PureInsight | March 24, 2013
[PureInsight.org] Last weekend I went with fellow practitioners to give out special edition promotion newspapers for Shen Yun. Before setting out I had to pick up the newspapers with another practitioner. By then, it was already late and we were worried. We wanted to deliver the newspapers as soon as possible. After counting them I tried to move them but wasn’t holding them securely enough. Several boxes fell down on my foot. A severe pain struck me, but I said immediately, “It’s okay, it’s okay.” Then I recited the poem from Hong Yin “Righteous Thoughts and Righteous Actions:”
“A Great Enlightened One fears no hardship
Having forged an adamantine will
Free of attachment to living or dying
He walks the path of Fa-rectification confident and poised.”
Later along the way to the distribution site, I looked inward to see if I had been attached to something, and it occurred to me that I was quick-tempered and prone to anger and attached to showing off. Later, I found my foot was okay and I felt light when walking. This reminded me of the last time I was giving out Shen Yun promotional newspapers. I tumbled heavily when running but felt my body was very light upon standing up. My leg felt a little tired before the fall but not a bit after, and I could run faster than before. It was like the example Master gave in Zhuan Falun, “We’d say that a good or bad outcome comes from one thought. The difference in one thought leads to different results.”
We arrived at the scheduled place and began to distribute the newspapers after being assigned different areas. After we finished a small block on the first map, it was 1:00 pm and a fellow practitioner felt hungry and wanted to eat some food. I thought it would be impossible to finish the work, and eating would waste a lot of time. Being winter, it would get dark before 5pm, and we wouldn’t be able to continue once it got dark. I said, “How about we finish the work before going to eat something?” The fellow practitioner was unhappy with my suggestion, and wanted to go and eat anyway. My mind was a little bit disturbed at that time but I managed to calm down immediately. Later I said, “So be it, you guys go to eat and drop me at the next area to continue with the distribution.” The other practitioners in the car asked, “Are you feeling hungry from not eating?” I said, “I’m not hungry.” In fact I hadn’t eaten since morning and had been feeling hungry for quite a while. But when it came to the thought that sentient beings were waiting to be saved and there were still a lot of newspapers that needed to be distributed, there was not a bit of hunger anymore. After dropping the others off, the practitioner who was driving and I drove to the next place. I said, “Leave this area to me; you can go to the next area.” I took 300 copies of the newspapers with me. One could barely run when holding more than 200 copies, and 300 would render one unmovable. Suddenly a practitioner’s experience sharing came to mind: the practitioner suggested to leave some copies in one place out of view, and just take the rest in hand and after distributing those, come back to collect the others. Later I used this method to save fellow practitioners’ time in delivering newspapers as well as increasing the speed; it was really killing two birds with one stone. During this process I felt hot in my belly. I sang Shen Yun songs while running and I kept a pure mentality by reciting Master’s Fa without a distracting thought in my mind–I only a thought for sentient beings to be saved. Later, one paragraph of Master’s Fa appeared in my mind: “In fact, I treasure you more than you treasure yourselves, for you exist together with Master. You are the most magnificent gods of the future, the exemplary models of the new cosmos, and mankind’s hope for the future” (“Teaching the Fa at the Fa Conference in Australia.”) I thought at that time that if one felt tired, hungry, and wanted to take a rest, that they were treasuring themselves, but in fact that was all superficial. It was not that exhaustion and hardship were not good things, it was that Master is the one who really treasures us, purifying us from the root of our lives, leading us to our true home, asking us to save people more quickly, saving sentient beings for our worlds, and perfecting our worlds. I thought this was really the way Master treasures us, and this was just the one bit I could understand by myself.
During this process, I felt more deeply the care that revered Master was taking of us, and felt more clearly the effects of righteous thoughts. Righteous thoughts are the thoughts of a God that have endless power, just like what Master told us in several passages in Zhuan Falun: “When a person’s Buddha-nature comes out it shakes the Ten-Directional World. Whoever sees this will help him, and they’ll help him no matter what.” “But with the thought of doing cultivation, just with this wish in their minds, it shines like gold and shakes the Ten-Directional World.” “You always hear people talking about Buddha-nature this and that, and what they mean is exactly this Buddha-nature that’s come out.” In my personal understanding, righteous thoughts are similar to Buddha-nature.
The above are my personal realizations; please kindly provide corrections if there is something improper.
Translated from: http://www.zhengjian.org/node/114144
