, and "Gen" represents the mountain. There are mountains under the ground, which means that it is very connotative, restrained and not exposed. This is the meaning of the hexagram "Qian".

The ancients were very kind and understood the principle of keeping one's glory and one's deeds low. Even if you have ten points of merit, you can say it is at most three points. But things are different in today's era. Modern people may say that they have three points of merit up to ten points.

This is an era of packaging. Everyone packages themselves magnificently and has a lot of titles. When everyone talks, they always want to show off that they have this ability or that ability. Now I'm trying to find some people who take their reputation a little lightly and are a little more humble, but it's hard to find them.

A humble person is like water. Water has a characteristic that it flows toward low-lying areas. Why does it flow down? Because water has its own equality, if it flows to a low-lying place, it will eventually level out. The highest level of kindness in life is like water, kindness benefits all things without competing for it. This is called "the best is as good as water."

Water is good at being in places that people don’t want to be. This is what a Taoist is like. On the other hand, some impetuous people, people with little connotation, will immediately show off their advantages if they have some. Once you come into contact with such people often, everyone will know that they have no connotation.

The dialectic of life is often like this. The more proud you are and the more you show off how you are, the more people will look down on you; the more humble you are, the more people will praise you.

If you are humble everywhere, your personality will gradually improve and your interpersonal relationships will be better. Therefore, ascetics must "humble themselves to feed themselves."