PureInsight | February 16, 2004
[PureInsight.org] We have recently started to publish Chinese-language newspapers in our local area, but problems have haunted us from the very beginning of the process. At first, the printing house wasn't able to open the source file we had submitted. Next, they were unable to print out photographs. We had no choice but to reprocess all photographs and remake the source file for the printing.
By the time the newspapers were printed, we were already late for distribution. To avoid the newspaper being wasted, we had to ask other practitioners to help distribute newspapers in a hurry. Thus we have seemingly wasted many fellow practitioners' precious time. Moreover, even the quality of the newspapers was less than satisfactory. The color of the newsprint appeared dull and gloomily dark. One practitioner whose Celestial Eye is open said that the counterparts of these newspapers in another dimension were mixed with impure matter. It was clear to us the root cause of the problems was that those of us who participated in the production of these newspapers did the work with an impure mind. At the same time, we also realized that his process is an opportunity that Teacher has given us to upgrade our xinxing. Because of Teacher's hints and our continuous Fa study, I have arrived at a new cultivation realization that I would like to share with fellow practitioners.
I should treat each facts-clarification project solemnly and seriously and discipline each of my words and actions in daily life. I discovered many of my flaws during the newspaper production: I often missed various deadlines. I often joked around, and I had considered it to be a small matter. But they had actually reflected my deteriorated standards of speech and action. I only took a quick glance at the content and called it a proofreading. I even tried to justify my failure to take my responsibility seriously with an excuse that we did not have enough time to check for errors. Even if I did find mistakes, I sometimes was not willing to correct them because I wanted to save myself the trouble of changing the entire page for some "trivial" mistakes. Even when I discovered mistyped characters or missing characters in the printed newspapers, I was quick to forgive myself and comforted myself with a lame excuse that mistakes were inevitable, especially when we had to deal with so many pages of a newspaper. I would even deftly escape criticism by laughing at my own mistakes, "Oh, what a silly mistake I have made." These may not appear to be "major criminal offenses," but they truly reflected the severity of my notions. They have shown that I had failed to be responsible for other people, the people of the future, living beings, or myself.
Question: Compassion arises after emotion is removed. So how is mighty virtue cultivated?Teacher: You walk this path of Fa-rectification well, you manage in cultivation to overcome your limitations, you let go of your attachments, and you save living beings with righteous thoughts and handle everything you face with righteous thoughts. That is mighty virtue. (Applause)
(From "Teaching the Fa at the 2003 Atlanta Fa Conference")
My comprehension of this Fa passage is that a cultivator doesn't simply establish his mighty virtue by assuming more Fa-rectification work. We establish our mighty virtue when we truly discipline our speech and actions, and meet the standards of the Fa when it comes to everything at work and in our daily lives.
Teacher said,
I also want to tell you that your nature in the past was actually based on egotism and selfishness. From now on, whatever you do, you should consider others first, so as to attain the righteous Enlightenment of selflessness and altruism. So from now on, whatever you do or whatever you say, you must consider others—or even future generations—along with Dafa's eternal stability.
(From "Non-Omission in Buddha-Nature" in Essentials for Further Advancement)
Our nature in the past may have been based on egotism and selfishness, but it shall not be so in the future. Our lives have not come into existence for ourselves. We also need to go through the process of establishing our mighty virtue because our sentient beings require us to get tempered and obtain enough abilities to shoulder our great responsibilities in the future. With this in mind, these "trivial" problems in cultivation can no longer be regarded as such. Instead, they reflect severe problems in my cultivation. Because I allowed my cultivation state, speech and actions to deteriorate, I may have cost many sentient beings their opportunities to learn the truth about Falun Dafa and missed out on opportunities that Master gave me to establish my own mighty virtue.
As Dafa practitioners in the Fa-rectification period, we must not only have a good grasp of the Fa principles. The requirement of the Fa for us is also higher. Each of our words and actions must be righteous and meet the standard of the Fa. This is also the path of our cultivation. Teacher said,
Study the Fa and obtain the Fa,
Share in learning and share in cultivating,
Following [the Fa] in everything
Compliance is cultivation.
(From "Solid Cultivation" in Hong Yin (Unofficial Translation)
I have come to another realization during this process - that we should correct each mistake as we come across one. It does not matter who made the mistake or whose responsibility it should be to correct the mistake. Sometimes when the newspapers came out of the printers, unexplainably, the photographs would be missing, or the photographs came out in completely wrong colors, and thus we had to reprint the newspapers, resulting in delays. I felt it was because we had left loopholes for the evil in other dimensions to exploit the situation and they might have had this thought, "Since some Dafa practitioners thought it was acceptable to delay the production schedule or to make some mistakes, I will give you what you asked for. I will delay your production schedule and I will cause you to make mistakes." Certain practitioners' work attitude greatly inspired me to reflect upon my own work attitude and see the giant disparities in our cultivation states. I have learned from these experiences that I must solemnly correct myself according to the Fa, for the evil will use every loophole in a cultivator as an excuse to create interferences among us all. It follows that it is everyone's responsibility to take our respective responsibilities in truth-clarification work seriously and correct each mistake as soon as we spot it. We are thus breaking through the old forces' arrangements and perfecting the entities of Dafa practitioners. We must not turn a blind eye to any opportunity to correct a mistake.
We mustn't be oblivious to our "trivial problems" because those might disguise severe problems. Actually, in cultivation there is no distinction between "trivial" and "severe" problems. As soon as we find a problem in ourselves, we should correct it.
Translated from: http://www.zhengjian.org/zj/articles/2004/2/6/25703.html
