A Novel by Zhong Fangqiong

Part II. A New Life

Preface: After I started to practice Falun Gong, I experienced for the first time in my life what the saying "A body is light when it's disease free" means.

In August 1998, a classmate of mine at the driving school started to practice Falun Gong. She is one year older than me and we were very close friends. She told me, "A fellow practitioner in Shahepu Place who used to be bald has grown back hair after practicing Falun Gong. And the white hair of an older woman from Lianhua Village has turned black. Why don't you also come to practice!" I replied, "Qigong exercise is for those who are elderly and retired. I won't do that. I will enjoy my life more by eating better food and wearing better clothes. If I die, I die." She felt sorry for me because I was letting a great opportunity go by. Every Saturday night, I would go to her home and play mahjiang with her husband and his two friends from work. Sometimes we played all night. She wouldn't play with us and instead would read Falun Gong books all by herself. I couldn't understand her huge change.

When Chengdu City's No. 3 Loop started construction, my business became busier. My good friend's husband was the manager of a Forage Factory in Meishan City and was equipped with a Peugeot sedan. She helped with the driving. When winter came, both of us were busy with our own businesses. She and her husband seldom came back to Chengdu. Before the Spring Festival, she called me, "I bought you some special treats for the Spring Festival. They are all Meishan City's special local products. Please come over to pick them up." When I saw her, I found she had become better looking. Her son used to call her "ugly mom." She used to have a lot of freckles on her face, but now her face glowed with a flawless complexion. I asked her curiously, "Where did you go for the operation on your skin? It's very well done." She said, "I haven't had any operation on my skin." I continued, "Which beauty parlor do you visit for facial skin care? What lotion do you use?" She said, "I haven't visited any beauty parlor, neither do I put any lotion on." I didn't believe her so I touched her face with my fingers. She said, "Don't you believe me? Let me wash my face to show you." She immediately rinsed her face with cold water. I asked, "Then why has your skin become so beautiful?" She said, "Through practicing Falun Gong." A negative feeling immediately came over me, and my mind couldn't believe her. I said sarcastically, "Your Falun Gong is so divine, it's something that can only be found in heaven, not in the human world." She didn't say anything. Even though I said those words, I had to admit that her skin had indeed improved.

Back home, I thought to myself how I had been going for weekly facial treatments without fail for the past six years to [remove] the discoloration on my face. What's more, I had taken a lot of Chinese herbal medicines prescribed by Chengdu City's Chinese Medicine Hospital. I also had used a lot of famous healthcare products made in China and overseas, such as Chun Bo Lao (forever young), pearl powder, Sunrider and so on. I even used an expensive American facial serum on the birthmark and had acupuncture treatments numerous times. I'd spent over ten thousand yuan to improve my facial appearance but it was all in vain. How did her dark freckles that I'd seen for over ten years completely disappear like that?

Out of curiosity, I went back to see her but I was too embarrassed to ask her about Falun Gong directly. She read my mind and gave me a tape of Teacher Li Hongzhi's lecture. She also quoted a line from Teacher, "You can kowtow every day until your forehead bleeds and burn bundle after bundle of incense, but it's still useless. It only works when you really cultivate your mind." On hearing this sentence of Teacher's, I suddenly understood everything. It was as if all the things that I couldn't understand before suddenly made sense. No wonder I didn't receive any special blessing from the Buddhas after I spent so much money and time burning incense and worshiping them. I couldn't understand it before. In order to cure my disease and have a happy family, I put all my hope on Buddhas and Taos. I once donated money to build a Buddha statue in a Guanyin temple in my hometown. I also paid an elderly artisan to put gold coating on the statue of Bodhisattva in Jintang County's Tongzi Temple. I went to temples in Chengdu City and went to Leshan Buddha statue, and drove to Shijing Temple to burn incense. I went to the Baiyun Temple on Qingcheng Mountain to donate money and asked the Buddhas for help. I even went to the Shaolin Temple in Songshan City, Henan Province. I also visited Mount Hua in Shaanxi Province to ask the Gods and Buddhas for help. However, all of my hopes were shattered. No Gods or Buddhas blessed me to get rid of my disease. I continued to live in despair. It turned out to be useless to depend on others; instead I had to cultivate my heart, and assimilate to Truthfulness, Compassion, Tolerance. I thought the teaching of Falun Gong made sense to me and I decided to give it a try.

But I still thought myself as someone with a high social status and felt that I'd lose face if my acquaintances saw me sitting on the ground with some ordinary elderly women. I didn't want to go to a Falun Gong practice site on my own and decided to wait until the following Sunday when my good friend came back to town so I could join her at a practice site near her home. When I arrived there, I saw around 100 people standing there doing the exercises with their eyes closed, their movements were in unison and looked beautiful. There were elderly people, young children and well-mannered young people. I looked everywhere but couldn't find my friend and her son. I then drove to her home to look for her. When I arrived at the gate in front of her house, I saw her and her son running out of the door on their way to the practice site. After we got to the practice site, she asked a fellow practitioner to teach me and she joined the group exercises. I asked him lots of questions, and that practitioner patiently answered them all. At the end, he told me, "There are several practice sites in the Xinhua Park near your house. One at the front entrance, one at the back gate, and some inside the park, and there is one in the garden of Chenghua Elementary School. You can go to any of the practice sites. The practitioners there will all be glad to teach you patiently and at no charge."

At 6:30 a.m. on March 5, 1999, I arrived on time at the practice site at the front entrance of Xinhua Park. A female practitioner with the surname of Li taught me the standing exercises there. Later she taught me to do the sitting meditation. Shortly after I sat down with my two legs crossed, my legs began to ache, my heart started to feel restless, and both of my feet looked like purple eggplant from the pain. Sweat came out on my head, and wet my underwear. I was very uncomfortable. At the moment, I remembered Teacher's words, and decided to endure the pain. I forced myself to endure it. After a while, I saw myself sitting on a dam beside a quiet and tranquil temple, wearing a golden Buddhist robe. The robe was shiny and emitted light. It was so wonderful. I felt the temple was my home and I hadn't been back for thousands and tens of thousand of years. I became so excited about returning home; I tried to control my tears from dropping down my face lest people would see them. But I couldn't stop the excitement inside, and I finally started to sob.

The exercise music stopped. I opened my eyes. Everybody was getting ready to leave. I felt there was still something rotating in my legs. At that time, several old women came over to console me, "You can take your legs down if you feel it's too painful. Don't cry while practicing." I then told them what I just saw. They said, "You have a good inborn quality. Your celestial eye has opened." "What is the celestial eye? This is my first time to do the exercises; I don't even have a book yet." I told them again, "I feel there is something rotating in my legs." They told me, "It's Falun rotating there. Do you have illness there?" I thought, "They are more effective then fortune tellers. I have seen many fortune tellers, but none of them was so efficacious." They told me, "The Falun is adjusting your body. It'll adjust wherever you have illnesses." They asked me to put my legs down, but after I put my legs down, the Falun was still rotating. They told me to move the two soles of my feet so that they wouldn't face each other. I did that but the Falun was still rotating.

On the same day, I received a Dafa book. I began to read eagerly when I got home. Ever since then, I've never overslept, and never played mahjiang. Every day I arrived at the practice site at 6:30 a.m. on time, and went to work after that. After arranging the work well, I'd grasp every minute to read the book till late night. I changed the pop music cassettes in my car to Teacher's lecture tapes.

First published in English at: http://www.pureinsight.org/pi/articles/2004/9/20/2535.html

Posting date: 10/18/2004
Original article date: 10/18/2004
Category: Open Forum
Chinese version available at http://www.minghui.org/mh/articles/2004/7/17/79559.html

 Yearly Archive  Printer Version