Trust

[PureInsight.org] I once heard a story about a butcher who cultivated Taoism. One day the butcher encountered a master and his disciple, who told him that cultivating Taoism will transcend life and death and make one immortal. This appealed to the butcher greatly, and led him to cultivate along with them. One day, the master said to his students: “In order to reach consummation, you must follow exactly as I say,” and both disciples willingly agreed to do so. The master then brought the two to a cliff and said: “If you jump off this cliff, you will become immortal,” and let the first disciple jump first. The disciple looked down from the top and thought to himself: “If I jump, won’t I die?” and backed off the cliff edge as he trembled with fear. The master then let the butcher jump, to which the butcher thought: “I’ve killed countless lives that I don’t know if I will ever be able to repay, and with this one jump I can become immortal, so why not?” and swiftly jumped off the cliff. As he leaped from the mountain, his body turned into thousands of gold pieces and floated away.

As you can see, reaching consummation is not dependent on the amount of time spent cultivating or the amount of hardships experienced; rather it is more importantly about the improvement in xinxing. It is also about completely trusting in Master and the Fa. It would be inaccurate to say that the first disciple in the story did not trust his master, but only decisions made under life or death situations actually matter.

I think of our Dafa practitioners who are being brutally persecuted in China. The root cause of the persecution is very complicated, but perhaps one factor is a trust issue in Master and the Fa?

In “Teaching the Fa in San Francisco, 2005,” Master warned us: “If every Dafa disciple can think and act righteously as he goes about things and can look at things with righteous thoughts under any circumstance, none of you will become afraid when facing persecution. If that is how you are, who would dare to persecute you! If a person is completely in the Fa no one can touch him. Isn’t that having the ability to protect yourself? As a matter of fact, with regard to the veteran students [that started] prior to the persecution, I raised all of you to your positions. As long as you can go about things with righteous thoughts and righteous actions you can protect yourselves perfectly well, and that applies as well for new students that joined later. It’s just that some students simply don’t have righteous thoughts. They have all the things in place, and yet when experiencing persecution they still look at things with a human mindset and still have a big pile of attachments. What is Master to do? Should I completely take over everything that you’re supposed to do in validating the Fa? Then would it be you that’s cultivating or would it be Master doing it?”

Think about it, when we are being persecuted brutally, do we really trust in Master and the Fa completely?

Translated from: http://www.zhengjian.org/node/118932