A Brief Suggestion About Quoting from Teacher's Articles

By Falun Dafa Practitioners in China

(Clearwisdom.net) The articles on Clearwisdom are published throughout the world, not just for us Falun Gong practitioners, but also for all people. Therefore I suggest that when fellow practitioners write experience-sharing articles, to add "Teacher said" whenever they quote Teacher. Alternatively, they may add a footnote to correctly identify the quotation. We have to identify "Teacher" as the author of a quote because I think this is also one aspect of respecting the Fa as Falun Dafa practitioners.

If we quote Teacher's words without specifying that they are Teacher's words, but simply add quotation marks, it should be clear to Falun Dafa practitioners but not to everyday people that these are Teacher's words. It would be easy for non-practitioners to confuse these words with common words, since people routinely put quotation marks around quotes of well-known people, especially when they are important to make people pay attention. Thus, quoting Teacher's words without specifying would imply lack of respect for the Fa, and some people may easily take fragments of sentences, or copy or change the original wording, thus changing the Fa. The consequences may be serious.

More importantly, we are Falun Dafa disciples of the Fa-rectification period, and what we are doing today is creating the future and setting a standard for the lives of the people in the future. And so we must listen to what Teacher says and set a high standard for ourselves all the time and everywhere. Every thought of ours should be based on the Fa. The Fa requires us to walk the most righteous path. We must adjust as soon as we find any inadequacy.

Additionally, I also found that many practitioners made mistakes while quoting Teacher's articles. The reason could be that they are trying to quote from memory instead of copying word by word. This is understandable if it comes from a practitioner in China who may not have a book. However, it is not acceptable if it comes from a practitioner overseas. At the very least it implies that the practitioner does not seriously study the Fa. Therefore I suggest that everybody should copy exactly from the original article without missing one word when quoting from Teacher's books. The practitioners outside China can directly copy and paste from the web site containing the Falun Dafa books.

Furthermore, the Falun Dafa books web site also has a "search articles" function. If you cannot remember Teacher's original words, or if you are unsure about the origin of the words, you can search using this handy function.

The web site containing the "article search" function is located at http://www.falundafa.org/eng/search_eng.htm

The above is only my own understanding; please correct me if it is incomplete.

June 10, 2003

Chinese version available at http://www.minghui.org/mh/articles/2003/7/1/53252.html

 Yearly Archive   Printer Version