PureInsight | February 11, 2002
One day I met a friend whom I hadn't seen for a long time. I was very astonished to see her, for there was a healthy glow in her face and she looked great. She had hardly any makeup on her face, only a little lipstick. Her delicate skin and kind face made her appear like a totally new person. She used to be a woman who paid a lot of attention to beauty aids, and her skin was not naturally smooth. In order to obtain healthy and beautiful skin, she utilized various major beauty centers and devoted almost half of her salary to this. I asked her in haste whether she had found some wonderful prescriptions or any special therapy at any beauty center, since I also wanted to try the same method.
She acted a bit mysterious and answered naughtily: there were neither special drugs nor any therapy; it was just a book, and she did not tell me the title of the book. She only gave me a website to download and read the book, and told me that I should buy it afterwards if I liked it. She only told me one thing when she left. She said that I should read the book from beginning to end, all at one time. I thought: "Wow, it seems that this beauty treatment follows steps like other common beauty treatments. Why does she act so 'mystical'?"
I went online and downloaded the book in a hurry after I returned to my home. I was quite disappointed at first glance. It was a file in Word format, full of written narrative and not a single picture. As I scrolled down without reading the contents, suddenly a paragraph came in front of my eyes: "To tell a joke, young ladies always like to apply facial makeup and want to make their complexion fairer and better. I would say that if you truly follow a cultivation practice of mind and body, you will naturally achieve that goal. It is guaranteed that you will not need to use cosmetics." (From Lecture Five in Zhuan Falun)
"Well, my friend was practicing cultivation. Um, will my skin become better as well if I practice?" I wondered. A thought suddenly came to my mind: "All Right! I will study this book carefully." Then I remembered my friend's words to read the book in one sitting, and so I spent a whole day reading the book from the first page to the last.
Not only were all the questions in my heart answered after I read the book, I also absorbed a lot of new ideas. I didn't remember the issue of beauty because I read about lots of more interesting issues in the book. These issues fully occupied my mind. I used to believe that cultivation practice was a matter for boys or elderly people and had to do with many legendary mysteries and miscellaneous deities. After reading the book, I discovered that my mind had not been clear. Of course, this was due to the influence of misleading information. The books and magazines in the market reported on things like "cultivation" to different extents, and they picked out specific cases for news. Weren't the modern media all attracting audiences in this way? Thus, I had negative reactions whenever I heard "cultivation" and the like. I couldn't bear to listen as long as I thought it meant being a vegetarian, staying away from a normal life, or doing meditation in temples.
After reading the book, I realized that the key was not those (cultivation) formalities. The key issues in cultivation are raising one's xinxing and being able to assimilate to the characteristics of the universe. It means becoming a truly good person. If one can really become a good person, according to the standards in the book, one will naturally have a good body, and the whole process of cultivating the heart is cultivation. Right! It is just that simple. However, we all know that it is even more difficult to change one's nature than to change the course of rivers or move mountains. Changing one's heart should be the most difficult thing of all! It is because the human heart cannot be changed through any formality or coercion.
If I burn incense and kowtow to Buddha while doing bad deeds behind his back, or hold lots of bad thoughts in my brain, the inner heart is not changed at all, let alone becoming that of a good person. Although it is hard, there are some guidelines. The book explains that we can use the standard of "Truthfulness-Benevolence- Forbearance" to evaluate whatever things we encounter, what we did not do well, whether there is an attachment to our personal interests, and how we can conform to this fundamental characteristic. An issue can be handled in this way or that way. Gradually, as a good foundation of thoughts are formed during this process of discriminating and improving, the problems that we encounter will be less confusing over time.
This kind of method and process is not new to me because science, engineering, and applied mathematics work in such a way. We are always changing the conditions or the environment, or trying out alternative hypothetical models to explain results, whenever we perform experiments or work on problems. We have to take other factors into account if we encounter large influences from various environments that are absent in the laboratory. Thus, we can formulate a model that suits the larger environment better, and then the broader environment is incorporated into the hypothesis. It seems that cultivation is not incomprehensible at all. Its process is as logical as the pursuit of knowledge in science. Furthermore, the process of handling conflicts during cultivation is to allow people to think carefully of what is the best way to behave according to "Truthfulness-Benevolence-Forbearance." If conflicts are solved, hasn't one's xinxing been raised? The gong level is also elevated with the improvement of xinxing. My face went red when I thought about this. In fact, the book was truly scientific because it examines directly the human being, life and the universe and bypasses explorations of this material world.
The even more powerful idea is that we do not have to do anything intentionally. Everything we encounter around us are all suitable objects for our cultivation. I have seen from this website that a 100 million people are already practicing, and everyone benefits both physically and spiritually. Speaking from a scientific, experimental point of view, this huge number has never been available from ancient times until now. It seems that our ancestors were smarter. They passed cultivation down to us. This thought came to me, namely, that it was unheard of for girls in ancient times to use any skin protection and nutrition products. That's right! Don't elderly people say that the appearance comes from the heart? I quickly made a call to tell my friend that I would join the exercise practice tomorrow.
Translated from:
http://www.zhengjian.org/zj/articles/2002/1/21/13466.html
