PureInsight | December 9, 2002
Greetings, Master Li. Greetings, fellow practitioners!
I am a practitioner in Mainland China. I am very glad to have this opportunity to share with everyone some of my recent understandings.
As cultivators, we should search inward in everything that we encounter. But when we encounter problems, we can't just search inward with a human mindset. If we do that, we would be taken advantage of and fumble around in vain. We might spend a great deal of effort and sometimes it appears that we have found the root cause of the problem. But the root cause that we find might be superficial or phony. We might start to feel overwhelmed and confused. We must remain clear-headed. In a fight between two martial art experts, many of the moves that they use are fakes and designed to draw attention away from the real blows. The old forces often use a similar approach. They do everything they can to put this matter or that matter, this notion or that thought into your head. The intention is to restrict us and confuse us. Especially at key moments, they limit us and make us look at things from our own individual small cells. As a result, we look at things from the point of view of individual cultivation or even from the human point of view, which make us unable to do what we are supposed to do. Searching inward is the most precious tool for us to elevate ourselves during cultivation and unlock our own abilities. How could it end up becoming something that confines us?
If you are a military commander who takes your soldiers into battle, you need to possess courage and wisdom. Participating in Fa-rectification is much more difficult than leading an army in battle. What we face are the evil and old forces that are invisible, intangible and do not possess even a trace of compassion. Just like when a snake is about to attack you, you must hit the part of the snake that is the most sensitive and vulnerable in order to do real damage to it. We have to approach things with the same attitude. Otherwise a lot of our efforts might result in less than the most optimum results. Fa-rectification cultivation is no small matter. If we cannot truly treat it seriously, can it do? If we can't look at things from the point of view of the Fa, if we cannot keep up with the progress of Fa-rectification, can it do?
Everyone is busy day in and day out and has worked really hard. But I have seen that some people are busy doing Dafa work not because of their correct understandings of the Fa. Instead, they are doing it because everyone else is doing it. Some people do Dafa work because they have this notion, "I have participated in Fa-rectification matters. I have contributed and endured and that is why I am so busy." They are just the kind of person that Master Li mentioned who think their diseases will be cured as long as they study the Fa and practice the exercises. It is true that Master Li said in "Touring North America to Teach the Fa," "I would think that your being a little busy and your enduring a little hardship is your Dafa disciple's mighty virtue." But some people do not look at things from the point of view of the Fa. Precisely because of this, their enduring becomes a foregone conclusion. Because their understanding is just that little bit off, their giving that is supposed to be incomparably holy becomes something else. They not only have wasted opportunities and time to do Fa-rectification, they have also brought a lot of trouble to themselves. A practitioner in North America told me with a bit of pride in his tone, "Because of participating in eliminating the evil head activities last month, many of us practitioners have lost our jobs."
But Master has said, "Just by staying unaffected, you will be able to handle all situations." (From "Lecture on the Fa at the U.S. Midwest Conference") If our human hearts truly stay unaffected, all the delusions and confusions will disappear like dust and clouds and we can see everything perfectly clear. "Just by staying unaffected, you will be able to handle all situations." If we can look at things from the point of the view of the whole picture of Fa-rectification at every moment of every day, if we look at things in the eternalness of history and eternalness of living beings, it is possible that we can easily see what "staying unaffected" truly is.
I know that a lot of practitioners have been confronted with all sorts of problems lately and don't quite know what to do. I have heard someone say that the rate for a telephone call from outside of China to China has gone up 10 times recently. On one hand, we can see that it is evil interference. We have gaps in our mind that have been taken advantage of, and we urgently need to recognize the problem and improve ourselves. On the other hand, it means that a stage of Fa-rectification and cultivation has ended. The methods that we used before do not work as well now. The progress of Fa-rectification waits for no one. It is a reminder that we need to search for new breakthroughs and should do deeper and more thorough work. It is a wake-up call. All of us practitioners both inside and outside of China can't just continue to hold onto our old understandings and old ways of doing things. What should we do then? The following are some of my personal understandings:
I have discovered that the things that I have enlightened to are all interconnected and systematic. As long as my intention is pure, a lot of things will become clear to me a little bit at a time. Of course a lot of times this will happen only after a great deal of arduous endurance and thinking. If my main consciousness does not try hard, it is the same as not having any desire to accomplish anything. I truly believe each and every one of us can achieve anything as long as we truly believe in the Fa and have enough confidence in ourselves (in other words not being limited by so many human notions). If you truly want to do something, it is very unlikely that you just cannot accomplish it. Using myself as an example, I only hold a bachelor's degree in engineering and was an average or below average student when I was in school. But through my own experience, I truly realized that as long as you have genuine and firm wishes, you can accomplish what you set out to do. Master mentioned that when high level beings talk, the words that they say are like poems. When a being is that pure, every single thought of his contains and carries everything that is beautiful as well as his power at his realm. Every word and every action of his represents the meaning of his entire life as a whole. Everything of his brings incomparable, splendid eternalness and liveliness to all sentient beings. He is using his whole life to say and do things. How could that not be like poems? Isn't that a manifestation of the Fa?
I read a few articles on Zhang Cuiying. Regardless of whether the article was long or short, I started to cry for no apparent reasons on several occasions. In an article that I read several days ago, it mentioned that someone stated that he did not want to do any bad things after looking at her paintings. Even though I do not know much about painting, I realized that Zhang Cuiying is using her entire life to validate the Fa through her paintings.
What should be the manifestation of the Fa in the human world as the Fa-rectification reaches the level of the human world? I have the following thoughts regarding science and culture of the future:
1. We must keep up with the progress of Fa-rectification. I feel that we must approach things in a carefully arranged and systematic manner. We can't do anything before it is the right time to do it. If we do that, a lot of practitioners who should have been a part of it wouldn't get a chance to do that. It might end up with a practitioner not being to save his own system on his own, resulting in his world being empty. On the other hand, we shouldn't cause delays in anything.2. I personally feel that the culture and the knowledge developed during the transitional phase will be mainly used to highlight and correct the current imperfections and new theories won't be brought out yet. A brand-new way of looking at things will be brought forth, but a brand new culture won't. That is because a lot of people will be left to conduct cultivation and it won't do if all the delusions have been broken. Another reason is that the new history won't have begun yet. So a lot of things during the transitional phase will disappear before the new history officially begins. Therefore even if something is brought forth, it can't belong to the future, but it can't be degenerated either. It is only intended for the transitional phase.
Based on the above viewpoint, it does not appear to be very difficult for us to make contributions in this area. It is just that there are a lot of different subject fields and a lot of things are involved. We should have practitioners to correct and perfect things in each major field. We should be able to accomplish this quite well. But we should be clear from the beginning to the end that we are only doing it to rectify the Fa and eliminate the evil, and we are only doing it to save sentient beings. We can't do it because we are personally interested in the subject matter or because we cannot let go of our attachments, self-interests or personal satisfaction.
3. From my experience, it is clear that we must refer to many books. It won't do if we do not refer and read these books. We must truly understand them from the ordinary person's perspective. On top of that, we must also understand them from the perspective of a cultivator. It requires us to handle ourselves well and not be confused or stirred up by them. Don't be afraid of being exposed to many muddled things. People of the past have said that to a sage, that is not muddled but a sign of being very knowledgeable in a variety of things. In order to correct something, one must truly understand it first. But the prerequisite is that we must guarantee that we can handle ourselves well. If we cannot achieve that, we would not only waste a great deal of time, but cause confusion to our own mind, which lead to unnecessary difficulties to our cultivation. But if we are already working or studying within a certain field, that is a whole different story, and the only thing that we need to do is to change our notions.
So how do I approach things? My mentality is that I definitely will be able to understand it and find its essence, and if it does not conform to the Fa, it must be wrong. In Lunyu, it says, "Everyday people will forever crawl within the boundary delimited by their own ignorance." My thinking is that only what Master has said is the truth. Then I ask myself, "Out of all the things that I have learned, what looks the most like crawling to me?" To me, that is the induction and deduction method that I had studied in high school. People use the same method to write their thesis. All the theoretical proofs and interferences are accomplished using it, and science uses it to conduct its research. All the books say that induction and deduction are good. But when viewing it from the point of the Fa, they are wrong. Then how is "conventional thinking" that Master mentioned in Lunyu reflected? It should be reflected "fundamentally" like Master said in Lunyu. Then what is fundamental? Isn't it the same thing as basic? The basic things are what we learned in elementary school, things like Pinyin (spelling or phonetic representation), Chinese characters, numbers, addition, subtraction, multiplication and division. When I study these things in depth, the above turns out to be 100% true.
In summary, do we use the Fa to judge things or do we let other things judge the Fa? In other words, do we truly believe in the Fa?
4. Many people of the world should not continue to study the erroneous contemporary science and culture anymore. But the new history has not yet begun. Nor can they change themselves. So we must guide them. The key is whether our own notions have changed or not and whether we are qualified to do this or not. I feel that we can do this without any problem. Many of us have made a lot of efforts in a variety of subject fields, such as writing novels, screenplays and songs.
5. From the experiences in articles of some practitioners, I see one problem. Some practitioners take very small steps in their cultivation and limit themselves severely both in terms of using different methods to rectify the Fa and their understandings toward cultivation.
Many people think that at the current time all we need to do is to tell people the facts behind the persecution and that Falun Dafa is good, and as long as they develop compassionate thoughts toward Dafa, that will be good enough as it will ensure them not being eliminated. I feel this type of thinking becomes from laziness and not from their own thoughts. While it is true that this is sufficient when dealing with an individual person, how could it be all we need to do? Won't we hope to do well in Fa-rectification? We definitely should be able to do better.
The only hope that I have is that we can truly do even better. I'd like to close by thanking everyone!
