PureInsight | January 28, 2007
[PureInsight.org] Due to the
modern cultural variability, the original meanings of many Chinese
characters have become ambiguous. The variability also affects
practitioners. Nowadays, many practitioners do not understand the
exact meaning of the Chinese character "milling and rubbing." The
character has been misunderstood as "learning from each other by
exchanging views." In fact, its original meaning is
different. A Chinese dictionary paraphrases the meaning as "two
objects milling each other." The original meaning of the
character is defined as "milling and rubbing."
There are different views and behaviors among the practitioners when
they come together. I understand that it is like a process of
milling and cultivating each other. This is because that all of
us have some sorts of attachments and human thoughts that we have not
yet gotten rid of. Therefore, a process of milling and rubbing
will produce different views and behaviors on the conflicts between
practitioners. These conflicts have touched the practitioners at
the level of their own human thoughts and attachments. If we do
not understand the process as an opportunity to cultivate and see
through the phenomena to grasp the essence, we won't be able to
understand other people correctly and to pick up the right
opinions. It could even intensify the conflicts and
contradictions between practitioners, which would jeopardize our joint
efforts towards validating the Fa.
There was a saying in ancient Chinese times that "A stone from another
mountain can rub and mill a jade from your stone." The conflict
is a good thing for practitioners in terms of cultivation. We
must understand how to take the conflict as an opportunity to look
inside ourselves and remove the human thoughts and attachments.
Use other practitioners' rough stones to rub and mill us to get a fine
jade from our own.
Of course, cultivation is quite different from rubbing and milling to
get a jade. A milling machine can mill and rub a stone to get a
jade from it. But this is done by a coercive force. Our
cultivation is a spontaneous behavior. The rough stone that wraps
the jade will not go off unless we remove our human attachments.
Thus, we must look inside ourselves when we are in the process of
"milling and rubbing."
Many practitioners like to "mill" with those who have cultivated
better in order to obtain a higher level of understanding about Fa and
harmony without "milling" and "rubbing." We must have a clear
understanding about cultivation. Those well-cultivated
practitioners have become better and better, like fine jade. A
fine jade has no roughness at all. If so, where can we get a
rough stone to remove our attachments that are like rough stone that
wraps around us?
If we know how to take conflict, the process of milling, and any
hardship in life as an opportunity to remove our own attachments, we
will make a rapid progress in cultivation.
Translated from: http://www.zhengjian.org/zj/articles/2007/1/16/41810.html
