PureInsight | July 20, 2014
[PureInsight.org] A person must make many different choices over the course of his or her lifetime, different choices will be made by different people because everyone has a different mindset. As a Falun Dafa cultivator, two choices I have made in the face of monetary gain are narrated here.
I began practicing Falun Dafa in 1995 when I was studying at a university. At that time I studied in a big surgeons’ institute in mainland China, where students enrolled were counted as soldiers on service. After graduation, the student’s job assignments were decided by the management of the institute. The students themselves did not have any say in the matter of where they would be sent to work.
When about to graduate, many of my schoolmates were busy trying to lobby or bribe and establish relations with the management of the institute, in the hope of securing a good job in big cities, with good living conditions and pay. No one wanted to be sent to the borderlands or mountainous areas where the conditions are poor. Some schoolmates, who were good friends before, were soon at odds with each other and became strangers when fighting for a better position. At that time I held to the thought that things will happen naturally. I was assigned to a job in the barren Gobi desert. Though somewhat frustrated, I was fairly calm inside. But an event that happened thereafter gave rise to big waves in my heart.
The student team to which I belonged had an unwritten rule: For students who were assigned to borderlands or difficult areas, other students would donate some money to be shared out by the students heading for the borderlands and difficult areas. Several of us students heading for the borderlands were given 800 Yuan each. As a Falun Gong practitioner I thought that I should not accept the 800 Yuan, so I tried hard to decline, this then caused some misunderstanding among my team leaders and schoolmates. I did not intend to break the unwritten rule, nor was I willing to compromise the good relationships I had with other people at that time, I was also unwilling to affect the other students who were heading for the borderlands, making them feel more uneasy in their already difficult situations. Under the persuasion of my team leaders and fellow students, I accepted the 800 Yuan for the time being. When seeing me off at the airport, one schoolmate told me in tears, “so-and-so (another schoolmate who was sent to the borderlands) thought the money is a small amount, why are you so silly? Rejecting the money that was given to you? Don’t be like this in the future; be sure to think more about yourself.” After five years of friendship through university, seeing the care for me by my classmate as we parted ways, was weighing heavily on my mind. I hugged my classmate and said goodbye.
Later on, in the hospital I was sent to work at, I saw a Uyghur man crying in a corridor for not having enough money to pay for his wife’s labour in hospital, so I gave him 600 Yuan, I donated the remaining 200 Yuan to a disaster area when making a donation on one occasion.
In 1999, the evil CCP began its persecution of Falun Dafa, my simple and calm life changed totally. I was first forced to leave the army and lost my steady job in the hospital, then I was sentenced illegally and put behind bars twice for 8 years, during which time I was forced to divorce after I had just got married. The second time I was released from jail; I was in a lot of pain and had wounds all over my body. By that time, I was single and nearly 40 years old.
Without holding a doctor’s primary credentials, I found a temporary job in a small private hospital. I was responsible for the maintenance of medical equipment; my food was not covered and my monthly salary was only 800 Yuan. Once, a machine was malfunctioning, I could not find the cause of the problem even after looking over the machine many times because of my unfamiliarity with the machine. So an engineer from Shanghai was asked to come and repair the malfunctioning machine, we looked over everything but could not find the cause of the problem; it was not until nearly 10pm that we found the problem; a video cable was unplugged. After we fixed the problem, the engineer said, “Since we have gone to such great lengths and spent so long looking for the problem, only to find the malfunction is merely because a video cable was unplugged, how can we report this to the hospital? Tomorrow, when you report to the hospital, tell them that we changed an element, we can quote 20,000 Yuan and I will give you 7,000 after the job is done.” I declined without hesitation, “No.”
After supper I sent a short message to the engineer, “I will report to the hospital tomorrow, I will mention your painstaking work today and that I should have identified the fault easily the first time I looked. However, I will not cause more loss to the hospital for my own personal benefit.”
It has been nearly 19 years since I began practicing Falun Dafa. Although I have not done well in many aspects of my cultivation, and am still far from the requirements of Dafa, the Fa is rooted in my mind which enables me to make totally different choices from common people and to be a good person, practicing what I advocate. Facing the complicated, chaotic phenomena in Mainland Chinese medical circles, I often think that one medicine can cure all: practice Falun Gong, and cultivate ones character according to “Truth Compassion Tolerance”, that’s enough!
Translated from http://www.zhengjian.org/node/131113
