PureInsight | January 14, 2013
[PureInsight.org] I am a practitioner who attained the Fa in 1997. During more than ten years of true cultivation, from being a student to an office worker and then becoming a housewife, I have gone through many hardships and difficulties which were all resolved by great compassionate Master who did not give up on me and instead reinforced me and endured for me. I cannot express my gratitude to venerable Master with any human language. Except for constant further advancement and solid cultivation, there is no other way to even come close to repaying venerable Master’s merciful and arduous salvation.
I was the only child of my parents. After my parents divorced, my mother and I depended on each other for survival. In 2010, my mother (who was also a practitioner) abruptly passed away due to sickness karma. I found this very hard to endure. When I attained the Fa, I was afraid that my mother pass away, so I persisted in practicing with her. Through the ups and downs of more than ten years of cultivation, my mother was my backbone and shelter. When she left, it seemed as if the earth had crumbled. In cultivation I was always an average person who heard the Dao; I had limited knowledge and no deep comprehension of Master’s Fa. Therefore, when I faced this huge difficulty, I didn’t know what to do. Because I had not removed my fundamental attachments, I even had the thought of giving up cultivation after my mother’s death. If the first test cannot be passed, then another one will soon follow. Soon after that, my relatives came to get everything in our house before my mother’s funeral. When they came, they took everything, even including the toothpaste, and then our house was empty. I distinctly sensed the indifference of my relatives and how miserable life can be. When I returned to my husband’s home, all the hatred inside me came out. I thought that my mother had suffered all kinds of hardship in her life which had caused her to leave, and hence I became an orphan before she was sixty years old. I felt that it was all because of these relatives, so in my heart I had hatred towards those who had hurt my mother and I. Tears bathed my cheeks all day long. In addition I quarreled with my husband, cursed my parents-in-law, and I even cursed my father and aunts on the phone. After hating everyone like this for more than half a year, I was still not able to break through it. Suddenly one day, I threw myself onto the bed and could barely breathe because of a terrible heartache. It seemed as if a sharp knife had been pushed through my heart. My husband sent me to the hospital for tests but the doctors could find nothing wrong. All I felt was extreme pain, causing me to have to sit up when sleeping.
When I went back to my hometown during a holiday, a fellow practitioner found me and helped me to improve by studying the Fa together with me. Venerable Master’s Fa struck deep into my mind: “You should all be thinking this way, with your first thought being to scrutinize yourself to try to find the problem. Whoever is not like this is not in fact a true cultivator of Dafa” (“What is a Dafa Disciple”). Suddenly, I realized that I had not been a true practitioner at all in these years because I have never looked within. When anything came up, I used the Fa to measure others instead of myself. I thought I was good, and compared myself with others but never with the Fa. In addition I had strained relationships with most of my relatives. After Master’s Fa teaching “What Does it Mean to ‘Help Master Rectify the Fa’” had been published, I further understood that there were three kinds of people in cultivation: Dafa disciples, students, and human beings. After reflecting, I saw that I had always played a human role in the Fa. Even after this, Master never abandoned me and He gave me hints over and over again. I sent a thought sincerely that I wanted to be a true Dafa practitioner. Through constantly looking inwards, I found many human attachments. After this, the next morning when I was practicing, I just couldn’t stand still, I sat down and suddenly three currents of warm energy penetrated my body. I knew that it was Master doing guanding for me, and the place where the energy penetrated my heart was like the annual ring of a tree spreading outwards. I felt more deeply how great Master’s compassion is. All of a sudden, I wondered if Master had drunk a bowl of poison during his suffering for me. When I thought of this, I felt a deeper shame when facing him; I felt that I was not qualified to be saved by Master. On our path of cultivation, Master does not want anything from us except our heart for cultivation and the strong will to change ourselves! Meanwhile, I also understood that my hatred had already formed into a substance in other dimensions, and it was Master who had borne and resolved it for me.
With my fellow practitioners’ selfless help, I studied the Fa repeatedly. Venerable Master mentioned in “Dafa Disciples Must Study the Fa”: “Don’t forget that the old forces have ruined the people in today’s world, particularly Chinese people, and although they claim that this is done to provide a cultivation environment, after you did manage to complete your cultivation that cosmos would be no more—you’d be like a commander-in-chief with no army wherever you were. So you must save people, even amidst the ordeals that you face, for this is the mighty virtue of Dafa disciples, and something no ordinary person—or anyone in all of history—could ever accomplish! ” In this paragraph I realized: the people around us were all degenerated intentionally by the old forces to help us in cultivation. But their arrangements were deficient. In their arrangements, these beings were supposed to be destroyed but the universe exists for all sentient beings. If all sentient beings were destroyed, the universe would be empty. Dafa disciples are remarkable because we are still thinking of sentient beings even when they inflict pain and suffering upon us. We purify ourselves with the principles of the righteous Fa while saving sentient beings. We rectifying them with righteous Fa-principles and make them become better gradually in order to achieve the goal of saving them. Only this is true cultivation; this is the benevolent might of practitioners with virtuous enlightenment and righteous Fa.
When thinking of this, a shudder swept through me and I understood the seriousness of cultivation and the great difficulty of saving sentient beings. Venerable Master told us: “I have said in the past that people are pitiable, for all a person is doing in this world is merely enjoying the feelings and sensations that are brought to him by living the course of his life” (“Dafa Disciples Must Study the Fa”). This made me understand that sentient beings were pitiful and lamentable. Practitioners are only supposed to save people, how can I hate them? After I let go of the hatred towards them, infinite sympathy and mercy towards sentient beings arose within me. However, having these were not enough; without having immense compassion, a cultivator cannot resolve the resentment accumulated throughout his history of reincarnating.
Then how to develop this great compassion? Venerable Master said: “I have said before that Shakyamuni, Jesus, Laozi and the like—as well as several great thinkers, saints, and great divine beings of an even earlier time who came to the earth—were all merely establishing mankind’s culture in the course of history. All of what they taught, the salvation they provided, and the things that they did were simply to leave mankind’s culture with what it must have. The only people who they truly took with them were those beings who they had specifically sent down to help them impart this culture, and even for those ones, it was merely the people’s subordinate souls, which never entered the world. The only ones who can truly accomplish such things—at this final, critical juncture in history—are the disciples of Dafa” (“What is a Dafa Disciple”).
In the past, for the purpose of saving sentient beings, Gods and Buddha’s gave up everything, even including their human bodies, in order to save their own people. They established our culture and historical references. Saving people was very difficult because the principle of mutual-generation and mutual-inhibition of the old cosmos is absolute. In saving people, they would have to pay with their own lives! When thinking of our being saved by venerable Master, how much has He paid for us?! Because we are beings existing at the old universe’s last moments, we are the last lives existing together with the universe at the very end of the process of formation-stasis-degeneration-destruction—the lives which were about to be annihilated. Master scooped us out of Hell and has suffered for us by paying for our massive karma accumulated throughout history. He has helped us step by step, like a parent teaching his child how to walk, and He has never wearied of this. His greatness at teaching has led us to the righteous way. On the way, He has provided us with everything, saving with benevolence all sentient beings in our worlds while saving us. I cannot help shedding tears when writing this. Let alone that Master wants to save all sentient beings that can be saved in the cosmos, how much will he pay for sentient beings?! What Master has endured is unimaginable to any being in the cosmos. Buddha’s infinite grace is not enough to describe the greatness of Master; Master has nearly depleted everything of His for the sentient beings of the cosmos! I feel deeply the tininess, ignorance, and incapability of my life. Filled with endless gratefulness toward Master, I swear in great solemnity: if sentient beings suffer because I have not cultivated well, I plead to Master to let me suffer first! If my sentient beings are destroyed because of me, what is the point of letting me survive? Where can I be placed in the cosmos? Am I qualified to live in the cosmos anymore?
One fellow practitioner told me: “The reason why the sea can absorb a hundred rivers is because it places itself lower than the rivers. Master went through thousands of difficulties to go down layer after layer to this lowest, dirtiest place, and enduring people’s curses, bullying, and slandering in order to save sentient beings. Facing these sentient beings, Master still wants to save them and place them at higher levels; how can such breadth of mind be described?! I understand that the bigger one’s breadth of mind, the more sentient beings one can accommodate—this is one’s realm. To save sentient beings one must lower and put down oneself.
After understanding this, I found those people who had harmed my mother and I and apologized to them. No matter what attitude sentient beings held, I only looked at my own faults. In this process, I learned to see their good points and to put the Fa first and validate the greatness of the Fa. The gate in their hearts opened, and they saw the greatness of the Fa through the changes in me and did not resist Dafa anymore. People around me changed their attitudes toward me in a U-turn. I felt as light as a swallow during that period, and felt that the real happiness of a cultivator comes from the merciful state of tolerating others.
From realizing it, to then living up to it, I spent one month during this period where I was relieved from the inextricable and extreme pains of life and given the magnificence of a life with virtuous enlightenment and righteous Fa—it really was a complete change of heart. This was really like: “When disciples have ample righteous thoughts, Master has the power to turn back the tide” (Hongyin II). Now my environment is becoming better and better, and those sentient beings even help me to clarify the truth and save people sometimes. These are all manifestations of the power of Venerable Master’s Dafa.
Fellow practitioners, Master’s Dafa is really omnipotent! Only when sparing no effort to catch up in future cultivation, looking within at every thought, really becoming one with Dafa, and putting down one’s ego, can we not let Master down and deserve the title of Dafa disciple.
Translated from: http://www.zhengjian.org/node/113386
