Humility keeps us in check. It keeps us guarded. Humility for me ties in very closely to Moral Shame and Moral Dread.
We will be humble so we do build a big ego because if we build up a big ego we have lost our moral shame and moral dread, and we get caught up with the eight worldly dhammas. Humility is a great guarding agent, in the same sense moral shame and moral dread guard us, as the two terms are called the "Two Virtues that protect the world."
So when you look at the Buddha statue and you try to remember who the Buddha was and you do a bow and put your head down, you're humbling yourself. But the physical action is only a physical action, we have to do it inside our mind and hearts. We have to truly remember we are not anywhere near to what he did, who he was, that we have more work to do. We need to be humble in that way.
We need that humility, in the sense of comparing yourself and your practice to people who have a more developed practice, maybe your teachers. Feeling humble knowing you aren't there yet. Or even comparing your average daily wisdom with some older people whom you know, some nice older people, even your parents sometimes. It is good to be humble when in conversation with them and encountering some of the wisdom that they have just due to their years of experience. So humility is a very important quality, it is not one of the Ten Paramis, but I see it very much right in there with moral shame and moral dread.
Moral shame and moral dread. It is very important to understand these two. They are called the Two Virtues that protect the world because they protect our world and in that way they protect the world around us. Moral shame looks into our past. It looks at everything we did that was not good, not wise. It keeps an understanding of it, tries to understand it, writes it down, types it into a computer file, whatever expression you want to use. It's job is just to remember all the things that we did that weren't very good. It doesn't remember them so that we beat ourselves with guilt and self-hatred. Instead it tries to understand them, so we can try to avoid causing Dukkha for ourselves and others in the future. That's when moral shame takes all this information and hands it over to moral dread. Dread is another word for fear. Moral dread is a wise fear, it doesn't want to do the same mistake so that we cause Dukkha for ourselves and others again.