PureInsight | February 7, 2005
[PureInsight.org] The Gods have left many miracles in the world throughout the history of mankind, such as when Bodhidarma rode a reed to cross a river and when Jesus filled the stomachs of tens of thousands of his followers with only five loaves of bread and two pieces of fish. Today atheists and many other people look at those events as legends, allegories and fairy tales that cannot be proven. But, in reality, if you examine the world around you carefully you will discover that miracles are happening everywhere. It is just that people cannot prove their existence by means of science and thus regard them as coincidental, natural phenomena.
When I was small I heard my grandmother talk of the three-year-long drought in Mainland China. A famine resulted and over half of the village inhabitants starved to death. Many strong and healthy men starved to death after five to six days without food and water. Many women lived for eight days before they too were starved to death. Nonetheless, there was a weak blind man who lived without food for twenty days. Afterwards he regained his energy from eating a couple of cucumbers and some other vegetables that his brother had brought him. He survived the huge catastrophe.
The blind man was a very ordinary person. The only thing that differentiated him from others was that he still burned incense and honored the Buddha(s) even though it was banned at the time as a "superstition." Afterwards everyone in the village said that it was really a miracle that he did survive. He said that at that time there were gods and Buddhas protecting him and that he never felt extremely hungry even after twenty or so days without food or water.
Many survivors of the recent tsunami catastrophe in Southeast Asia have credited their survival to the miracles of gods. A man in Sri Lanka was trapped under the sand. There was concrete on top of his head, while huge waves continually slammed into his body. Just before his limited oxygen supply became depleted, he prayed to God to rescue him. He said, "God almost instantly answered his prayers." Suddenly the concrete tiles broke, freeing him, and allowing him to float to the surface. One Sri Lankan hotel owner described his experience thus: Although buildings for several kilometers around his surrounding area were destroyed, his hotel miraculously sustained only slight damage. He expressed that this miracle happened because of his ten years of doing good deeds.
In the city of Phuket, Thailand, near the beaches of Lalai, is a small fishing village of 2,000 inhabitants. Every August, the people of this village would host a ceremony to pay respect to the gods of the ocean, praying to the sea gods to protect the fishermen. During this tsunami, following instructions of the elders, the entire village escaped this catastrophe of the sea. There were no casualties. After the tsunami, the sincere, local Sri Lankan religious believers are even more firmly committed, believing in their religion, honoring their religious symbols and places of worship. Although engineers believe that the "religious" buildings have better resistance to tsunamis compared to the majority of the buildings with conventional architecture, many people, though, still firmly believe that the main reason why these buildings were so fortunate was because of divine protection.
An atheist friend asked me before, "You say that the miracle of gods are everywhere. From this tea cup in front of you, can you see any of God's miracles?" I replied to him saying, "Although this cup is manmade, the raw material for this cup is soil, and soil is something God created for mankind. Mankind cannot use different metals, water and other non-organic matter to create soil. So in conclusion, it is not only this cup that is a miracle, but you can see the gods' miracles everywhere in this vast earth as well as in the broad seas."
To people with strong religious convictions, it is obvious that the gods or Buddhas have bestowed unto mankind every single mountain, every body of water, every field of grass and tree. One can see the traces of miracles in every incident that has happened to mankind. Atheistic people are unable to recognize the essence of these incidences because their obstructive notions prevent them from doing so, that's all.
Translated from: http://www.zhengjian.org/zj/articles/2005/1/14/30713.html
