Practitioners Benefit When Their Shortcomings Are Pointed Out with Compassion

By a Falun Dafa practitioner in China

(Clearwisdom.net) Once when I shared experiences with two practitioners, one practitioner noticed that I was not treasuring the time on hand, and he said to me in surprise: "Now the time is so pressing; some practitioners feel sorry if they waste even one minute, and feel that they have not done their best for sentient savings. It is hard for me to imagine how you could waste your time like this!" His words shocked me. I felt genuine regret.

I truly admired these practitioners' honesty, so I asked them to point out any other attachments of mine that I had not realized. One practitioner smiled and said, "I have to tell you, two other practitioners noticed an issue but they did not tell you about it. It is good that you can see scenes in other dimensions, but please don't become attached to it, as it may cause 'transformation according to mind intent.'" As a matter of fact, I do not have an attachment to my supernormal abilities, but why had other practitioners thought that I did? It must be some other attachments that I have. I looked inward and found that whenever I talked about what I saw in other dimensions, I always had the attachment of showing off. These practitioners saw my attachment of showing off.

From these two practitioners, I also found lots of my other shortcomings, such as talking about things at too high a level when clarifying the truth, not having enough compassion, and other issues. I benefited greatly from their insights.

From this incident, I realized that when we see practitioners' attachments, we should point them out immediately. This is benevolence toward other practitioners. At the same time, you have to ask yourself why it was that you saw other practitioners' shortcomings. Was it an accident? Or is it that Master arranged for you to see it so you could remind fellow practitioners? Why do we sometimes hesitate to point them out? Are we afraid of embarrassing practitioners or is it due to some other reasons? Is this an attachment also?

Actually we should not worry too much about it. If our sole purpose is to help another practitioner to improve, how could he not accept our criticism as a fellow cultivator? Master said,

"If a person is free of any personal notions, isn't motivated by self-interest, and is truly looking to benefit others, then when he points out another person's shortcoming or tells the other person what's right, that person will be moved to tears." ("Teaching the Fa at the Conference in Singapore")

We all have to continue to correct ourselves, to purify ourselves in order to better save sentient beings. If we let fellow practitioners lose a good opportunity to improve because of our own attachments, it is a loss to Dafa. The above is my personal understanding. Please kindly point out any mistakes.

March 7, 2005

Chinese version available at http://www.minghui.org/mh/articles/2005/3/8/96831.html

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