The gentleman was humble.
Long ago, Confucius said:
"It is not easy to be poor and yet resent neither Heaven nor one's fellow man. But it is harder still to possess much and not grow arrogant."
We are prone to think this way: when want presses too hard upon us, the weight becomes more than we can bear and we lay the blame on everyone else; and when we are rich, we tell ourselves it all came about by our own ability.
Humility is a great power. There is no weapon greater than humility.
The footsteps of the poor grow ever heavier, and often they come to resent Heaven and fault their neighbors. The rich, meanwhile, though the burden of life sits lightly upon them, slip into arrogance, trusting only in their own gifts and growing haughty.
Within this yoke of life, humility — that noble virtue — shines all the brighter.
Like a gentle ripple, humility quietly soaks into the human heart, bringing a subtle balance among people. The heart of the arrogant is rough and restless as high waves; the heart of the humble is calm and deep as a still lake.
Such humility is by no means weakness. It is, rather, strength — a great power.
—
I was born on the outskirts of Seoul, in Opo, in Gwangju, Gyeonggi Province. Today the new city of Bundang has risen there and the region has prospered, but in my childhood it was a remote backwater where even electricity had not yet arrived, and life was hard.
—
At some point, outsiders began to move in. Three or four families arrived. Among them was a Mr. Kim from Seoul, who took a small house for a time and passed his days tending a vegetable patch. We called him "the mister from Seoul" and followed him everywhere.
He always wore a bright smile and treated us with warmth. And he served the village elders well. The grown-ups praised him too, calling him "a poor young man with a good heart."
He even taught us our lessons in the evenings, in his own room. We children, who had never cared for studying, found it more delightful to learn there than at school.
As I recall, he stayed some three or four months. No one knew why he had come to live among us.
—
Only later did I learn that he was the son of the head of one of Korea's foremost business empires, and a graduate of S University's law school — the school so many long to enter. He had come, they said, to rest and recover for a while.
And yet — how could he have been so humble?
By now, might he not have become the chairman of some great conglomerate himself?
—
Even the strongest man under heaven comes to kneel before a humble one. For humility carries an inner strength that does not depend on visible force alone. It is a power beyond all telling — an intangible influence that draws people in.
The humble person, though nothing shows on the surface, earns the respect and love of others, and by that unseen influence quietly transforms the world around him.
Humility also awakens us to this: even amid abundance, abundance does not determine a person's worth. Rich or poor alike, it is when we live humbly, grateful for what we have, that we discover true happiness.
Thus humility is a weapon that purifies the human heart and makes our world more peaceful and more abundant.
To live without resenting Heaven and without blaming others, we must draw near to life with a humble heart, thankful for our very being and for all that we hold. Only then shall we discover the true worth of living, and build a world in which we can understand and love one another.
Sources
Every factual claim above is traceable. We do not translate articles — we gather facts from multiple outlets and write them ourselves.
- 천하장사조차도 무릎 꿇게 하는 S대 법대 아저씨의 겸손 — 청람서루 · Kim Wang-sik
