(Minghui.org) My mother was imprisoned for practicing Falun Dafa. After she was released, she went to her workplace to get the pension she hadn’t received while she was incarcerated. She was informed that half of the pension was deducted from the base amount when the verdict of her trial was announced. I felt sadness mixed with feelings of injustice and helplessness. I couldn’t accept the fact that my mother had to endure economic persecution after what she suffered in prison.

A Difficult Beginning

My mother and I wrote a letter requesting the return of the pension she hadn’t received while imprisoned. My mother, aunt, and I delivered the letter to various departments in my mother’s workplace. We also told the officers from the community, police station, and workplace who came to our home what happened and gave them the relevant paperwork. We didn’t receive a response and my mother continued to receive pension payments of only 2,000 yuan a month.

This occurred not long after my mother was released. At the time my cultivation state wasn’t that good. I had no idea how to follow up on the matter and just let it drop. My mother and I felt tired after doing even a little bit of Dafa work. We decided to focus on studying the Fa. Looking back, this laid a foundation for us to get the pension later. We studied all of Master Li’s lectures and gradually felt that the bad things in our bodies and minds were removed.

Master Arranged Help

We stopped thinking about the pension and didn’t use information from articles we read about how other practitioners got their pensions back.

A practitioner who had just been released sought us out. He said the Social Security Bureau sued him when he was in prison for the pension he received, but he won the case and didn’t have to pay any money back. The Bureau then privately sent him a letter requesting he return the pension. The practitioner intended to go to court and sue the Bureau. He said my mother’s situation was similar to his and he hoped she would use legal means to get the pension she was owed.

We knew he was right but we didn’t immediately take any action. We finally woke up when we learned he hired a lawyer and successfully filed the case in court.

We didn’t know who was responsible for paying the pension. Was it the Social Security or the employer? After looking at the pension account and asking others, we finally understood the pension was paid by the Social Security Bureau after my mother retired, and her workplace had no right to withhold her money.

After figuring this out, we looked at other practitioners’ complaints and information on pension-related articles on the Minghui website. We realized that the practitioner we spoke with provided many details about how to get the pension back and that we could copy the complaint template, modify it as needed, and file a case.

Taking the First Step

After some discussion, my mother, aunt, and I decided to try to recover the pension.

First, we looked for a community aid lawyer. We decided to use this issue to tell people about Falun Dafa, and not just focus on getting the pension back. We met with the lawyer, who was very kind and provided us with a strategy: Go to the Social Security Bureau Complaints Office to appeal and go through the litigation process only if there was no reply or the answer received was not satisfactory. We also told those present about the persecution of Falun Dafa, and they all listened. After we walked downstairs, we saw two national security officers. As I wondered why they had been alerted for such trivial issue, I realized that it was a battle between good and evil, and the evil was terrified.

The three of us went to the Social Security Bureau and submitted the materials to the petition office. We went to a few departments to talk about our situation. We took the opportunity to tell the staff about Falun Dafa. Having gathered various feedback, we realized that many people thought that withholding a person’s pension during imprisonment was the right thing to do. However, the staff only showed us documents that were not legally binding. When we told the staff this, they refused to accept responsibility and told us to discuss it with my mother’s former employer.

Although some people don’t understand Falun Gong due to the propaganda from the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), they are still willing to listen to what we say. Someone told us to take the matter to court to sort out the situation. I felt we should do this. Then why, as Dafa disciples, were we afraid to go to court? My aunt started sending righteous thoughts intensively while my mother and I prepared our complaint. We decided to file the case ourselves.

Master Helped Us File the Case

The practitioner who told us how to file a complaint had a lawyer file his case, but the lawyer encountered repeated setbacks for a month before his case was accepted. We remained calm and decided to go to the court near my mother’s residence to file the case. I was not very confident at first. After reading the sharing and complaint template on the Minghui website, I became more confident and organized my mother’s details using the template. I felt that anyone who read the complaint would understand that it’s illegal to withhold the pension.

We took the complaint to the court. It was a Friday, and there were a lot of people. My aunt and I did not bring our IDs, so we weren’t allowed to enter. The officer at the counter read my mother’s complaint and told her to add pension details from the last six months and come back on Monday.

We went to the bank and got a printout of the recent payment details. My mother told the bank officer the reason for printing the details, and he helped us. We also photocopied my mother’s retirement certificate and ID card. When we went to the court on Monday, the three of us had our IDs and could enter. The officer at the counter said we passed the preliminary review and told us to wait for an update that should arrive in seven working days. We would be contacted once the case was filed.

When we walked out of the court, the temperature had dropped 10 degrees, and the wind blew harshly. We felt that the evil in another dimension was trying to stop us. Since the day we started working on the case, the three of us had diarrhea whenever we had to go to court. Fortunately, Master arranged for public restrooms for us on the way to court.

We thought it would take three or four days for the court to call us, but we received a call the next day informing us to go and fill in a form and pay a 50-yuan fee. We were happy that the case had been filed. The next step would be the court session, where we would have a place to have our voices heard.

The law in the human dimension should be for punishing evildoers and promoting goodness, but instead its used to persecute Falun Dafa practitioners. When practitioners use the law, and, in the process, rectify it, the law can truly play its role. When I understood this, I was no longer afraid of the court or confused as to whether there were problems with the law itself or if the persecution had defiled the law, resulted in people no longer believing in the law and justice in the world.

Seizing the Opportunity to Tell People About Falun Dafa

When the case was filed, we started looking for a lawyer and used this opportunity to tell people about Falun Dafa. However, finding a lawyer took more work than filing the case. Many people were unwilling to take our case, and we couldn’t find anyone to help. During the process, we got a lot of information that was helpful for us in finding a lawyer, and at the same time, we talked with people about Falun Dafa.

What I remember most clearly was what happened while my mother was filling out a form the court had requested. I was sitting next to her, watching her and helping her to complete it. A couple sitting next to me mistook me for a court employee. The man stood next to me with a smile on his face and timidly asked, “Hello, could you help us fill out this form?” I said, “Please wait a moment while I fill it out for my mother first.” The man was even more embarrassed and said, “I thought you worked here.”

After my mother submitted the form, I came back to ask the couple if they needed any help. They quickly asked me to sit down and kept saying, “You’re a good person.” While I showed them how to fill out the form, my mother and my aunt told them about Falun Dafa and helped them quit their CCP memberships. The couple was very happy. The wife came to court to file a complaint because a delayed diagnosis by the medical institution allowed her cancer to spread. We wrote down the nine-character mantra (Falun Dafa is good, Truthfulness-Compassion-Forbearance is good) and asked her to recite it. They thanked me and said they would call a taxi for us and treat us to a meal. We thanked them but declined their offer.

We went to a high-end law firm and had to register before entering the building. After we went to the floor with the law offices, the person at the front desk would not let us in. We were told we had to pay 600 yuan to consult a lawyer. My mother told the front desk why she wanted to see a lawyer and about the persecution of Falun Dafa. Several women at the front desk expressed sympathy but said that they had to follow the rules.

As we were turned to go to the elevator, I saw a lawyer waiting for the elevator. I thought, “Master has arranged this for us.” In the elevator, I asked him, “Are you a lawyer?” He said yes, and we quickly told him about our case. He took a photo of our complaint with his mobile phone and said he would contact us after reading it.

He called us within two days, and we made an appointment to meet with him. With his help we went directly to his office without paying the usual consulting fee. The man found another lawyer who was willing to take the case. At the same time, we also told them about Falun Dafa and the persecution. He told us the fees and told us to think about it. We also went to another prominent law firm and met a very good lawyer who listened to us talk about Falun Dafa and gave us some good advice about our case.

Meeting with the two good lawyers changed my previous inferiority complex. After being persecuted, I always had some lingering feelings about being targeted. In the process of getting the pension back, it seems like we are begging for sympathy and asking people to help. Thus, I always felt pessimistic about going to the larger and more well-known law firms. I thought it might be better to go to a small and unknown firm.

However, the lawyers in the small law firms either didn’t dare take the case, or were rambling, unprofessional, and not very thorough. The lawyers in the big law firms were highly professional, and they gave positive feedback after listening to our story. I realized it’s wrong to position oneself as vulnerable after being persecuted. As Dafa disciples, how could we position ourselves this way? How can I save people if I can’t even stand straight or hold my head high when I speak with them?

The Strongest Team

During the process of going to court and finding a lawyer, I realized that no one works alone. At the court, the judge said that they were a team. In the law firm, everyone worked as a team. I thought to myself that we were a team, too: my mother, my aunt, and myself. Actually, our team included practitioners on Minghui and the Justice Forum who gave us a lot of assistance. Our questions on the law were all answered by practitioners. The answers were professional and filled with righteous thinking.

We truly felt unprecedented strength because it was not just the three of us who were doing this; many, many fellow practitioners were silently cooperating with us. We were so honored to have help from practitioners from all over the world. There are so many elites among practitioners. At that time, we were very confident and not afraid of any difficulties because we knew we had a strong team behind us.

Positive Effects From Doing the Exercises More Often

During the two months that we went to social security, the courts, law firms, and other places, I felt like I had the wind in my steps, and I could travel a thousand miles a day. This was the effect of my mother and I doing the exercises every morning and night, including doing the second exercise for an hour each time. Our schedule was very tight, so we had little time to sleep. Nevertheless, we had endless energy.

No matter how great the divine powers of Dafa disciples are in other dimensions, in this world, we need the human body to do things. Sleepiness, fatigue, and illness may delay us from doing what we should do. But by doing the exercises twice a day, I felt every part of my body had become divine. When faced with a sudden problem, my mind was clear, and my thinking was agile. I came up with a response plan in a short time, but the idea was not from my brain—I felt I had received help from the divine.

Helping Practitioners Paves the Way for Yourself

The practitioner mentioned above hired a lawyer to file his case in court. He also discussed this with us and we exchanged ideas. We accompanied him to meet his lawyer, and gave the lawyer legal materials and opinions, and told the lawyer about Falun Dafa. Before his trial, we also read the materials submitted by the Social Security Bureau with this lawyer and helped compose his response to the lawsuit.

When his trial started, we were in the courtroom. When the first-instance judgment was given, the result could have been better. We found a lawyer and appealed the judgment. On the surface, it looked like we were helping a fellow practitioner, but in fact, everything we did was paving the way for our own case. My mother said, “Master is using this opportunity to let us rehearse in advance.”

During this process, we also had disagreements due to our different viewpoints. The practitioner was hesitant to mention Falun Dafa. He just wanted to sue for the pension. But I felt that it would be meaningless for a Dafa disciple to go after the pension if he didn’t mention Dafa. In the end, he talked about Dafa.

However, this exchange exposed my self-righteousness, intolerance toward fellow practitioners, and my harshly criticizing others. Recalling when I was just released from prison, I remember it took me a long time of studying the Fa and cultivating before I could work on getting the pension fund back for my mother. The practitioner worked on his case right after he was released from prison. In comparison, my cultivation is still far behind. Since Master arranged for the practitioner to work with us on this matter, if we see any shortcomings, we needed to resolve them. We should all work hard to do this better instead of emphasizing who is right or wrong. This is what a Dafa disciple should do.

Rectify Hidden Notions and Cultivate Yourself Well

From the very beginning, we had some concerns about suing the Social Security Bureau. Would we be subject to retaliation? At that time, my mother still received 2,000 yuan pension a month. Would she lose that money after this lawsuit? This thought, although weak, occasionally popped up in my mind. Sure enough, the Social Security Bureau notified us that it would stop my mother’s pension, saying that the previous payments were made on behalf of her former employer, and that those who were sentenced to prison did not receive pensions. They told us to contact her former employer in the future. However, my mother continued to receive pension that month. We learned from the bank that the payee had changed from the Social Security Bureau to her former employer that month, and the credited name was still “pension.” If the Bureau hadn’t mentioned it, we wouldn’t have known that my mother’s pension was stopped the month we filed the case.

When we went to the court to change our lawsuit request, the judge asked us to add a third party to our case—my mother’s former employer. This addition made me even more uneasy: Would the workplace retaliate?

Master said:

“... it was a demon who came knocking at your door, thanks to your human attachments?” (“Be Vigilant,” The Essentials of Diligent Progress III)

Sure enough, the former employer stopped paying her pension. Thus, my mother didn’t receive any pension.

Then COVID broke out in Wuhan. Many provinces and cities across the country were closed off, including ours. Because of the pandemic, we didn’t know when our case would be heard.

My mother and I calmed down and studied the Fa. My mother copied out the Fa by hand while I memorized Zhuan Falun for a second time.

The pension money is my mother’s private property. Both the former employer and the Bureau violated my mother’s legal rights and interests. When they were held accountable, they retaliated. From the perspective of modern people, it would be better not to sue so my mother would continue to receive 2,000 yuan a month.

Through studying the Fa, we found that our problem was we were using the lowered moral standard to measure good and bad. It wasn’t wrong for my mother and I to sue the Social Security Bureau. The reason we felt uneasy in our hearts, even if we knew we were right, was because we feared we would experience retaliation. We accepted in our hearts that in a society controlled by the Party, upholding justice and maintaining righteousness may not necessarily solve the problem and may instead cause unexpected events.

When we can’t let go of our selfish interests, the fear of our interests being damaged far exceeds our insistence on justice. When our interests are affected, we begin to doubt if our efforts will work. To put it in a broader sense, we were measuring whether something should be done based on whether it would hurt us. There’s only one standard to measure right and wrong, good and bad—the characteristics of the universe: Truthfulness, Compassion, and Forbearance.

After we understood this, my mother and I were no longer worried or afraid. We stopped thinking about whether or not we would receive the pension. We realized it was just an illusion the old forces used to intimidate us.

My mother’s pension was suspended for two months. After the news spread, and with the joint efforts of fellow practitioners at home and abroad, her former employer paid my mother for the two months. After that, they continued to pay my mother 2,000 yuan on time every month.

Only By Persevering Can There Be Hope

After the pandemic lockdowns were lifted, my mother’s pension case was scheduled for trial. However, the Social Security Bureau objected to the jurisdiction, and the court had to transfer our case to another court. It was not until then that the judge said, “I don’t know how your case was filed. Under normal circumstances, it would not be accepted.” We knew it was because Master helped us.

After the case was transferred, we waited for a long time before a trial date was set. Before the trial, the Social Security Bureau put pressure on the judge, who then asked us to withdraw the lawsuit or reduce our litigation request if we wanted to proceed. If we didn’t follow the judge’s orders, we felt that we would not be allowed to go to court, and the lawsuit would be dismissed. At the same time, the judge said that modifying the complaint would be in our favor and asked us to split the complaint into three parts according to the time period: withholding (pension) during the incarceration, reduced payment after release from prison, and stopping social security after we sued. The judge also said that if we modified the case according to her instructions, we may win the latter two cases.

After gathering various legal opinions, we decided not to split our case into three separate cases. When we and our lawyer told the judge our decision, the judge became very angry. Our lawyer performed a risk analysis: if we did not split the suit according to the judge’s requirements, it’s possible that the case would be dismissed for procedural violations (namely, the complaint does not meet the judge’s wishes). If we split the lawsuit into parts, at least one of them would be heard in court.

My mother and I decided not to withdraw. My mother said, “I don’t care whether the case get argued or not. Today, I will use my case to define how many administrative actions there are. It’s worth it!” The judge angrily left the room.

On the way back from the courthouse, the lawyer said that if several cases are filed, the lawyer’s fees would go up because there is a fee for each case. I told him that we want to make the best use of the lawyer’s fee and would go to court no matter what. If we don’t even go to court, the money would be wasted. As cultivators, the path we chose was to persevere. Although our case seemed hopeless, our hope lay in the process of perseverance.

Few people thought my mother and I would win the case. However, things took a positive turn. A few days later, I contacted the judge to get the defense and evidence from the Social Security Bureau. When we met, she was a different person. She didn’t mention anything about the previous incident, as if it hadn’t happened, and she was smiling. From her words, I could tell that the trial would be held as scheduled according to the original arrangement.

Before that, out of my desire for profit, I considered the judge’s instruction to refile the case as three cases. This way we might still win and get the money back. However, my mother said, “Why did we do this in the first place? Was it for the money? Have we forgotten our original intention and become obsessed with how to be calculating and get some money?” She was right. We did this as a way to tell people about Falun Dafa and rectify ourselves, not to get more money.

The trial was postponed, and a trial date is yet to be determined. However, we felt calm. Through continuous Fa study, I felt I was improving and felt the joy of improving. By studying the Fa and looking within, I felt that only by rectifying myself would I change the environment around me, and all the things that happened were directed at the human thoughts that I hadn’t gotten rid of.

Everything That Happens Is Good

When I first heard my mother’s pension was withheld, I had mixed feelings. I felt helpless and wondered why the persecution hadn’t ended. But after going through this process with my mother, I was very grateful for the opportunity to improve. Everything I encounter on the path of cultivation is good, even if it was difficult to accept at the time. But by truly acting like a Dafa disciple, I used this incident to identify my human thoughts and attachments, tell people about Dafa, and truly cultivate and rectify myself.

I’ve recently heard practitioners in some areas having their pensions taken back or stopped. This is of course a manifestation of the evil; I think that as Dafa disciples, if we can make good use of this incident and turn it into an opportunity to talk about Dafa to a wider range of people and improve ourselves, it’s a good opportunity to clarify the truth.

In fact, every step I took in this process is inseparable from Master’s protection and arrangements. Thank you, Master. Thank you to all the practitioners who silently supported us.