Eliminating Evil and Saving Sentient Beings through the Minghui/Clearwisdom Website
I want to share with you my experiences of the work that I do
on a Dafa website and also to tell you about my downfalls and my newly gained
understandings throughout this process. A short description of how we started out I am the editor of the Russian version of the Minghui
website. When I was offered to take on this responsibility in the year 2000,
there were only four translators. Although in Russia I received a professional
education that prepared me for editing work, I could hardly imagine how I could
do such important work at that time. I felt like I didn't have enough
experience, and didn't have a deep enough understanding of the big picture of
what this important work entailed and what it could influence and affect in the
world of cultivation. However, it had to be done. I understood one thing:
Minghui is the only source of truthful information about Falun Dafa for the
Russian-speaking community. This site must fulfill its role for practitioners
and society during this period of Fa-rectification. At first we could hardly put up five to six articles a day,
and almost every translator had to submit one to two articles daily. I was
sending out the article assignments to the translators, coordinating their
return, posting to the web and doing all the editing. This method of doing
things continued on for years, until I started to seriously analyze the
situation and was helped to recognize some of my shortcomings by other veteran
practitioners. I finally started to acknowledge my attachments, which acted as
impediments on the road to improving the way the site functioned and developed. Dafa work is cultivation At that time it seemed to me that no one could do this job
better than I. I didn't recognize anyone else who could share at least some
responsibilities with me, aside from the actual article translation. Aside from
the work for the website, I also actively participated in editing Teacher's new
articles and lectures. All of these things shortened my time for improving
coordination with my fellow practitioner-translators and contributing to our
Whole Body. We should have made more time for Fa study and
experience sharing. I was doing a lot of Dafa work, meanwhile I was decreasing
my time for studying the Fa and almost entirely stopped performing the
exercises, even though I tried to maximize my time by sleeping five to six hours
a day. When the situation became critical, I was finally able to look within
myself. Other practitioners with benevolence in their hearts started pointing
out my shortcomings. I then realized that everything that was happening was not
due to my attempts to improve the quality of Dafa work. On the contrary, it was
a manifestation of my attachments to finishing my own work without help, my
selfishness, the wish to establish myself in front of others and most
importantly the result of my lack of trust in others. I then thought to myself:
How can I fulfill the responsibility bestowed upon me by Teacher with such
attachments? Then I realized it is not enough to theoretically know how a
practitioner should act, study the Fa and do Dafa work, it is necessary to
immediately apply these standards to my own behavior and to live my life
according to the principles laid out in Zhuan Falun. I
realized I should set my mind upon leaving all human sentiments behind and doing
the three things that Teacher told us to do well. I also came to
understand that Teacher utilized this situation to reveal my attachments. I
discovered an attachment to coordinating and being in charge, and understood
that I need to learn how to be more patient when working with others, to respect
others' point of view and to incorporate their input. This was a very important
realization. At that point, conflicts were arising from all sides and
problems were appearing. It wasn't easy to start the process of change because
the work patterns that needed alteration had been laid out years earlier. The
hardest thing to change was one's own view of the situation. As soon as I
enlightened to the real situation, the rest was easier to settle, because
righteous thoughts lead to the correct path and things start to fall into place.
I was acquainted with a fellow practitioner who introduced me to Dafa, however I
neglected to ask her to help me with the website work. We started working
together. I helped along, and in time she became a co-editor of the site. The
workload became lighter, and suddenly there was a little time to think about
restructuring the way the work was being done and about improving the flow of
work. The special role of the Russian version of Minghui for
Russian practitioners and the ordinary Russian people of the world All of us know about the role of the Minghui website and
about the great emphasis Teacher has put on it from the very beginning. For
Russian practitioners, this website also plays a very big role, even a special
role. Why? Because not all practitioners, even in our time, own computers, and
not everyone that has a computer is connected to the Internet, or their Internet
access is very restricted. This is not a very cheap service in Russia. In other
words, it is very important to help get the materials posted on our site to
those practitioners because that is their only source of information. There are
very few Russian practitioners who know English well enough to be able to access
the English Clearwisdom site. In order to help practitioners with these
problems, the weekly version of Minghui was organized. Articles are picked out
by a practitioner who lives in Russia and posted on the local Falundafa.ru site.
We'd like to post them on our site as well, and these issues are currently being
resolved with the webmaster. In this way, practitioners who have problems with
accessing the Internet can log on only once and download the weekly article
selections. This can also be done by the group coordinators, who then share the
printouts with the rest of the practitioners attending their local group study. Russian practitioners have a lot of unique problems. Factors
such as the influence of China's Communist mentality, and the Russian
government's cooperation with the Chinese regime to suppress Falun Gong, create
a lot of hardships and interference, as well as increases the difficulty with
which practitioners can spread the Fa and clarify the truth to save
sentient beings. Due to my attachments becoming an impediment in the
development of the site, time was lost and we all needed to work harder for what
was missed. I went to a Russian Falun Dafa Experience Sharing Conference and
realized that our site wasn't really being read a lot by practitioners in
Russia. Besides the above-mentioned reasons of why the site wasn't as helpful to
Russian practitioners, the real reason was that the site wasn't performing its
role to its fullest potential at that time. It was time to improve the site's
reputation and to make it such that it could really destroy evil. It needed to
fully reveal the facts of the persecution, allow Russian practitioners to read
the experiences of others who have enlightened to new understandings, and widely
announce the Falun Dafa events happening all over the world. At that time it
seemed to me that by improving our site we could awaken the hearts of our
Russian practitioners and help them catch up to the progress of Fa-rectification.
They would do so by starting to clarify the truth from all angles in order to
diminish the evil's influence and to save as many sentient beings as possible.
While answering questions at the New York Conference in 2007, Teacher said: "At present, the most important thing is to save
sentient beings, save more people! That is the most important thing."
("Fa Teaching at the 2007 New York Fa Conference") Our website also participates in saving people - and this
is precisely the form that Teacher has picked out for us on our way of
cultivation. Because our site is now being read by a large number of people, our
responsibility is great and our efforts, our understanding of the Fa, as well as
our xinxing levels really influence the effectiveness of the
process of saving sentient beings. Positive changes involving site work Several years ago Russian practitioners came to a Dafa
conference from Russia. I went to see them after the conference. We met in a
tiny room of a hotel in Manhattan. We talked about a lot of issues. I started
talking about the importance and meaning of the Minghui site for Russian
practitioners. Teacher helped to strengthen my righteous thoughts and I spoke
about the purpose of the site and about the fact that it was created during the
most difficult time for Dafa. This was done with the goal of letting the world's
people know the truth about Dafa. I noticed that this conversation made an impression on these
practitioners. After returning home, one of the practitioners wrote a letter
about several practitioners in Moscow who would like to become translators for
our site. This way we were able to significantly increase the number of
translated articles that were coming in daily. Aside from the new Moscow
additions, most of the Russian-speaking practitioners in America also decided to
join in on the effort. There appeared even a few practitioners from the Ukraine.
Our team was growing larger and larger. It was becoming more and more difficult
for my co-editor and I to individually send out articles to be translated to
each practitioner and to track down their responses. We decided to split
everyone into groups. We divided the translators by regions: the American group,
the Russian group, the Ukrainian group, a group from the far corners of Russia,
and a group of Russian practitioners with knowledge of Chinese who were
translating directly from Chinese to Russian. In total, five groups were formed.
At that point we had over 30 translators. We delegated the coordination and
assignment of articles to a practitioner, who was previously only working on
translations. Each of the formed groups had a coordinator, so she would sent the
articles that needed to be translated to the coordinators only and they would
then assign them among their group members. The coordinators also keep track of
how many articles each member could handle and regulated the flow of incoming
and outgoing translations. We also picked out several practitioners in each
group that could act as editors for the articles that their group translated. When the site was created, the mission was to spread the
facts of the persecution as much as possible. The site was created in a hurry
because we wanted our media to carry the truth about Dafa. We hardly thought
about the quality of the translations and about the professionalism we put into
our work. Now it was time to think about these things. At present, several
groups have a multi-step process of preparing the translations for web
publishing. First, the article is translated, then another practitioner reads
the translation and polishes it, then another practitioner edits. This way, the
articles posted on the net are of a much better quality than before. It became clear that for all the people working for the
Minghui website to work harmoniously, it became necessary to create our One
Body. That is, to study the Fa together and share experiences. That was a big
omission in our work before. So, every other week we started to have meetings
for the translators of our site. First, we study the Fa for about an hour, then
we speak about the work of our website, and about our problems and plans, and
then we share our cultivation experience. I usually send a notice in advance to
all translators the outline of the next meeting, so they will know the topics we
are going to discuss and have time to think about it, maybe write down some
experiences to share. We always share our impressions and understanding of
important US events, public meetings and actions with Russian
practitioners-translators during the meeting. In fact, the translators are the
first recipients of the updated Falun Dafa information, and they are able to
pass this important information to practitioners in Russia and other regions.
These meetings became a revelation for all of us: we really got to know each
other better, but most importantly, it gave us an opportunity to improve
together in the Fa and it has positively affected all work on our website. The
importance of Teamspeak both for cultivation and Dafa work cannot be
underestimated. Recently, we decided to try to use our Teamspeak for one more
purpose: we started to have special Teamspeak meetings for improving the
polishing and editing. First, I did not really know how to carry this out, but I
was certain that we needed to raise the quality of the translations. I decided
to try to do it in the following way: I sent in advance the same copies of 2-3
articles to each translator and underlined the sentences that we were going to
talk about at the meeting. This way, they had time to look them through and
think about the way to translate them best. Then, at the meeting we would
analyze each sentence, correct mistakes and emphasize why the corrections were
necessary. We analyzed different topics: grammatical, stylistic and syntactic.
Sometimes I do not underline anything so that translators could find places
which need to be corrected themselves. I also do my best to help translators to
be active and to participate in our work and discussion. Sometimes I choose to
work on particular mistakes. We have already had about 6 such meetings.
Practitioners say that this helps them in their translation work and it's very
effective. I'd like to mention one more thing. All of us graduated from
school quite a long time ago. Some of us either forgot or never even knew many
grammar rules. The Russian language has a rather difficult grammar, and it is
really important to use it correctly. If a comma is used incorrectly (and in the
Russian language the rules for punctuation marks are more strict), that can
immediately "betray" the general level of literacy of the author of
the article. It's not only the practitioners who read our website. Therefore, we
recently have decided that during such meetings we'll do a brief, 10-15 minute
review of grammar rules. We have already done one brief review of this kind, and
next time another practitioner will prepare a review of another rule. It might
be that we haven't chosen the best format yet. A lot still needs to be thought
through and improved, but the main thing is that this process has begun and has
already shown results. At the present time, we receive an average of 12-15 articles
per day from our translators. Sometimes it is less, sometimes even more.
Therefore, it is possible for us to translate all recommended and important
articles without exception from the Clearwisdom website. Currently, we try to
publish no less than 4 articles about persecution, articles about traditional
culture, and of course we translate practitioners' experiences and insights. On
average, we publish no less than 10 articles per day, and often up to 12-13
articles per day. Certainly, there are also failures, but we have less and less
of them. At the present time, we are in the middle of getting several more
editors ready for work, and this will enable us to publish up to 15 articles per
day, including the articles that are currently being left behind due to needing
corrections. Additional editors will be able to correct and prepare these
articles so that they will be ready to publish. We have already involved
approximately 5 translators in this editorial work. We also have some plans for the future. We would like to
publish on our website video information about the actions which take place in
Russia and the Commonwealth of Independent States. This is the idea of a
practitioner from Ukraine who works for NTDTV. He told us that there is a group
of reporters and cameramen who would like to do special reports for the Minghui
website. Now this project is under consideration. In conclusion, I'd like to say that our work depends on the
efforts of every one of us. Daily release of our website is a sum of very many
tasks, and it is the result of many people's work who do different things for
the website. If anyone on our team has some kind of omission, (it is just like
in the One body of Dafa disciples), it is reflected in the whole body. My understanding is that a real effect of eliminating evil
and saving people through every concrete article is gained by the mutual efforts
of everyone: starting with the person who chooses the article for translation
and sends it to the coordinator, then the coordinator, who sends the article to
the translator, then the translator, who sends the article for correcting and
editing, then the article finally getting to the editors and published. Everyone
who participates in this process brings in their energy and understanding,
including the author of the article. That's why the article will carry the
effect that we ourselves generated. In this way, our website will carry in many
respects that power and that effect which corresponds to our group level. The
more pure and righteous our thoughts, the more firm our faith in Dafa and
Teacher, the deeper our understanding of the importance of this Dafa work, the
more powerful will be the energy of truth clarification and saving of the people
that emanates from our website. A little about personal cultivation Daily work for the website, a large amount of correspondence
that requires answers to questions; work with translations of Teacher's
articles, coordination of translation of the Kilgour-Matas Report, coordination
of translations of the articles for the two Internet Conferences of
practitioners from Mainland China (we have translated more than 50 articles), my
job in the human world, household matters, care of parents -- all of it has to
be combined with daily Fa study and doing the exercises. Sometimes I feel so
tired, my righteous thoughts weaken, there is a sensation of pressure upon me
and it seems as if I have no more strength left to continue living in such a
way. Then I think back to a story told to me by one of the veteran
practitioners. She was doing very important and especially responsible work for
Dafa, there was a lot of pressure on her at the time, a lot of work needed to be
done, and she was in a similar state. When she felt she had no more strength to
go on, and that she gave every bit of her will to get the job done, it still
wasn't enough to complete her task. She decided to share her troubles with her
mother, another veteran practitioner. Then her mother said to her: "You can
do it; it is necessary for the future." It was as if Master put these words
into her mouth. When I think back to this story, I feel ashamed. My weakness and
my subconscious desire for comfort is what makes me question myself, and now I
understand that when our thoughts start with Dafa, when they are rational and
without human emotion, there is nothing that is impossible. Our abilities and
resources are boundless, as boundless and immense as this Fa, which brings
salvation to all sentient beings. I wish to thank our benevolent Teacher for the great honor
which he rendered upon us, having given to us an opportunity to participate in
such an important Dafa project. Thank you, Master! Thank you, fellow practitioners!
Chinese version available at
http://www.minghui.org/mh/articles/2007/7/30/159815.html
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