My Thoughts on Changing Our Notions After Following Teacher's Instructions to Change Certain Characters in Falun Dafa Books

Written by a Dafa practitioner in China

(Clearwisdom.net) After Teacher Li published the new article "Revision," [1] I followed Teacher Li's requirement to revise the characters in Teacher's books. In the beginning, I found I couldn't get used to the changes because the misusages of "de," "di," and "jin" have continuously been in everyday people's thoughts for many years. However, I think that for Dafa practitioners, only when we follow Teacher Li's requirements are we doing what is right. Therefore, I ignored the restraining force of any notions and insisted on following Teacher Li's requirements to revise one Dafa book after another. In the end, the more revisions I made, the more I could understand the implications behind revising the characters. In fact, many wrong notions of everyday people have been in people's minds for many years, and we don't think to revise them, and then all kinds of interference from the outside makes us even more confused.

For example, at present when we validate Dafa, some practitioners are very sensitive to everyday people's concepts of "police" and "government," etc. For many years, police and government have been synonyms for "justice" and some practitioners have the notion that "we cannot go against them" -- they feel that as long as we mention the mistakes of the government, we seem to be getting involved in politics or fighting against someone.

In actuality, our truth clarification is for the benefit of those people who can listen to the truth, and is not for fighting with anyone. We just want to stop them from persecuting Falun Gong practitioners, stop them from destroying the conscience of Chinese people, and help people have a good future. The means that we have taken to achieve this purpose are exposing the persecution and clarifying the truth.

In Zhuan Falun, Teacher Li tells us that "Zhen-Shan-Ren is the Sole Criterion to Discern Good and Bad People." We cannot use the regulations of certain government officials as the criteria to discern good from bad. After understanding this principle, many Dafa practitioners openly and nobly wrote appeal letters and went to police departments, appeal offices, law firms, and other places to expose the evil and clarify the truth.

For example, in recent period, a practitioner in our area passed away. Faced with everyday people's misunderstandings, we had some notions in the beginning: "Practitioners should be all right after they practice Dafa and we hope people will agree with this." Such notions were preventing us from clarifying the truth. After we changed these understandings, we talked to people from the perspective that practicing Falun Gong is just a belief and also needs the protection of the law, and people who practice it need to have a healthy psychological state, and we need an environment to practice openly and nobly. However, under the persecution of Jiang's regime, we have lost the environment to practice the Falun Gong exercises in public and endure all kinds of pressures. Under such circumstances, what can guarantee that a practitioner won't become ill? Therefore, the death of that practitioner was not caused by the practice of Falun Dafa, but should be attributed to the persecution. As our notion changed, the confusion of everyday people was resolved.

When some practitioners were learning to use computers, they felt that they didn't want to learn because they were older, so they unconsciously accepted the old forces' arrangements. Later, we realized that actually the old forces want to create all kinds of illusions to stop Dafa practitioners from validating Dafa. When we completely deny such misunderstandings in our minds, the wisdom to learn to use computers keeps manifesting in front of us. Quite a number of practitioners in their 60's and 70's could access the internet after a few hours of training. Therefore, I feel that during the process of Dafa practitioners validating Dafa, no matter how much confusion and how many difficulties and dangers there are, we have to follow Teacher Li's instructions and keep changing various notions that we have developed over a long period of time and that we don't even realize exist. Then the path for us to validate Dafa will become wider and wider, and more and more mature.

[1] Teacher Li's article instructing Chinese-speaking students to revise certain characters in the Chinese version Dafa books. There was no change to the meaning, so there were no changes in the translations of those books.

Written on August 20, 2004

Chinese version available at http://www.minghui.org/mh/articles/2004/8/22/82268.html

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