By Wang Jing, a Falun Dafa Practitioner in Shijiazhuang City, Hebei Province

(Clearwisom.net) As a result of the persecution by the authorities in China, it is very common that Falun Dafa practitioners there are now facing various financial problems. Many of them have lost their jobs. The practitioners who own businesses are often arrested, sent to forced labor camps, sentenced to prison terms by the authorities, and driven into bankruptcy as a result. Some of them have accumulated a lot of debt. Such atrocities have caused a lot of interference to practitioners leading normal lives and to their efforts in validating the Fa and saving sentient beings. In addition, it creates a negative image of practitioners in the eyes of everyday people. We must pay sufficient attention to this issue and have a good understanding of it from the perspective of the Fa. In the following article, I would like to share my preliminary understanding in this respect.

As soon as we were released from the forced labor camp, my younger brother and I opened a restaurant using our life savings. In spite of our tremendous effort and the sufferings we endured, we ended up taking a loss due to our choosing a poor location and the high cost of rent. In fact, within only half a year, our loss totaled about twenty thousand yuan. Since we lost all of our money, we had to work for others earning merely 500 yuan a month. Often, my spouse (a non-practitioner) took away all of my salary, leaving me penniless. Nevertheless, I did not take the financial difficulty seriously because as a Falun Dafa practitioner, I took fame and gain lightly. "Compared to many other practitioners," I thought, "my situation is much better - at least I don't have to worry about food and shelter." To make truth-clarification brochures, many practitioners donated their savings and even their pensions. I started to feel sorry for myself because, due to my lack of good understanding from the perspective of Fa, I mistakenly took my poor financial situation as a test of letting go of my attachments to fame and gain.

Recently, after I studied Master Li's teachings once again, I was suddenly awakened to the issue. In "Teaching the Fa at the 2004 International Fa Conference in New York," Master said,

"Dafa disciples are walking on a righteous path in validating the Fa and are saving all beings, so all aspects of that path, including financial conditions, should come together. If you don't do well in certain regards the evil will take advantage of the gap."

The financial problems that Falun Dafa practitioners are currently facing are not inevitable. They are not a test of fame and gain, either. They are the interference from the evil old forces to drain us financially in the name of testing practitioners' attachments to fame and gain. The real purpose of the old forces is to prevent us from saving all beings by persecuting us financially. As a result, we must change our incorrect understanding that deviates from the Fa. We must not passively suffer these pains. We must be very clear that doing our everyday jobs is not only to demonstrate practitioners' compassion toward everyday people and to maintain the Fa at the level of everyday people, but a needed part of accomplishing our mission of validating the Fa, breaking the arrangements of the old forces, and saving all sentient beings.

The lesson I learned from my own process of understanding is: we should not look at any issue from an isolated viewpoint of an individual's cultivation; only by melting into the Fa, can we avoid confusion. This is of paramount importance at the last stage of the Fa-rectification. In many cases, it is a lack of good understanding of the Fa that leaves loopholes for evil demons to exploit in forcing us to suffer injustices.

I am not writing to instruct anyone to take any particular actions, but to share my understanding of the Fa. I strongly believe that as long as we keep improving our understanding of the Fa and filling in our gaps of misunderstanding the Fa, we will be able to prevent evil beings from exploiting our gaps. This way, things will naturally go smoothly. As Master teaches us in Zhuan Falun,

"The cultivation is up to you, gong is up to the master."

Posting date: 4/15/2005
Original article date: 4/14/2005
Category: Practitioners' Insights
Chinese version available at http://www.minghui.org/mh/articles/2005/3/27/98234.html

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