PureInsight | February 29, 2016
[PureInsight.org]
I normally kept, for safekeeping, any donation money given to the local material production centers. This is because as a coordinator, I had more opportunities to contact each fellow practitioner. There have been lots of lessons over the years. I am increasingly recognizing the seriousness of issues involving Dafa resources, from studying Master’s Fa. I wrote this sharing for fellow practitioners who have custody over Dafa money.
Initially, I had to walk everywhere, because we didn’t have a group study environment or truth clarification materials. I was very upset not to have the convenience of having transportation or enough money, and thought that I would just do whatever I could afford to. Later, I thought that since I had donation money for Dafa, why not use it to rectify the Fa? “There shouldn’t be a problem as long as I don’t use it privately,” I thought. So I used the donation money to purchase a motorcycle and to change its oil and fix it when needed. The motorcycle often had oil leaks and other problems. However, I couldn’t realize that it was my fault, rather than being interference from the old forces. I also started paying for fellow practitioners’ fares, purchasing gifts for practitioners’ families, installing NDTV, and accessing the internet. I believed that I could make decisions on how the money was spent, as long as I was the one keeping the money and I did not spend it on myself.
As Master said in Fa Teaching Given at the 2010 New York Fa Conference, "Indeed. There are many students who are incapable of earning money, but who have no problem at all spending it. (Audience laughs) However much it may be, they won’t hesitate to spend it, and they burn through it quickly with no thought about the results this will have, about where it came from, or what our situation will be later on [after the money has been spent]. They have no sense of responsibility. The gods are all watching angrily those who act this way. Wasting Dafa disciples’ resources is equivalent to interfering with and damaging Dafa.”
Master also said in Fa Teaching at the 2013 Greater New York Fa Conference, "Moreover, embezzling funds without other people knowing, or treating the money as one’s own, is really a major taboo in cultivation, an extremely serious problem. So, sometimes I’m thinking: be sure not to make any of these kinds of mistakes. Master isn’t going to overemphasize these things, and it’s not that important to me personally. But I’m truly worried that whoever makes such mistakes will have spent all those years cultivating in vain. The old forces don’t care whether you’re a veteran student, new student, or coordinator—they might just destroy you all the same."
Later, after studying the Fa, I realized that I held responsibility for the donation money, as long as I was safekeeping it. But I didn’t have the right to use it at will, because fellow practitioners had donated the money to our material center with a clear will to save beings. The Gods in other dimensions have already recorded who had donated how much money and on which date. Isn’t it a crime to embezzle Dafa money and use it by myself? After having this understanding, I made up all the money I had used in a timely manner. Looking inward, I found a big ego. All kinds of deeply hidden interests and excuses were present to validate myself, in the name of Fa-rectification.
Once, a non-native fellow practitioner donated a laptop after finding out that we had limit material centers. I kept the laptop for Dafa work. But the laptop stopped working after I used it to browse ordinary people’s websites. The laptop was then seized by policemen while it was in for repair work. After talking with a fellow practitioner, I realized that I had used the donated resources as private money and had polluted Dafa materials with my impure mind. The evil had taken advantage of my loopholes. I made up for my mistakes immediately after realizing this.
I hadn’t taken my role of safekeeping Dafa funds seriously in the beginning and thought that it would be fine to do things at will as long as I separated my personal account from a donations account. However, for a while, there were always problems when fellow practitioners donated money for truth-clarification. After studying the Fa, we realized that we needed an account with clear records in revenue and expenditure. It seemed to be clear at that moment. But even three months later, we still had problems in auditing the account. Thankfully, we had records and could make up for over 300 RMB of losses. Otherwise, I would owe Dafa again! It was a scary thought.
Another fellow practitioner had been saving Dafa money for a long time. One day he accidentally found 10,000 Yuan in a drawer. He couldn’t remember whether this money belonged to Dafa or himself and had to submit the money to the material center. Master said in Fa Teaching Given at the 2014 San Francisco Fa Conference, "Let me talk about something specific. Dafa disciples have launched one Dafa project after another, and some disciples are doing business out in the ordinary world and want to make contributions to Dafa, yet I must remind you that your accounting books and records need to be clear and clean. The reason is, with whatever you do, it will be the human side of a Dafa disciple that’s seen doing it, and when human beings do things, human attachments act up. When you loosen standards for yourself and do things as you please, gods don’t look at the matter the way you do. If the financial activities of a Dafa project are not solidly managed, and if someone’s motives are really not right, then the sins will be enormous, because what you did is not just a personal stain, but is undermining the way of Dafa disciples. "
We still had attachments and the old forces could make trouble by seizing our loopholes, and deliberately eliminate Dafa disciples. We had to keep a solid record and not get muddleheaded in thinking that there were no problems with ourselves or fellow practitioners in how we had acted.
I became more and more aware of the seriousness of the problem, after looking within and correcting myself. I started paying more attention to the overstocking and wasting of materials locally. To save money and time, truth clarification materials were purchased by a big material production center and then uniformly distributed. Due to lack of communication, fellow practitioners in small material centers were too timid to refuse unusable materials. There were some backlogged materials that had expired after two years. When fellow practitioners were kidnapped, practitioners from other material centers had to clear out and transfer a car-full of documents. I shared with some practitioners that some practitioners in the big material center had become strong minded due to being independent for a long time and therefore hard to communicate with. I helped the practitioners in small material centers to clean up their backlogged materials. Although they felt embarrassed, after realizing how serious it was, they all wanted to face the problems, to be responsible to the Fa.
In dealing with issues, I solved many problems with Master’s help. For example, no material center was accepting paper that was coated on both sides, because it was too thick to put into the printers. They all had a pile of such papers. Thankfully the paper worked with my printer. But what could I use such thick paper for? Suddenly an idea hit me, “Why not use it to print the word ‘Lucky’ downloaded from the Minghui website, since it would be New Year soon? Fellow practitioners welcomed the newly printed material. Another example was a box of ink for a six-color printer, which had been there for over two years. There was no such printer, so practitioners had put aside the light colors after using up the dark colors. I didn’t want to waste them, because it was a waste of money. Suddenly I had an idea that we could mix the light color ink with black in the ratio of 2:1. We had very good results; the printed materials looked normal and were then used up.
Some elderly practitioners liked to personally keep everything from the material center. Over a few years, their families had accumulated a considerable amount of stock. The practitioners might think that there was no problem in keeping the weekly information articles, Master’s new lectures, the calendars, couplets and amulets, etc. since they had already donated money to the center. Actually we donated to Dafa, not to ourselves. You would be taking Dafa resources by keeping them. It was not easy to share this with these fellow practitioners. Some didn’t welcome my sharing; others even thought that I was trying to collect money in a different way. I believed that it was an opportunity for me to make up for my mistakes. Without thinking too much about the result, I cherished the opportunity and patiently talked to the practitioners. I really didn’t want any fellow practitioners to have a problem regarding such issues, since everybody was trying their best.
Translated from http://www.zhengjian.org/node/150815
