PureInsight | June 13, 2005
[PureInsight.org] Jiang Tengsheng was a man who lived in Guguan, Ji Prefecture, during the Tang Dynasty. In 626 A.D., the last year of Emperor Gao Zu's Wude Period (618-626 A.D.), he suddenly became ill. He went to Mount Meng to seek medical treatment, but it didn't work. After he returned home, he developed such severe abscesses that his fingernails and toenails fell off. He continued to suffer the illness for many years.
One night he dreamed of a Buddha statue of three feet tall carved out of a white rock. The Buddha statue said to him, "If you repair my right arm, I will have your illness disappear." When Jiang Tengsheng woke up in the morning, he suddenly remembered that in the first year of Wude Period, he had once tried to repel sparrows from a cornfield. He couldn't find anything suitable to use. So he went to a Buddhist temple in the village and tore apart a paper Buddhist scripture and tied pages from the scripture to a stick to scare away the sparrows. Someone witnessed his blasphemous act and told him, "It is a terrible sin to tear off part of a Buddhist scripture." Instead of repenting his sin, he cursed the man fiercely and went berserk. He ran back to the Buddhist temple and hit a Buddha statue carved out of a white rock with a hammer until he knocked off its right arm. It was the very Buddha statue that appeared in his dream.
He hurried to the Buddhist temple and bowed to the Buddha statue, sincerely repenting his sin. Next he hired a rock craftsman to reconstruct the Buddha statue's right arm. He hired a man to transcribe forty scrolls of Buddha scriptures, and he built a new Buddhist temple. Within a year, his strange illness disappeared without a trace. After that, the villagers started referring to the Buddha statue carved out of white rock as the "Sacred Statue."
Jiang Tengsheng met karmic retribution because of his blasphemous acts. Fortunately he repented for his sin in time and made up for his past wrongdoings. Otherwise, he might have met with even greater karmic retribution. Today the great Falun Buddha Fa (or Falun Gong) blessed China with its presence, but Jiang Zemin, out of his jealousy over its popularity, committed the most severe blasphemous acts in human history. Many people fell prey to Jiang Zemin's lies and deceit and, together, they committed terrible sins of blasphemy and persecuting cultivators of Falun Buddha Fa. Many of these sinners have met great karmic retribution, but some of them have not repented for their sins and continue their blasphemous acts. Buddhas will not always give them opportunities to repent after they repeatedly miss the given opportunities. We hope that everyone who has participated in the persecution against cultivators of Falun Buddha Fa will become clearheaded and repent and make up for their sins like Jiang Tengsheng.
Translated from: http://www.zhengjian.org/zj/articles/2004/5/3/26890.html
