(Clearwisdom.net) My cultivation status had recently become quite poor. I often found myself full of complaints, and I had conflicts with the practitioners around me. I also encountered obstacles when I did Dafa work, which made me more upset and even pessimistic. Right after an argument with a fellow practitioner at home the other night, my husband (also a practitioner) said bad words to me until midnight. Being mentally exhausted, I decided to look within, yet he went on and on.
The next day I was very weak. I managed to print copies of the Minghui Weekly from noon until night, and I felt only a little better afterward. During the following days, I felt sluggish and lethargic. I had seldom run into this kind of situation since I started practicing. Needless to say, I was worried. I spoke to a fellow practitioner whom I trusted, and my condition improved a little. However, when we communicated the next day, she criticized me, and I didn't feel well in my heart. What she said was completely off what I thought was the case, and her criticism was far from the truth. In my eyes, she completely lacked a heart of compassion, and she was aloof while lecturing me. I thought about it for a long time, until it suddenly dawned upon me--wasn't she a mirror of me?
My recent deeds and words leaped before my eyes. For example, I had talked endlessly and made unwarranted criticisms of an older practitioner. I lectured her with an aloof tone, and failed to put myself in her shoes to understand her difficulties. My lack of kindness not only hurt her, but also contributed to her resistance to heeding the actual content of my words, regardless of whether they were right or wrong. The problem lay in the fact that my heart wasn't righteous. In another case, I had secretly picked on a fellow practitioner whom I partnered with on a project. I complained about her not spending enough time studying the Fa or sending forth righteous thoughts, and about her not cultivating well and not being smart enough... Yet she took no offense to what I said at all. In order to carry on our work, she not only tolerated my shortcomings, but also frequently worked with me on some projects.
I, on the other hand, had an inflated sense of self-importance because of the increasing number of projects I had independently taken on over the past year. Little by little, I began ignoring my project partners. My competence in carrying out Fa-related activities led to my becoming more arrogant and conceited, and my tendency to lecture others grew. The roots of these characteristics were my attachments to reputation and gain, which I had failed to cultivate away over time. Now that I think about it, how scary it was! I was already on the edge of a cliff, yet I continued picking on the practitioner who coordinated projects with me. Perhaps she served as a mirror only during my presence. Perhaps in reality she had already improved in those areas that were amplified by me. My husband's harsh comments started ringing in my ears again, "As a matter of fact, all those weaknesses you spotted in them can be found in you." I finally understood why my symptoms of myocarditis, which were cured after I initially started practicing, had returned. Although I was clear on the evil-imposed-persecution via sickness karma and I wasn't afraid of it, I failed to do well in my cultivation and to eliminate my attachments. The evil forces thus exploited my gaps. When I realized the issue, the myocarditis symptoms instantly disappeared.
I continued looking within to search for the root cause. My fundamental problem was a lack of compassion and kindness, which caused me to have unrighteous thoughts and actions. Master said,
"You should always be benevolent and kind to others, and consider others when doing anything. Whenever you encounter a problem, you should first consider whether others can put up with this matter or if it will hurt anyone. In doing so, there will not be any problems. Therefore in cultivation practice you should follow a higher and higher standard for yourself." ("Lecture Four" in Zhuan Falun)
Yet I failed to do what Master said. My selfish notions let me slip into being self-centered. For example, I liked to select practitioners who cultivated well to work with on projects, because I felt that it was safe and reliable to partner with them. For those whose cultivation states I viewed as "unstable," I was unwilling to be partners with them. Instead of helping them by providing constructive feedback, I'd even sometimes say things that hurt their feelings. From the Fa Master taught us, I enlightened that we should treat fellow practitioners, especially during tribulations, with a heart full of compassion and kindness. Take me, for instance. When others accused me while I was going through a tribulation, I felt pessimistic and discouraged. I wished so much that my fellow practitioners would instead offer me encouragement and comfort. The same also applies to others experiencing tribulations.. Don't they need encouragement and comforting? Did they need accusations?
I have personally experienced that compassion is associated with positive power and energy. Likewise, the negative impact of accusations and lecturing doesn't just hurt someone's feeling at a superficial level, but the matters behind it are also bad, and push the person in the opposite direction. In actuality, after years of cultivation, there are very few practitioners who don't have a clear understanding of the Fa. Most problems we encounter might be caused by the fact that we are not strict with ourselves, or because we still hold onto the attachment to comfort, which leads to our lingering cultivation state of "being enlightened, but unable to follow through." Lecturing someone from our own understandings of the Fa has far less effect than some simple, yet kind, encouragement. I once heard a story that a practitioner (A) planned to "provide guidance" to Practitioner B, who had been struggling with sickness karma for a long time. As soon as A arrived, B started talking. Practitioner A was about to lose her patience and was going to offer "guidance" right away, when she suddenly recognized her unrighteous thoughts and decided to continue listening. Her silent listening went on for two hours. In the end, all of B's "sickness" symptoms miraculously disappeared (although this doesn't happen in all cases).
There was also another older practitioner in our local area who was unable to pass the test of "sickness karma." The evil took the opportunity to impose physical persecution on her every so often. She was a little timid, with an indecisive nature, and tended to talk about her issues whenever she met with other practitioners. After multiple efforts by practitioners to "provide guidance," we were all fed up. We either would not give her an opportunity to talk during sharing times or would assign someone to "help" her. She was told that there were many things she didn't do right, or well, and that she didn't know how to cultivate, or perhaps she had reached her predefined age limit... The impact of our words and deeds was hard for her to endure. Her mind and thoughts moved further away from righteousness, and her complaints about us escalated. Eventually she went to the hospital. Although it was unfair to hold us all responsible for the outcome, if we could have treated her with hearts full of compassion and kindness, the story may have been different. Our compassion would have generated a huge amount of positive energy that might have pushed her to overcome the test once and for all.
A memory of her helping me out five or six years ago just came to my mind. At that time I was frustrated by my constant failures to remove my attachment to lust. She came to see me, but we didn't touch the topic and only talked about other things. Yet I instantly found my attachment fading away and felt relieved. In fact she didn't have much attachment to fear and was fairly single-minded. Her only problem was the inability to pass the sickness karma test.
When I didn't cooperate well when partnering with fellow practitioners, the problem stemmed from my lack of compassion, my inability to put myself in someone else's shoes, and my failure to remove my attachment to competition. Why did they treat me that way? Because I didn't do well myself. Because there were still bad substances left in my own dimension, I couldn't reach the level of "the Buddha-light illuminates everywhere and rectifies all abnormalities." ("Lecture Three" from Zhuan Falun) I was continuously looking outward. My behavior was far from that of a true practitioner!
My astounding finding made me realize that despite so many years of cultivation, I still lacked compassion. I therefore wrote this paper to remind myself that I should never lack a heart of compassion when interacting with fellow practitioners and sentient beings.
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