PureInsight | August 4, 2003
[PureInsight.org] In this solemn conference, let me represent all the faculty and students in the Washington DC Minghui School in this report to you. After Dafa practitioners in Washington DC first set up the Minghui School on January 6, 2001, Sidney, Australia, Toronto, Canada, various cities in Taiwan and Thailand followed. More schools have been set up in the past year, such as New York, New Jersey, Tokyo, Japan, and Seoul, Korea. Taiwan has applied for a "Minghui Education Association." A few weeks ago, we heard that Vancouver and Ottawa have also set up their schools in recent weeks. More are being planned around the world. So while we are so busy doing Fa-rectification work, why start a Minghui School? How could we let it play its part in the validation of Dafa? With today's opportunity, let me share our experiences here and please point out any shortcomings.
Why Do We Establish the Minghui School?
Talking about school, let's first talk about the issue of Dafa practitioners' children. Suppose a family of three are all Falun Gong practitioners, then the child is one third of the family. Undoubtedly, though the child lives in your or our homes, s/he was born for Dafa. They are young Dafa practitioners who have predestined relationship with Teacher. They are particles of Dafa not to be ignored. Having made this point clear, we should not ignore strictly disciplining them and we should not allow them to be polluted by unhealthy language and behavior. Otherwise we are unworthy of Teacher's compassion for us. While busy, we should not allow our kids to be a disturbance to us, or even disrupt the solemn atmosphere of Dafa Experience Sharing Conferences. Only by disciplining them with Truthfulness-Compassion-Tolerance can we create a good growing environment that is suitable for them. That's our duty as parents.
During the past four years, in China, Jiang Zemin's regime has been persecuting Falun Gong with all indecent means. They tried their best to deceive people; even primary school students are not spared; Outside of China, Chinese parents mostly send their kids to Chinese language school on weekends, but the vicious Jiang regime also aimed to deceive overseas Chinese children. The evil will not even spare kids. We know that in the current society everything including education has deviated from the right way. Western education encourages students to pursue fame and money, to put oneself above others. As Dafa practitioners, besides taking care of the Dafa practice of our kids, we should also transfer the right way of educating kids that we have learned from Dafa to society, so to rectify warped concepts and to leave the right way for the future. So we thought of establishing a school with Dafa practitioners as teachers, and Truthfulness–Compassion–Tolerance as guidelines, a school open to people of all races. That is how Minghui School originated.
Actually, opening a school created an easy way to contact and communicate with ordinary people and this opened another channel to clarify the truth of Dafa to people. While being attacked and persecuted, we still spend our own money to run schools and promote righteous traditional Chinese culture. This is definitely viewed by society as a positive thing. At the time when our Minghui School was founded for half a year, the Washington Post took the initiative to report with a full page that Falun Gong practitioners had established an unprecedented school. It reported why the school was established, what is taught in the school and so on. They referred to us as, "a school that teaches truth and Falun Gong practice." We knew this was Teacher encouraging us to run the school better. The "flourishing" of Minghui School is a head-on blow to the evil.
I read an article on the Minghui website; it reported that a child Dafa practitioner had to leave home because his parents were persecuted. Other practitioners told him that children Dafa practitioners outside China could go to Minghui School, he really hoped he could too. Some Dafa practitioners with their third-eye opened saw that there were Minghui schools in higher dimensional worlds. Also, I read a suggestion of a Dafa practitioner in China. He suggested that we produce a video of Minghui School as a truth verification tool. He said: "Among our truth clarification videos, I seldom see videos about Minghui schools. I thought that Minghui schools proved two points: firstly Dafa is welcomed, otherwise parents would not send their kids there; secondly, Dafa is apolitical because no parents would send their kids to accept political training from childhood. When people in China see that many pure kids are studying and practice Falun Gong in the Minghui School, their hearts will be shocked. Their doubts about Dafa will be dissolved. This kind of truth is powerful beyond their imagination."
Early this year, Teacher told us in the "Explaining the Fa During the 2003 Lantern Festival at the U.S. West Fa Conference", "The human society of the future is one without religion, and everyone will be a part of society, people will be participating in everything of that society, and perhaps the Fa-truths at this level of human beings and their inner meanings at higher levels will be integrated throughout the textbooks that students study. So in this Fa-rectification it's being made possible for man to become Gods. It's not a change at this level of human beings—it involves a systematic harmonizing and perfecting of the entire cosmic system, it's the harmonizing and perfecting of the Fa. This type of event where people persecute Gods who are here to save people won't exist again. Situations like Jesus being crucified will absolutely never be allowed to happen again. So how we walk the path of cultivation well in this place of ordinary people has become of utmost importance." These words encouraged us to solidly run the Minghui Schools. We also felt that our responsibilities were huge. No matter what difficulties we have, we will try our best to run our Minghui School in the best way, because this is a school for the future human beings.
How to Let Minghui School Play Its Role in Validating Dafa
How to run Minghui School during the Fa-rectification period? We have no models to follow, we had to create our own way. We know that as a Fa-rectification Dafa practitioner, our personal cultivation is linked to our Fa-rectification activities. Children practitioners are the same. On one side they should practice well, on the other side they need to build up their high prestige through truth clarification and the process of saving sentient beings.
Firstly, we taught non-Dafa practitioners' kids according to their cases. For the child practitioners, we emphasize their study of Dafa. Speed was not the priority; we required them to understand Dafa as much as possible. Dafa is supernormal; they will learn Chinese in the process of Fa study. But parents should cooperate in this respect. Ordinary teaching methods let kids learn a certain amount of Chinese characters before they are taught to read. Here is a good example: a four-year-old girl has gone though Zhuan Falun four times. Now no matter what page you turn to, she can read it fluently. At the beginning, her mother led her patiently to read word-by-word, sentence-by-sentence. Gradually, she turned from a lousy girl who cried in Fa-study to a lovely girl everyone likes. She now very earnestly takes part in the Fa-spreading activities of the Minghui School.
Except for Fa study and sending forth righteous thoughts, we arranged many truth clarification activities such as teaching kids to do internet chatting, write envelopes, make flyers to rescue Charles Li and wrote letters to congressmen or to the president, and the like. They work hard in doing things, they are not a burden and they are good helpers.
In the Dafa truth clarification and spreading work in the Chinese community, the Minghui School acts as a bridge. At the beginning of 2001, many Chinese groups in Washington DC did not like direct contact with Falun Gong, but they could accept our Minghui School to take part in their activities. Minghui faculty and students also do volunteer work in the community. Once over ten Chinese and western Dafa practitioners volunteered to clean weeds for a Chinese senior apartment. After the work we had lunch and chatted together with the seniors. Some seniors studied the Dafa practice right there. This simple event changed the point of view of a Chinese group leader towards us. Now he frequently appeared at our parties or gatherings, or the parties of Chinese groups to appeal to stop the persecution of Falun Gong.
For various reasons, we could not attract many kids from non-Dafa practitioner families to our school. To increase our school's influence, firstly, we arranged some activities that would be interesting to more people. Secondly, we took part in the community activities. Students not only know how to demonstrate the exercises of Falun Gong, but are also good at singing, dancing, and playing music. They also drew attention of the media and many children were reported and photographed in newspapers. When they told their true story of positive changes after they practiced "Truthfulness-Compassion-Tolerance," they would move people's hearts.
These past years, Minghui students have traveled a lot with their parents and taken part in many activities. What is worth mentioning are this and last year's Oriental Cherry Festival Parades. The Cherry Parade is one of the two big parades on Constitution Avenue. We know those are good chances to let more people to know about Dafa. Last year, the Minghui School prepared a program called "Truthfulness–Compassion–Tolerance around the World." Students wrote letters to ambassadors to introduce the Minghui School to them, tell them the school is based on Falun Dafa, that it is aimed at bringing Truthfulness–Compassion–Tolerance to people, and that no differences between age or race are made. We especially wrote down the meaning of "Truthfulness–Compassion–Tolerance," helping them to understand it.
At the same time, we asked them to supply the spelling of Truthfulness–Compassion–Tolerance in their own language so we could put it on to the banner prepared for the Oriental Cherry Parade. Within two weeks, we got scores of responses from countries all around the world. Some thanked us for including their languages in our program. One country said the three words, "Truthfulness–Compassion–Tolerance" are really beautiful! Minghui School faculty and students spent two days making a banner called "Truthfulness–Compassion–Tolerance Around the World" with the three words in different languages on it. On the parade, "Truthfulness–Compassion–Tolerance" in over 20 languages marched on the Constitution Avenue and won much praise along the way.
One shining spot in this year's parade is that students from Minghui Schools walked at the front of all non-governmental groups wearing white clothing imprinted with "Truthfulness–Compassion–Tolerance." They held lotus flowers and balloon ribbons to lead the way. The healthy lovely images of kids who are practicing "Truthfulness–Compassion–Tolerance" won much applause from the audience.
The Fa-rectification process moved quickly. When the Minghui School appears in such an eye-catching position, some fellow Dafa practitioners did not understand the issue. It left some loopholes in their cooperation. After the parade, we communicated together, but the gap in opinions was still there.
Ten days later, we heard Teacher's lecture in which Teacher said, "At present the friction that's come up among some students–you all need to pay attention–you can't allow those minor things to affect the right things that Dafa disciples are supposed to do. I'm going to tell you, no matter what kind of conflicts arise, or what kinds of situations emerge, it's bound to be that we have gaps in ourselves. And this is for sure. If there wasn't a gap nobody could exploit it. The Xinxing clashes among our students, the lack of harmony when you collaborate together–and it doesn't matter if the incident is major or minor–I'm telling you, that's definitely demons exploiting gaps." (From "Lecturing on and Explaining the Fa at the Metropolitan New York Fa Conference") What I wanted to say is: no matter how fierce other's words are, those are just tests for us. By focusing on looking inward, we should not delay Dafa work because of our different opinions. To let more fellow Dafa practitioners understand the meaning of the Minghui Schools could help us to be one body, so not to leave loopholes to the old forces.
Teacher has told us, "But today's Dafa disciples are doing something different from the cultivation ways in every other period in history, and that's because you are shouldering a greater responsibility that surpasses your personal Consummation. Saving sentient beings and validating the Fa, these far surpass your personal cultivation, they're even greater things. And that's something that the old forces can't handle correctly, and they're interfering with you. Negate them, and face all of it with the right thoughts!" (From "Explaining the Fa During the 2003 Lantern Festival at the U.S. West Fa Conference")
We hope all Minghui Schools around the world will reinforce connections with each other. No matter what difficulties and interruption there might be, we should keep powerful righteous thoughts to save more beings in a way that's acceptable to ordinary people.
