Thoughts Inspired by "Searching Inward" and "Sending Forth Righteous Thoughts"

(Clearwisdom.net) Recently, I felt overwhelmed by a bunch of problems that kept cropping up. My legs started to hurt, my bicycle was broken, and my mother suddenly became sick. I used "being busy with truth clarifying work" as an excuse and tried to deal with these problems in a superficial manner. I thought to myself, "The pain in my legs is caused by my karma, so I need to endure it to pay back the karma. If it had been evil interference, I would have sent forth righteous thoughts to eliminate it." I then took the bicycle to the repair shop and asked my older sister to accompany our mother to see the doctor.

Several days passed, and the pain in my legs did not lessen a bit. I suddenly thought about how Master Li told us to search inward when encountering problems. I thought to myself, "It must be that I have my own problems. But what on earth are they?" I thought for a while, but something else came up so I stopped thinking about it.

Late at night, I gnashed my teeth and managed to bring one of my legs over the other to do the sitting meditation. I felt so much pain in my right leg that it felt as hard as a rock. As I reached a tranquil state, I suddenly realized that I was still carrying around the attachments of laziness, dependence on others and the pursuit of comfort in my truth clarifying work. In addition, these attachments were exerting a great deal of influence on me. I was very surprised. I realized that I had searched inward again and again, but I always let the matter drop before discovering the real cause of my problems. I then asked myself, "Is what I am doing really cultivation? Is this truly assisting the Teacher to rectify the Fa?" A feeling of shame and self-blame beyond description arose in my heart.

When I sent forth righteous thoughts right after that, it felt so tranquil and magical. The next day, everything returned to normal.

This experience strengthened my confidence in "searching inward" and continuing to "send forth righteous thoughts." At the same time, I also found the root cause of why I tend to do things with a great deal of fanfare at the start and quickly wind down to almost nothing toward the end. In the past, when encountering conflicts or problems, the first thing that came to my mind was "eliminate the evil, eliminate the evil." I did tell myself to search inward. However, I often only searched for a moment or two, and I would not be able to find the root cause and eliminate it. It was mainly because I did not treat it seriously enough.

"Searching inward" is an important element in Fa-rectification cultivation. "Sending righteous thoughts" is eliminating the evil, and eliminating the evil is doing Fa-rectification work. The two are interconnected, and neither can be neglected.
Chinese version available at http://www.minghui.org/mh/articles/2002/1/18/23395.html

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