(Clearwisdom.net) Some time ago I was sharing an experience with a practitioner and I discovered that she had great admiration for those practitioners who were detained for a long time and experienced various tortures and yet were still very determined in cultivation. Her reverence for them was clearly displayed in her face and in her speech.
She thought that the practitioners with such experiences must have greater virtue than those who did not have those experiences. But I said to her that the old forces had the same thinking as hers and that that was the reason the old forces tried every means to put practitioners into prisons and torture them in the name of "establishing their mighty virtue." I asked her how come she had the same notion on this issue as the old forces. After hearing this, she suddenly realized that she was wrong.
The mission our Teacher has bestowed on us is to clarify the facts and save sentient beings. To do well the three things that Teacher tells us to do makes it possible for us establish the greatest virtue. We do not need the old forces to arrange the persecution in order to establish our mighty virtue.
Please think about it: who can establish greater virtue, the student who does the three things outside of prison or the one who suffers various tortures in prison? The answer is obvious. We should have done the three things whole-heartedly without thinking of establishing mighty virtue for ourselves. But due to the different levels that practitioners are on and the attachment of selfishness, some of them have taken this point into consideration consciously or unconsciously.
When the persecution first started, many practitioners thought that they could not establish great virtue and could not reach consummation if they did not have experiences in prison. Many practitioners were taken to prison willingly. Though currently there is no practitioner who is willing to be put into prison, many of them still think that they could have established greater virtue if they had experienced the torture but had not been "reformed" and left prison with dignity. The old forces think the same way and they might find excuses and put you into prison to "establish your mighty virtue."
May I suggest that Clearwisdom.net put an emphasis on publishing more experience sharing articles on how practitioners get rid of the attachment of fear, not going to extremes and doing the three things well on a long-term basis.
Some practitioners did not pay enough attention to Fa study and their security and they might have done a lot of things only for a short term. Soon after, however, they were put into prison. If we cannot do the three things well for the long term, we would have suffered great losses in saving sentient beings and also caused damage to ourselves.
September 21, 2005
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