Treat Every Sentient Being with a Compassionate Heart

(Clearwisdom.net) In July 2000, my husband and I were arrested and detained for going to Beijing to appeal for Falun Gong. While I was in detention, my husband's whole family became a mess. My husband's brother and his wife, and my husband's sister all put the blame on me, claiming I was the one who had driven their family to destruction. They even badmouthed me in front of my father. They said they didn't believe I would be released, and if I did get released they would spit on me upon my return.

My father couldn't put up with all this so he started a fight with them. His sister-in-law later even went to the police department to report me, claiming I had been keeping constant contact with other Falun Gong practitioners and hoping the authorities would increase my sentence.

At that time, my son was only a fourth grader and couldn't take care of himself yet. Both of my parents-in-law used to practice Falun Gong, but they didn't dare to keep my son with them. Nobody else in the family wanted to help care for my son either. In the end it was my father that took my son with him and looked after him.

I didn't learn about these circumstances until I was released on medical parole from the labor camp in 2001. My sister and my son told me about all of it. I was extremely pained after hearing what they told me and my heart was broken. I had treated my husband's family very well. Why had they treated me and my son this way when I was in difficulty? I started to hate them, and I never wanted to see them again.

Compassionate Teacher saw my hatred and gave me some hints in a dream. I was able to see my predestined relationship with people in my husband's family. After waking up from my dream, I felt very ashamed of myself. As a veteran practitioner who obtained the Fa in 1997, I still had such poor xinxing. Teacher said in Zhuan Falun,

"In cultivation, when you're really having trouble with somebody, or when other people treat you badly, it could be one of two scenarios. One is that you might have mistreated them in your previous life. You feel wronged, 'Why are they treating me like that?' Well, why did you treat them like that before? You say, 'I don't know anything about back then. This lifetime has nothing to do with that lifetime.' But it doesn't work like that. There's another scenario. When you're clashing with somebody, there's the issue of transforming karma involved, so when we're handling each of them we should be very forgiving, and we shouldn't act like ordinary people. At work there's interaction with other people, and the same goes for other environments where you do work or if you're self-employed. It's impossible not to have any contact with the outside world--at a minimum you interact with your neighbors."

I came to realize that I must remove my hatred and treat my husband's family with kindness since they are also sentient beings waiting to be saved. With such thoughts, I began to have a better relationship with my husband's family. Through truth-clarification, some of them have quit the CCP and its affiliated organizations and my father-in-law has resumed cultivation.

Oftentimes we feel we already understand the Fa principles. But in our cultivation, we still tend to unknowingly judge everything with our human notions and don't use the Fa principles to guide us to look inward and rectify ourselves.

I wrote this article hoping to help fellow practitioners realize the issue I just raised. We should share experiences and elevate together.

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