PureInsight | July 14, 2008
[PureInsight.org] The slogan "Gods bless China" emerged from a rally in support of "Quitting the Chinese Communist Party" which was organized by American Falun Dafa practitioners after the earthquake happened in China. A practitioner was holding the banner "Gods bless China," but it was torn by someone under the CCP's influence. The practitioner was crying: "What else do you want if you don't want 'Gods [to] bless China'?"
While watching the scene in the recorded video, I couldn't help crying. I made up my mind that in future articles I would make a big change in direction so as to dedicate more of the content to reflecting on and gaining a pure insight into China's civilization. Therefore, it took me longer to write this article.
The purpose of writing about Chinese culture is to awaken our conscience and good thoughts that have been enshrouded by dust for a long time, and also to enable morality to return, bringing back our innate human nature.
Of course, I know this can't be done by me alone. I just hope my articles can serve as a modest spur to induce others to come forward with their valuable opinions.
Before I start the main body of this article, I would like to point out that the word "China" mentioned in this article is just a cultural concept. It is not nationalism and neither does it intend to exclude other cultures.
Chinese culture was created by Gods for spreading the Great Fa of the cosmos at this current time. Moreover, when we came to this human world, at first each one of us was incarnated in China. In other words, everyone has the substance of Chinese culture at the core of their being. (For details please read Master Li's Lecture "Touring North America to Teach the Fa")
Ok, let's get back to the subject at hand.
We all know that there were originally four countries with ancient civilizations: Egypt, Babylon, India and China. These four countries created and initiated our glorious human civilization.
However, after years of change, only China has inherited its ancient traditions. All the other areas of the world didn't inherit the essence of their traditional cultures. So in the entire history of human civilization, we can say that China is the only country that has in its history a civilization of five thousand years. Chinese people will be forever gratified by this.
Many Chinese people may have been out of China for a long time, but they get excited whenever they see Chinese characters or Chinese snacks. When they come back and set foot on their motherland again, more often than not, they can't hold back their tears (I couldn't hold back tears when I was writing this). This is the power of culture! This power has already been dissolved in the blood of everyone in the world, no matter which race or nation you are.
So what caused Chinese culture to have such a strong vitality ever since it was formed five thousand years ago? How is it that after experiencing all kinds of hardships and ups and downs, this culture still shows its incomparable charm?
Especially after the Chinese Communist Party established its political power, it destroyed Chinese traditional culture hysterically. As a result, many Chinese young people don't know much about their own traditions. When some people of insight proposed the revival of Chinese traditional culture, the substance of Chinese culture which had been enshrouded with dust for so long started to recover.
At the end of the last century, a scholar said that the twenty-first century is the century for the renaissance of Chinese traditional culture. Now let's reveal the secrets of why Chinese traditional culture could remain standing even after five thousand years.
Actually the reason is very simple: that is the title of this article - Gods bless China!
Isn't it so? The Chinese traditions handed down from ancient times include: Shen Nong who tasted a hundred different types of herbs, Nu Wa who created man, Cang Jie who created Chinese characters, the Xuanyuan Huang Emperor who wrote the book Huang Di Nei Jing, the Huang Emperor's wife who taught people how to weave clothes to resist the cold and Da Yu who controlled the water to prevent floods. These are all stories we know well. In other words, Chinese culture was bestowed to human beings by gods.
The Chinese culture, which was originally centered in the Yellow River valley, was invaded by foreigners several times. However, the foreigners were all eventually assimilated by the Chinese traditional culture. Many scholars have been confused by this fact: how come Chinese culture has such a strong ability to assimilate other cultures?
If you think carefully, the Xuanyuan Huang Emperor could be called the founder of Daoism (Taoism). Laozi and Confucius were active during the Spring and Autumn Period and Shakyamuni's Buddha Fa was also passed to China.
People have their own beliefs and can choose from the Buddha School which is detached of all things, or the Confucian School which teaches a utilitarian approach to social harmony and defines moral obligations between individuals and society, or the Tao School which strives for self-cultivation. Ancient people's moral standards were high. They believed in morality but they were not foolish. Under this strong righteous environment, it would not be surprising at all that although foreigners could occupy China for a period of time, they were inevitably assimilated by the Chinese culture.
Because everything in mankind's history was arranged for Dafa to spread in the human world today, China is the main stage in this play, and thus Chinese culture was bestowed to human beings by gods intentionally. Only under gods' special care was the Chinese culture able to go through these five thousand years! Gods care for human beings; however that is not to say that human beings are carefree. Because people sometimes do bad things, there must be some ways to eliminate their karma.
In the authoritative history books such as Shi Ji and Zi Zhi Tong Jian, they all recorded that ancient emperors judged themselves by observing whether the movements of the sun, the moon, and the stars were normal. This actually manifested in the ancient Chinese school of thought that "heaven and human beings are in harmony." This is the essence of Chinese traditional culture. That is why modern people regard the Book of Changes as metaphysics. No matter how they study the book, they still can't understand it. At most, they could only understand some superficial things like fortune telling and Feng Shui reading.
When people (especially emperors) do something wrong, heaven would show strange phenomena to warn people: don't do this! If the emperor is able to awaken to it, then his country may last for a while. If the emperor continues to treat his people badly, then that's the beginning of the next dynasty change!
The human world is like a play with different people playing different roles. This arrangement was to lay the foundation of culture such that people could understand the Fa when it is spread.
The famous historic and cultural sites in the well-known mountains and valleys silently record past glories. When people visit there, they can recall the history during that certain period, or recall the bearing of a poem. Those were all arranged by gods (heaven) intentionally, no matter whether the site is in the Gobi wilderness or hidden in high mountains and dense forests.
In short, "Gods bless China" encompasses heaven sending down gods to guide human beings, starting from ignorance, and guiding them to gradually have characters to write with, to have clothes to wear, houses to dwell in, to form the standards regarding contact and communication among people and finally guide them to the path of civilization. If people make mistakes, heaven will show unusual phenomena to warn people to maintain their morality. Belief systems are also passed on to human beings. On one hand this is to maintain moral values for human society; on the other hand, this is for those who have a good underlying base to obtain the Dao (Tao). This is also to pass the culture of cultivation to human society (I will go into this in my next article). In order to leave lessons and experiences to mankind's successors, heaven arranged a system to record the authentic history, in other words, to record the history of Chinese civilization objectively on paper. There are also lots of deities giving protection and blessings from other dimensions, which have helped our civilization to come to this point today. Please forgive me that I can't go into those details here.
My next article is about Chinese culture laying the foundation for the culture of cultivation. The title will be "The Journey Homeward to Heaven."
After these two articles at the introductory level, I will go into some periods of Chinese history to take a look at our past experiences. That's all for this article.
Translated from: http://www.zhengjian.org/zj/articles/2008/7/2/53612.html
