Hexagram 41 Updated

 

According to the changing demands of the situation, the wise repeatedly reduce their faults and increase their benefits to all to the point that nothing remains to reduce, nothing to increase:  strength balances gentleness.  Throughout the Great Path, we use this practice to decrease our willingness to harm others for self-benefit while increasing our virtues and the ways we benefit the well-being of all. 

All the harms people cause come from going too far beyond what we need to the point of depriving others. Everyone needs to feel they belong, but the selfish do so by dominating or exploiting others.  We all need the resources necessary for life, but the selfish deprive others so that they can have more.  We need to defend ourselves, but then the powerful go beyond that to wanting to dominate and control others. 

Within the world we experience dangerous reduction when those with wealth and power benefit themselves from taking from those with less.  The disadvantaged go deeper under, and the elites go even higher.  This situation destabilizes society and brings harm to everyone. 

The path of reduction requires we understand what needs reducing and discern how our faults harm others.  We also need to guard against the dangers of excessive or insufficient reduction. By not knowing when to stop reducing, we create an imbalance, which then reactivates our selfishness and aversion. 

By their generosity and reducing the inequality of the disadvantaged, the wise become secure.  Sages curb their urges for more than sufficiency and stay close to basic needs to align with natural limits.  Through right reason, they set restrictions upon themselves. We can experience within presence the wanting without acting on them.  When we experience feelings of ill will within presence, they dissolve and allow us to return to calm and gentleness.  We attend to the call of the situation to respond in ways that benefit all, which gives enduring joy. Our appreciation and contentment grow for what we already have.

We use reduction and increase, each according to the time, as the means to move on the path.  Daily we reduce our faults and increase our virtues again and again until we have nothing more to increase or decrease, becoming wholly integrated with the design of nature.  This practice finds the middle way between yielding and strength, gentleness and firmness. At first this path seems difficult as we have yet to master our selfishness and hostility for others, but then it becomes easier as we gain confidence in living the Way of humanity.  In this way, spiritual capacities increase within reduction.

The Way of humanity calls us to willingly reduce ourselves to serve others.  However, those helped must not ask for too much and injure those who serve them.  Inconsiderate and selfish demands take the joy out of giving and service. 

People who throw themselves away in order to do the bidding of a superior or spinelessly comply diminish their own position without giving lasting benefit to the other.  Those who blindly follow orders in the name of loyalty do not know the meaning of loss and gain.  To render true service of lasting value to another, the wise serve others without relinquishing their aim to benefit all.

Reducing our faults manifests our devotion to the sacred in an essential and meaningful way.  Such an offering increases our confidence that we can persist in undoing our selfishness and ill will.  Even in harsh external conditions, we can still offer small acts of selflessness.  When decrease has reached its goal, flowering begins.