(Minghui.org) Today is a bright Sunday morning with a gentle breeze coming through the window. Sitting at the computer desk, I recalled how I felt and what I learned over the past few months. At this moment, my heart is peaceful and full of joy.
I was born into an ordinary rural family. My parents are innocent and friendly, and my brothers and sisters are kind, enthusiastic, and supportive of one another. But we were poor and life was difficult. My grandma and Dad weren’t in good health. They had to take medicine for years to relieve their pain, and hospitalization was also common. When I grew up, my father’s painful expression as he endured various illnesses, and my mother’s hard work taking care of my father, my siblings and grandparents, burned in my mind. My parents had to worry about high medical expenses as well as increasing school and living expenses.
I often thought, as a human being why do we suffer so much? Why can’t kind and good people have a good family life? Why can’t they live a peaceful life without suffering the torment of illness and poverty? As a teenager, I even thought that life was so painful that it became meaningless to live like this.
For a long time, I didn’t know much about Falun Dafa. What impressed me most was the “Tiananmen self-immolation” incident. After that incident, the mainstream media in China spread it all around the country. At that time, I regarded it as one of the major political events. I was thirteen years old and only exposed to the topics related to my school studies. My knowledge was relatively narrow. I rarely cared about political issues and had no religious preference. Thus, I felt that Falun Dafa was far away from what I knew.
Understanding Falun Dafa
In 2011, I met my current husband. We fell in love at that time. He told me that he was a Falun Dafa practitioner and so were his grandmother, father, and aunt. My first reaction was to worry about their safety, and then worry about how their life would be affected. To be honest, I was very nervous at the time. Besides worry, I was also curious about what kind of cultivation Falun Dafa was that so many people persisted in practicing regardless of their own safety.
So, from then on, I began to take the initiative to understand Falun Dafa cultivation practice. I tried to understand the principles of the practice and what it was that practitioners cultivated. I wondered what kind of people were cultivating, and how had their thoughts and behaviors changed.
In our subsequent interactions, I often heard about the three words, “Truthfulness, Compassion, Forbearance” and witnessed how my husband used them to discipline himself. He shared lessons he learned and understandings from the Fa-study group. He explained how he changed his perspective of the world and the way to handle things encountered in life. Listening to what he said, I gradually realized that Falun Dafa was not as propagandized by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) state media. There was no way Dafa could lead people to harm themselves, commit suicide, or harm other people. On the contrary, cultivation helped people do good deeds, accumulate virtue, and look inside to improve their character. I thought at the time that if everyone lived with such high standards, society would definitely become more stable and harmonious. What could be wrong with this?
Slowly, my concerns went away. Although I still worried about my husband’s safety, especially when I saw him telling the truth of Falun Dafa to people, I would urge him to be careful and cautious. I feared that he could be reported to the police by an unreasonable person. But I understood his motivation to cultivate. I began to support him in his cultivation and regularly participated in activities with practitioners.
In January of this year, my husband suddenly asked me if I wanted to join him in the Fa-study group. At that time, I didn’t think too much about it and so I went.
My Questions Were Answered
This Fa-study group consisted of seven or eight people, all of different ages; some are around 40 to 50 years old, and some in their early 20s. Everyone read Zhuan Falun together, and then exchanged experiences and understandings. To my surprise, the first time I walked into the Fa-study group a lot of my long-standing questions about life were answered.
I read the fourth lecture of Zhuan Falun that day. It talked about loss and gain. In fact, this problem is often encountered in daily life and personal social interaction. What was described in the book gave me a completely different perspective of what I understood in the past. My former understanding of gain and loss was merely to not be greedy for small gains in terms of interest and materialism, and not to excessively argue with others. When having conflicts with people, I would not quarrel. The gains and losses mentioned in Zhuan Falun are even more profound. It says that material gains and losses are only part of it, more emphasis should be on the gains and losses having to do with moral character. This is something that I never thought about. This is mainly manifested in the abandonment of various attachments, including showing off, jealousy, competitiveness, vanity, etc. It includes giving up all kinds of desires, attachments, and ideological constraints. People’s behavior often changes with the transformation of thoughts. When these things are taken lightly or even abandoned, what would we gain?
It turns out that the bad things in a person are called karma, and the corresponding good things are called virtue. Karma and virtue not only exist in this life but are accumulated from life to life. In the past, I didn’t understand why I was born as a human being, why I always endured so much suffering, physical illness, material deprivation, debt, and so on.
After reading this chapter of Zhuan Falun, I began to understand that, in fact, all generations accumulated a lot of karma. Karma and virtue are both material and will not disappear out of thin air, but they will interact with each other. The size of the universe, the complexity of time and space, and various arrangements are not accidental. Through suffering and tribulations we are eliminating karma. Only when we have endured the pain, can the karma that has entangled us for generations be transformed into something good. By understanding these concepts, I felt that my world suddenly opened up, like a clouded sky suddenly clearing. The dark clouds in my heart were slowly dispersing.
Looking Inside
From then on, I made time to read Zhuan Falun and study with my husband every day. We discussed many common topics. Occasionally we may argue, but he always takes the initiative to look inside. Isn’t this an opportunity for the character improvement that Master Li Hongzhi (the founder of Falun Dafa) talks about in the book?
In the past, whenever I was angry, I complained that the other party didn’t understand me and didn’t think about the problem from my standpoint. It was the other party’s fault. Since I started practicing Dafa, every time we had a conflict, my husband would actively look inward for the cause, his action also reminded me to improve my character and look inward instead of complaining. When I put this thought into action, I found that the conflict between us disappeared.
During the first month after joining the Fa-study group and reading Zhuan Falun, I developed cold symptoms and a serious problem with my voice. I could not talk for that first month. It was the most severe vocal problem I ever remembered. A month later, this symptom disappeared suddenly and I could speak normally. I also recovered from the bad cold.
This experience confused me in the beginning. Later, I heard from some veteran practitioners that this situation occurred to eliminate karma. I suddenly understood what had happened and felt so grateful to Master Li.
Learning Zhuan Falun has made me realize that after birth people will experience pain and suffering. If they want to escape the pain of reincarnation, they must embark on the path of cultivation. Under the guidance of Dafa, we will continuously improve our moral character and level of understanding of the principles of Truthfulness, Compassion, and Forbearance. And finally, we will go home and return to where we belong. This makes me more determined in cultivation.
I am grateful to the practitioners around me who have been helping me. I have shared my experiences of obtaining the Fa with others so that more and more people have a chance to read this book and know about Dafa. Let us practice Falun Dafa together, assist Master Li with Fa-rectification, attain enlightenment, and return to our true selves.
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