Li Hongzhi
September 4–5, 1998, Geneva
Good day to you!
Among those seated here, there are people who just rushed
here from the Singapore Fa conference, people who
rushed here from other countries and regions, and new students. The main purpose
of our holding a Fa conference is for everyone to draw upon each other’s
experiences to discover their own shortcomings so that they might improve
together in cultivation. At the same time, this event
itself is an occasion for spreading the Fa.[1] Everything we
wish to do is for enabling us to cultivate and improve—it’s by no means about
formalities. So any time in the future when we hold a Fa conference, we have to
adhere to this principle so as to truly help our students make progress. We have
to ensure that before we can hold such conferences. Too many experience-sharing
conferences too often will easily bring about a kind of competition, where you
run one way, I do it another, etc., while everybody holds tight to the human
mindset. That won’t do. All of us have to proceed from the Fa and hold
conferences like this entirely for students’ cultivation.
Quite a few of you in the audience are veteran students. I’m
really happy to see all of you. You are really improving yourselves by leaps and
bounds on the path of cultivation. You can’t see the changes in yourselves as of
yet, but the changes are tremendous. You’ll be able to confirm and see it in the
not-too-distant future. So I’m really pleased.
During this period in which you
cultivate, by listening to the Fa that I teach at Fa
conferences and continually studying Zhuan Falun in depth, you can see
many different manifestations of the truth, and you have gained a different and
deeper understanding of the Fa. Along with this, I’d like to discuss further
with you the process of your cultivation and the concept of another type of
cosmic structure. I’ll first talk about another type of cosmic structure.
There’s something here I’ve got to explain first: The cosmos was actually
constructed by the Fa. So the purpose of my talking about the cosmos definitely
isn’t to propel contemporary science to some higher realm, and it’s not told to
you as some kind of knowledge. It’s to allow you to cultivate. That’s because it
goes hand-in-hand with the Fa. The goal is to have you reach different realms
through cultivation. That is, you are to return to the places in different
realms where you were created, to return to different levels and realms of the
cosmos. This Fa is as immense as the cosmos is large, and that’s still a concept
unknown to your mind. Today I’ll speak from another angle and see whether your
thinking can keep up.
I’ll first talk about the cosmos. To talk about the cosmos is,
to put it another way, to actually discuss matter or the understanding of
matter. Regardless of how advanced modern science is, its understanding of
matter is still extremely shallow. It’s just not even worth mentioning when
compared with the entire cosmos—they can’t be compared. You know that I’ve said
that the cosmos is composed of elementary particles. And what are
the elementary particles composed of, then? It has to be explained in a specific
way. In the concept of different layers of cosmic
bodies (not the different layers of universes), how large are the
cosmic bodies? The expanse of just one cosmic body alone is extremely large. Yet
it’s not like there is
regularity whereby one cosmic body consists of some average
number of layers of
universes. Some consist of upwards of ten thousand layers of
universes. And there are
ones that consist of upwards of 100 million layers of universes. This
concept is extremely vast. So every cosmic body
is an unimaginably vast cosmic expanse.
When people talk about the
concept of the universe, they are basically talking
within the expanse of the number of galaxies that people can recognize. The
expanse that modern science can observe is just the small universe that people
talk about. Let me take Earth as a standpoint. Starting from this small
universe, three thousand small universes of our size constitute the
second-layer universe. Then, three thousand universes
each as large as the second-layer universe constitute the
third-layer universe. Think about it, everyone: The magnification
is quite large. Nevertheless,
this is to talk about an expansion from
one standpoint. But there’s not just one particle the size of Earth in
this universe. Particles roughly the size of our Earth are spread throughout the
universe, and they’re countless. I just spoke of the universes’ magnification
from the standpoint of a single particle. In fact, particles of that size are
spread throughout the entire cosmos. They are in anything and everything. They
all have that kind of expansion system, spanning from large to small, from small
to large. To mankind, even just this layer of small universes is enormous. The
number of planetary particles of different sizes within it is immeasurable. Why?
Because although Buddhas, Gods, and Daos at very high
levels have insight into everything, no one has thought about counting the
specks of dust. A planet within a vast cosmic body is really just like
a speck of dust drifting in the cosmos.
So three thousand universes of
this size continually multiply and expand the range; they
continually multiply and expand the system. At roughly the
one-thousandth
layer, the boundary of this first cosmic
body system is reached. But even that expanse
is not the only one: In the vast cosmos it is still a
particle, and particles of that level, too, pervade the immense cosmos. Beyond
the expanse is a state of complete emptiness. And just
how empty? If any substance in this system were to enter it, it would be the
same as self-disintegration. That’s because any
substance within the range of this system has life, characteristic features,
and thought. To enter into a microscopic emptiness of
that kind would be as if the particle could no longer sustain thought and life.
It would instantly disintegrate. In other words, anything that fell into it
would disintegrate. Explaining the concept this way makes it easy for
us to understand.
Beyond that expanse of emptiness, however, there are
actually yet other cosmic bodies of even larger expanses. But all the same, the
lives in this realm can’t possibly move a single step toward going there, since
factors of an even more microscopic nature exist at more, and even still more,
microscopic levels. Over in the even larger expanses, however, the concepts of
matter and life are different in that cosmic body—the concept of matter no
longer exists. Within the range of cosmic bodies, the number of layers of universes is not the same, but each and
every cosmic body is composed of the most microscopic and elementary particles. And all
of the elementary particles are formed from the nature of the cosmos, Zhen,
Shan, Ren.
The concepts I’m talking about
here are really complex. You need to pay attention since human language is truly limited. For
instance, the largest particulate matter of a certain cosmic body is, as well,
made into a layer of particles of that size
from the infinitesimal particles in its own system. It’s called a horizontal
particle-composition system. That is, the
particles of a substance aren’t only assembled from a vertical microscopic
system, but are themselves at the same time also composed of substances—from
microscopic to larger and even larger—in a system of their own. In other words, the different-sized
particles in every level of that system are themselves systems composed of
microscopic substances. And particles of different sizes at each level of
that system pervade everything. So its particles of different sizes form
horizontal compositional schemes as well. Its most elementary particles and its
level of largest particles are quite far apart from each other.
Then what, ultimately, is the
most original matter? It’s water. But the water I’m
talking about is not the water of our ordinary human
society. Nor is it the water of the rivers, streams, lakes, and oceans that
exist at different levels. This water is what creates all matter and lives of
a cosmic body at a given
level. You can call it “original matter”…
[actually,] you can only call it original
matter. And this kind of water differs from the
concept of water that we understand in the dimension of ordinary human beings.
To be precise, it should be called “still water,” as it doesn’t move. It’s
completely still and motionless. It wouldn’t ripple or splash if you were to
toss something into it.
Now that we’re talking about
water, let’s first talk about the water of the human
world. We can take an example from secular science. As you know, in our society
of ordinary people, contemporary scientists say that there are organic and
inorganic substances. Those are in fact just understandings limited to this
dimension. Matter isn’t only composed of substances of this surface dimension.
Usually scientists classify as “organic substances” the things considered in
this dimension alive—trees, flowers, grass, plants, animals, and human beings.
They’re made of this dimension’s water, in fact. You know that water comprises
more than ninety percent of the body. That is, we
humans are composed of this dimension’s water. I mentioned before that water can
create all things. It’s just that contemporary scientists can’t figure it out.
Yet [as you know] the water of this physical dimension
can grow vegetables. When a vegetable is squeezed again and again in the hands,
eventually nothing will be left but some chlorophyll. And if the chlorophyll is
specially treated, nothing but water will remain. In other words, everything of
this dimension that people consider to be organic substances actually originate
from the water of this dimension. That
means that water forms and creates
everything.
So let me tell you: So-called
inorganic substances are in fact created by water of a higher level. But modern
science can’t recognize this, and so it thinks that those substances aren’t
alive. But they are in fact alive. Their form
of existence is quite different from what modern science can recognize. People
will never recognize their form if modern science continues to evolve with its
current concepts. There was a saying in Chinese cultivation circles of ancient
times: “Immortals are so powerful they can toss a rock into a wok and extract
water from it.” It sounds like a joke, but in reality
it’s no joke. Throughout the entire expanse of this cosmic body that
this universe belongs to, the
most fundamental origin of any object is water. What’s the
more microscopic water like? And what’s
the even more microscopic
water like? It’s inconceivable, unimaginable. So I’ve said
that it can only remain an idea to you.
What I just said was that
particles of different levels all have one most fundamental, most original
element. But those particles as a whole have both vertical and horizontal
arrangements. It’s just like starting from the Earth we’re on: Such and such a
number of galaxies constitute one universe, and then such and such a number of
universes compose a universe of a larger expanse. We take Earth as a starting
point because we human beings are here, and I’m here teaching the Fa. So I take
Earth as a starting point. But Earth isn’t the starting point for all substances
in this universe. We think that all of the substances we see around us are the
most material ones. When I taught the Fa in the past, in order not to confuse
everyone, I said that they were the lowest-level substances. But in reality,
they can’t be regarded as the only kind of material substances. You could call
them “elementary matter.” We can use other terms to refer to them. There is
still super-matter, super super-matter, even more super
super-matter…
Earth occupies the central
position in the dimensions of these Three Realms. It’s in the center vertically,
horizontally, and in terms of granular size. Then there also exist substances
whose masses are even larger than our Earth. It’s not the kind of mass I’ve discussed
before, whereby atoms or atomic nuclei form things of great mass,
it’s not that concept.
Those are all substances that humankind
can recognize. What I’m talking about is super-matter, something that’s not a
substance of the human dimension whatsoever. It surpasses the substances of this
dimension in terms of its
particles and its surface compositional state. So the base point of
the largest super-matter is the edge of the Three Realms, and likewise, the base
point of the smallest matter is at the edge of the Three Realms. The human
dimension, or the base point of matter that humankind knows, lies between the
large and small substances. If you were to call everything of this human
dimension “matter,” then the things in the Three Realms that are smaller than
substances of the human world could only be said to be non-matter, and those
even smaller substances would be called non-non-matter, and so on until the
smallest particles in the Three Realms were reached.
That’s what I meant when I said before that the concept of
large and small in the universe isn’t like what ordinary people
understand.
And the cosmos as a whole is the
same. All particles are alive—they have life. So think about it, everyone: The
universe is alive, too, no matter how large its expanse. But within the boundary of a cosmic body,
there are numerous, countless particles of different sizes, each existing as an
individual living entity. How many layers of heavens
are there in this cosmos? How many layers of universes does it have? How many
layers of cosmic bodies are there? No being inside it
can assess how vast and complex the cosmos is. The concept of the cosmic body
that I spoke of includes tens of millions of layers of universes, yet it’s still
merely
a speck of dust in the immense body of the infinite cosmos. It too is a tiny
particle. If you could dash off to a very, very far away place and take a look
back, you would see that it’s smaller than what a grain of sand looks to a human
being. Looking at it from further away, it would seem smaller than a
speck of dust. Looking from even further
away,
you couldn’t see it anymore. Just now I was explaining it over and over, but to
put it plainly, the whole cosmos appears to be
constructed with particles composed of particles, and particles composed of
particles. But actually, to look at it from an even broader perspective, it’s
not composed of particles. There is no language for it, and it can’t be told to
human beings.
The human way of thinking is
always limited. When I said that particles comprise particles, you were led into
a simplistic logic, which actually
is not appropriate. The complexity of the
structure of the cosmos can’t be clearly explained using human language.
Moreover, thoughts, time, dimensions, life-forms… everything changes upon
leaving our dimension. Especially when the space-times become different, there
are great differences among particles. For example, we know that between planets there are distances which
are quite far. But did you know that our bodies, wood, air, water, etc.,
are all composed of molecules, that molecules are also a level of particles, and
that this level of particles is right next to
planets? That is, molecules are the largest particles
that are smaller than planets. Atoms are the largest particles smaller than
molecules. When the distance between molecules and atoms is viewed with human
concepts, we think that
they’re quite close together, almost without distance between them. But if you
were to enter into that realm, you would find that dimension to have its own time and state, too, and that
it’s an extremely vast and extensive dimension as well. Every
level is like that. Positioned between molecules and planets, we feel that the
cosmos is huge. But if you were to stand in-between atoms and molecules, you
would feel that that cosmic expanse is even larger than this one. In other words, you
have to conform to the way of its time and space in order to understand
it.
By discussing this issue just
now, I was telling everyone that while you see great distances between planets, the distances
between molecules—which are close when
viewed with our human notions—are in fact really far. Particles can
form countless beings, including us human beings, various kinds of animals,
various plants, wood, cement, steel and iron, as well as the air in which we
live. I’ve mentioned
that human beings are actually living in a mound of
soil. We’re aware that worms crawl around in soil. But did
you know that gods look upon us humans in
the same way—that human beings are burrowing around in
soil? Why is that?
We humans deem
soil to be soil, but gods see all molecules—that is, the
molecules in the Three Realms—as soil, and as the coarsest and dirtiest
substance. They take them to be soil, and
they are indeed soil. So think about it, everyone: How
do those gods view this
universe and the world? The air is composed of
molecules, and the whole environment that exists around you is composed of
molecules. The water of this dimension is composed of molecules, too, and so is
even the air. Gods see
molecules as soil, so you are completely buried in soil, and human beings are
burrowing around in soil—human beings just live in that kind of environment. By
explaining it this way, maybe you can see why in the Western religious tradition
Yahweh or Jesus taught that God created man from clay, right?! Actually, in the
East it’s said that Nü Wa created human
beings from clay. This explanation should make it easier for you to understand.
Gods in fact see all particles made of the matter of this
dimension as soil dust, or soil. It’s really true.
Just now I said that particles
can form everything in a dimension. The cosmic bodies are extensive and
flourishing. The more microscopic the particles that compose a world, the more
beautiful and glorious the world. Actually, even
larger particles can form even larger cosmic expanses or even larger lives.
While these planets appear to us human beings to be pretty far from one another,
they seem quite close to one another in the eyes of larger beings; it’s much the
same way human beings perceive the distances among
molecules. Then could what human beings see between
planets be part of
a being’s body? In other words, could it
make up an even larger life?! It’s really the same
idea. In the past it was said that there were giants and dwarves.
Whether ordinary people say they existed or not doesn’t matter, I’m teaching in
terms of principles. It’s just that times have changed. With history’s
progression to this stage, it had to conform to the historical and cultural
requirements of this time period. So that caused today’s society to become
how it is. People no longer believe in what they can’t see or experience. And
the more they disbelieve, the less they
are allowed to know the truth. That’s
because human beings have become foolish. And human beings’ disbelief was
actually something arranged. I often say that human beings want to be in charge
but they never, ever have been.
As for
the matter of human beings wanting to be in charge
and desiring democracy, in reality, human beings have never truly
been in charge, for it is gods that control the world. For instance, when
persons have many blessings in their lives and great talent, it was certainly
arranged that way, or that they become high-ranking
officials. Those who have minor blessings and those
who aren’t all that capable, conversely, definitely can’t become
high-ranking officials. The Paris Commune overturned
the monarchy. But let me tell you, all of the presidents elected
generation after generation in France were emperors before, it’s just that the
arrangement has changed. What I mean by that, is that everything is arranged by
gods. So the rivalries that have developed between political parties in today’s
human society are just the state of affairs amidst which
today’s humankind exists. In
ancient times—and I think
you’ll all believe this point—there was no such thing. Today,
humankind is actually a rather
warped humankind with a warped society. For now that’s all I’ll
say about this topic.
I just mentioned that the
different particles of the universe can make up beings of different sizes. Lives
exist on every planet. It’s just that they don’t appear in this dimension of
human beings, so we human beings can’t comprehend them. Today’s science doesn’t understand this since
it’s underdeveloped and can only crawl around within this dimension. Actually,
it’s quite easy to see into other dimensions.
As long as you have a huge microscopic observation
system you can see the form of existence of those
objects composed of particles smaller than molecules. Human
beings can’t see their true existence because humans have all kinds
of obstacles—they have mental obstacles that prevent them from believing. They
don’t dare to do it, and they don’t see
the point of doing that. But regardless of
whether you want to see them or not, they will reveal their true appearances from time to time. Some people
just suddenly see them. Under a strange combination of circumstances, substances
that are in motion might suddenly reveal themselves. It’s something that happens
every now and then. People always explain mirages as a kind of refraction of the
atmosphere. That is a self-justifying theory adopted
to explain what modern science
cannot, it makes no sense. In reality, they are the true
manifestations of other dimensions. You can grasp the
concept of the universe that I
just discussed, right? (Applause)
All matter in the universe is
composed of Zhen, Shan, Ren. At different levels
Zhen, Shan, Ren has different manifestations
and is displayed in different ways. It has created
different living environments for the beings of different levels. When it comes
to human beings’ level, the manifestation of this Fa is extremely vast and
extremely complicated, cultivation ways are abundant,
and the truths that people enlighten to are numerous. If one wants
to be a good person, the criteria that exist in this dimension are: benevolence,
loyalty, propriety, learning, trustworthiness, and so on and so forth. They are
all derived from Zhen, Shan, Ren, and are incredibly many.
And that’s not all. Elements that constitute women are delicateness and
gentleness, while men need to be strong and
upright, and so on. Those are all
manifestations of the Fa. How material beings appear and
how material forms of existence are, those are all
manifestations of the Fa. The Fa has created everything.
Next, let me talk about
cultivation. In cultivation, why do you have to meet a realm’s criteria in order
to go over there? Because there is Fa for that particular level. In that realm
there is a required standard for those beings, as well as a standard for the
environment of those beings. A karma-laden body that doesn’t conform to that dimension’s
environment is unacceptable. A
filthy body absolutely cannot enter a dimension that high. So you have to
conform to the bodily state of that higher realm—namely, a karma-free state. Not
only do you need to be free of karma, but your body’s
substances need to be microscopic and fine in that way. That’s something people
who don’t truly cultivate cannot attain, even if they
wanted to and pursued it—it can only be cultivated. It’s attained by enduring
hardship and going through grueling
cultivation.
Moreover, the living side of you has to conform to
the standards of that realm. Or in other words, your mind, your thoughts, and
all of the spiritual properties of your existence have to conform to the
standards of that level.
Of course, there’s also a
standard for the form of existence of that dimension’s lives. You can’t go there
as a human being like this. You have to assume the appearance of the beings in
that dimension when you are about to Consummate. The higher the level, the more
youthful and beautiful the appearance of those beings. The lower the realm, the
less beautiful. As one goes higher, not only is the appearance more beautiful,
but also the thoughts have to be more pure and refined. One’s
way of existence, speech,
demeanor, and movement will all undergo changes. Their
speech is like poetry, and that’s just the way of things at one certain level.
Higher levels are even more splendid. It definitely wouldn’t work if you didn’t
conform to the requirements of that realm. I often say that “cultivation
is up to you, gong is up to the master.” In other
words, though you want to reach that kind of realm, how could you reach it when
you don’t even know about it? How could you do that? You
yourself can’t do it. I only look at the heart you have for cultivation. Master
will take care of the other side if you’re determined to keep
cultivating. What’s critical is whether you can be steadfast
and whether you can finish your cultivation.
I haven’t discussed the
specific way in which gong is evolved, and I don’t want people to focus
on it. Doing it this way keeps attachments from springing up and it spares
people from letting their imaginations run wild. As you know, the higher one
goes, the more tranquil one’s
mind. Yet it’s not right for you to insist on seeking
tranquility without raising your xinxing. Some people are bent on seeking
tranquility when they do the exercises. They insist on trying to attain
tranquility, and it develops into an attachment. But I can say that as low-level
cultivation ways see it, it is a method, whereas when viewed from high levels,
it’s intention-filled conduct. Why? Tranquility can
only be achieved through cultivation and gradually eliminating attachments. If
someone wants to will himself into total tranquility and part with all
attachments just like that, in general that can’t be done. (Of
course, there are special circumstances that we won’t
discuss.) Being able to achieve that kind of tranquility means that your
mind
has
become pure to that extent. What I call “special circumstances” refers to
cultivation ways that cultivate the assistant soul (fu yuanshen), whereby
a person can will himself to be tranquil from the very start. But that’s not our Dafa’s
way of cultivating. This is
no minor thing.
As I mentioned before, when you
speak to others with your own goals in mind, wanting to change or persuade them,
no matter how reasonable your words are, other people will have a hard time
completely accepting them. Nor can the words move people’s hearts. Why? Let me tell you: It’s
actually because the words you say contain all of your thoughts. Your sentences
have complicated thoughts included in them, such as your human emotions and
desires, and even those many attachments of yours. That makes your words not so
powerful and rather diluted. Also, people often look at things from their own
viewpoints when they say things to others, and those might not conform to the Fa
of the universe. So in this respect they lack the
power of Truth. Moreover, when speaking to others, people add things to protect
themselves so that they won’t
get hurt. In other words, the intention behind your words is no longer pure,
then. And as a result your words get really frivolous.
But when your mind can truly become tranquil, when your attachments get less and
less, or when the distracting thoughts get less and less, then you’ll find that
your words have power. Why was it that when I spoke about non-action I mentioned that you
shouldn’t interfere with things that shouldn’t be interfered with? That’s
because your words already have power, and words with power can change people.
It doesn’t matter if your changing someone seems right, you might be doing
something wrong. You don’t know the truth since what your
eyes see is superficial, and since you can’t perceive karmic reasons
from the past. Your mind will become increasingly pure as you
reach higher levels. What your thinking brings forth then,
and what you say, will be extremely pure.
The purer and simpler they are, the more they conform to the principles of that
level of the universe. The words you speak then can instantly pierce
people’s hearts, strike the
depths of people’s thoughts, and strike the more microscopic part of their
existences. Now isn’t that going to be powerful?! So if you can become
tranquil, that ability signifies that you have reached a certain
realm.
In our cultivation we need to
meet the requirements of a given realm in order to reach that realm.
Otherwise you can’t go there. That’s why in our cultivation human attachments
have to be discarded, why karma has to be eliminated, why the requirements of the Fa have to be
met, and why I ask you to read the book a lot and
understand the Fa well.
I’ve only discussed the topic
briefly. This is a Fa conference. You don’t have a lot of opportunities to meet
me, and you’ve had lots of questions brewing which you have wanted a chance to
ask me. So I will use the time that’s left to answer
your questions. But there is one thing you should pay
attention to: Some people (of course, they are all new students) have a brash attitude when they
ask questions, and don’t show due respect for their master. Of course, it’s not
so much that I’m demanding respect for a teacher by upholding old-fashioned
formalities, but I am your master after all, and will save you to a high realm.
What I’m giving you is something that you can never repay in the eternity of
your lives. So I hope your tone will be that of a disciple. All right,
you
can pass your question slips
up.
Question: After Shakyamuni, Lao Zi, and
Jesus, how many people have attained the Tathagata Righteous
Attainment through
cultivation?
Teacher: All in all
there have been a lot. Many people did after Shakyamuni attained the Way; they
cultivated successfully in the Buddhist religion. And there were people among
Jesus’ later disciples and monks whose cultivation met with success. Of course,
in China there are lots of cultivation ways.
Since
cultivation ways aren’t geographically restricted, in ancient times there were
also those in Western society who practiced cultivation, and
quite a few of them succeeded. It wasn’t by way of religions that they
succeeded. But in recent times there have been few who Consummated. In
contemporary society the number is almost
zero.
Question: It’s
mentioned in Zhuan Falun [(Volume
II)] that the moon was constructed by the humankind of a remote age.
Could Teacher tell us a little about the reason and purpose back then for
constructing it?
Teacher: Everyone
here is laughing, because
that’s so far from why I teach the Fa. You are seeking
knowledge and letting your imagination run wild. And when your imagination runs
wild, your thinking becomes less pure and tranquil. But instead of letting go of
those things you’re attached to among ordinary people, you’re asking me about
them and even mixing them together with the Fa. That’s precisely
what I’m worried about with you all. Put your
mind to cultivation. Of
course, I can answer, since the question has been raised.
In the past, the situation never
resembled that of today’s science. So the mankinds of different time periods
were of course developing in the ways of those times. People at one time
recognized the trouble that the dark of night caused people, so they constructed
a moon up there to bring light to Earth during the night. That has nothing to do
with cultivation. It’s not that I’m unwilling to tell you about it. It’s that
whatever I say will materialize something, as the things I say become Fa. So
don’t ask me to casually talk about human interest things.
Question: Is the
speed of one’s intention faster than the speed of
light?
Teacher: That’s for
sure. The speed of human thoughts is quite fast. As your level rises you will
penetrate every dimension in the levels below you. Listen carefully to what I’m
saying: As your level gets higher, when your gong penetrates any of the
dimensions in the levels below you, it isn’t subject to the time restraints of
those dimensions. Gong is directed by intention. Since you live in this
environment, your walking speed, the speed of your car, and so on, every single
thing is limited by the time of this dimension. The intention that people
emanate is rapid in this human dimension. If a person is a cultivator, he
transcends the restrictions of this dimension and his intention is extremely
fast. Meanwhile, we’ve said that a person’s gong and all of the abilities
carried in his body are controlled by his thoughts. So that means, when his
intention arises, his gong arrives—that’s how powerful he is. I’ve said
that if the abilities of those of you who have cultivated to very high realms
were not locked up for you, you might really turn the Heaven and Earth upside
down in just an instant. So before a person has reached complete Enlightenment,
he is absolutely prohibited from being unrestricted while he cultivates on the
earth, it’s absolutely prohibited. It is all right for those people with minor
abilities, since this dimension is watched over by the
gods of this dimension, and those
gods can control all of this so that a person can’t
topple Heaven or overturn Earth. But if a person’s abilities are greater it
won’t be allowed. Master also has to watch over this.
Question: In this universe of ours, what type of
matter has the greatest speed?
Teacher: You’re asking about
science. To tell you would be to satisfy your pursuing mind, and that’d be the
same as expanding your attachment. Yet if I don’t tell you, well, you’ve raised
the question.
In regards to the speed in this dimension that people
nowadays know of, it has even greater energy that people haven’t discovered and
can’t utilize. The ideas of what’s the largest and smallest all come from the
perspective of human understanding; they are understandings within the range of
the human dimension and time field. Size, as
conceptualized by humans, doesn’t exist
in this universe. So in the universe, what is fast—as
referred to by you—depends on the level. For example,
the rate at which a very high-level god speaks is still faster than the
speed of your mind—even when that god is speaking
very, very slowly. The words I’m saying here and what I just said about your
being attached have just taken place, but in a specific dimension they actually
occurred hundreds of years ago. That’s how big the
difference is. The universe is just incredibly vast. The differences in time
fields have formed the universe’s complicated dimensions.
Actually, not
being subject to the restrictions of
time, that’s what is most rapid. But
human beings will never really understand the real
meaning of that sentence. Your idea, “what type of matter has the greatest
speed,” is a human notion and a
human understanding. Time is not absolute, even in this present
dimension of ours. As you know, I mentioned in Zhuan Falun that a certain
star is seen to be 150 thousand light years away from us. But in fact, I was
only discussing it by using what human beings can
understand with contemporary science.
That’s not really how it is. Then how is
it? Let’s think about it: There exist different times in different dimensions.
Within the expanse of our Earth there is a time field, and everything is
confined within the boundaries of that time. As soon
as a man-made satellite goes
beyond our atmosphere it is in another time
field, which is definitely not the same as
Earth’s. So there are also the time fields of other
planets when it passes by
those planets. The larger the cosmic body,
the greater the time and speed differences within
it.
It’s said that it takes 150
thousand light years for us to see the things that
occur in the Milky Way system. Actually, let me tell
you that perhaps you can see them in just two or three years. Why? Because the
speed of light, too, is subject to the restrictions of
time fields. When light penetrates through different
time fields, its speed,
“shwa—, shwa—,
shwa—,” suddenly becomes fast or slow. When it gets
here to our Earth, it then conforms to Earth’s time field and becomes extremely
slow. There is simply no way to assess
the time in the universe using this time
field that Earth’s inhabitants can comprehend.
Humankind’s understanding of
truth, of matter, life, the universe, and many things,
including the development of human beings, is wrong.
Question:
How do the great enlightened beings of the Buddha system explain the
light of this universe?
Teacher:
What’s so great about just seeing light?! There are
many kinds of light, and they’re different at different levels. And how, as well
as for what purpose, light is emitted is different.
Don’t use human thoughts to think about things that
are higher than man. I’d say that if you want to cultivate, you need to read the
book more and study the Fa a lot. What you can’t enlighten to and what you don’t
know will, in the future, all be visible in the Fa. Think about it: I’ve
said that every object has energy—even molecules have
energy. People can’t sense that molecules have energy
because man himself is composed of molecules. That’s why people can’t sense it.
Things that have energy have light and power. Don’t
make a mountain out of a molehill or inflate the significance of every little
thing. When Dafa disciples’ mighty virtue is displayed, now that will be
glorious and brilliant.
Question: Can we publish
Master’s articles in newspapers in order
to spread the Fa? On the other hand, I’m
concerned that people
might misinterpret the meaning of the
articles.
Teacher: They will, they all will. So
it’s best not to do that.
Why? Let me tell you: Our best method for spreading the Fa is for everybody to
do the exercises in groups. We’re only saying that we don’t want to leave out
people who have a predestined relationship. When I talk about
spreading the Fa, I’m not asking the entire
humankind to come obtain the
Fa—that’s not the idea at all. I’m talking about getting people with a
predestined relationship to come obtain the Fa. Today
I might as well tell everyone clearly: The Fa-spreading method we’ve adopted all
along is that you do the exercises outdoors. Another one is to have our Dafa
books for sale in public bookstores. My Law Bodies will direct people with a
predestined relationship to buy the book, and as soon as they read it they will
come and learn. Also, we’re doing the exercises outdoors, so the Law Bodies will
arrange for them to find the practice sites and obtain
the Fa. Through a strange combination of circumstances they will be led over
here to do the exercises, or they will find our
students. That’s how we’ve arranged it.
You want more people to know about it and you’ve used
many, many methods. It’s the students’ good intention,
I can see that. And you’ve done well. But all of it is self-initiated,
individual action, so I don’t approve or disapprove.
In the Fa, however, the
Fa-spreading methods that I’ve left behind for Dafa are these: We do the
exercises outside in groups, hold Fa conferences, and
have books for sale in bookstores. People with a predestined relationship will
go buy the book, and they’ll want to cultivate after
they read it. And then they will find us of their own initiative and learn.
That’s how it is. Of course, sometimes students will,
as a personal act, put announcements in newspapers to
inform other people about
it. That too can allow a lot of people to obtain the
Fa. I don’t disapprove of that approach,
for it can help the predestined ones
become aware of it. I’m just saying that the best
forms I leave for you for spreading the Fa are group
exercises and Fa conferences.
Question: I’ve made spreading the Fa an integral part
of my cultivation, but Master has said
that spreading the Fa has nothing to do with reaching
Consummation.
Teacher: Spreading the Fa and
reaching Consummation are of course two different
terms and concepts. But there’s one point to be made:
For those who work to spread the Fa, if you treat it as a job and,
although you often work hard and make a
great effort to do it, if you normally
don’t read the book much and you don’t
have time to do the exercises, this kind of work will inevitably depart from the
Fa. In other words, you won’t have integrated your
cultivation with your work. You’re really attached
when doing the work, and you don’t think about whether the troubles you
encounter are related to your xinxing or
whether the way you do things conforms to the Fa or to the standards of a
cultivator. If you don’t look inside yourself in this
manner, if you don’t look at it this way, then your work
is just the work of ordinary humans, and
you’re just an ordinary person doing work for Dafa. At
the very least, you haven’t conducted yourself according to the standards of a
cultivator. Cultivation needs to be integrated with our work.
When you run into any challenge in your
work, you should always check your own xinxing
and be able to examine yourself. When you come across
troubles, look at yourself and think: “Why are things
happening like this? Have I done something wrong? Is there a
problem with my intention? Or is it because of
something else?” That is, you should demand of
yourself and evaluate yourself with
a cultivator’s standard at all times. You are truly cultivating
when you treat yourself as a cultivator and don’t let
up with any bit of your
thoughts. Then won’t your work be integrated with the
Fa? As for Consummation, that depends on the extent of your cultivation and
whether it reaches that stage. Even though a person
might cultivate every day, whether he’ll Consummate depends on
whether he can reach the level of Consummation.
Question:
I read Zhuan Falun every
day, but with respect to some parts of
it, such as “The Subject of Sorcery,”
“Bigu,” “Fasting,”
“Stealing Qi,”
and “Gathering
Qi,” I think it’s enough to just have a
general understanding.
Teacher: I’ll tell you, although I
used those things as examples, what
I talked about wasn’t limited to that.
What I talk about are principles of the Fa! The meanings behind
them are countless, boundless, endless. However large
this cosmos is, the Fa is no less. I’m
just using human
beings’ most mundane
deeds, the plainest
language, and the lowest forms—those of human
beings—to teach this Fa. The point is to allow you
to understand and enlighten
to its boundless and endless inner
meanings. So make sure you don’t read it
selectively. You must read the Fa from start to finish with nothing left out.
Pay attention to this. Its continuity is highly beneficial for your cultivation.
The Fa has continuity, so you can’t read it
selectively like that.
Question: Is everything in a practitioner’s
environment conjured by Master?
Teacher: The surrounding environment
isn’t conjured. Everything that occurs around you during the course of your
cultivation is a result of prenatal karmic reasons, namely, it’s your karmic
retribution as well as rewards for your past good deeds. Everything is a result
of your goodness or badness. I utilize them to allow you to cultivate.
They aren’t something I conjured. When you
go through some ordeal it’s true you are paying for
karma, for sure. What a lot of students see in dreams
or while they do the tranquil exercises isn’t entirely conjured, either. Much of
it is reality being displayed, only you don’t see
it too clearly.
Question: Master, could you please disclose a few
things about your cultivation to those disciples who will
Consummate?
Teacher: You will know things after
you Consummate. I intended to share with you my
background. Given the present circumstances, though, it looks like that’s
becoming less possible. And why is this? It’s because, in the future people
won’t be allowed to know of my existence. So I don’t want to leave my story
behind for people. As for you, once you Consummate you will know. At that point,
words won’t be enough to describe the greatness of your master!
(Applause)
I’ve given my utmost concern not just to you, but to all
lives. I have almost depleted everything of mine for
all lives. Of course, that kind of depletion isn’t what you understand, where
there is nothing left. I’ve often said
that I have incorporated into this Fa everything that can
allow you to cultivate and
advance, and everything that you can
attain through cultivation. Although you are in
different realms, none of you can truly understand the
weight of my words. You will obtain everything so long as you cultivate.
But do you know how many things of mine are
incorporated into what you obtain? (Applause) Of course, I don’t want to
talk about these things that concern me. I just want
to tell you that you should cherish this undertaking that your Master is
carrying out! You have to do well in
cultivation. Don’t miss this chance.
Question: When can we get Dafa translated by
Westerners?
Teacher: Zhuan Falun will be
available soon. The French version will soon be sent to the publisher for
printing and the English version is already available. The German version is in
bookstores now; apparently a lot of bookstores have it. As for
versions in other languages, the Italian and Spanish
ones are apparently being translated, and the Russian one is available.
That’s the case for the Western languages. And there
are people translating it into still other languages. Personally, I’m really
concerned about this matter. Often the reason is that conditions aren’t yet ripe
in many regards. And there’s interference from different sources
that you’re not aware of. So it’s been dragging on.
Question: Since xinxing
cultivation is most important, why does Master still mention
cultivation levels and divine powers in the book?
Teacher: A lot of questions are being
raised by new students. At least read the book before you
ask! Cultivation and a
Buddha’s abilities are inseparable.
So I only speak of those things in a general sense in
terms of underlying truths and principles of Fa, and
this allows you to comprehend. I give one example to
allow cultivators to understand the
rest—that’s the reason. It’s not that I
ask you to not pursue those
things but I go and tell you about them. Those things can’t be separated from
Buddha Fa cultivation. What you pursue and the truths
of the Fa that you should understand are two
entirely different things; divine powers
are a manifestation of another aspect of Buddha Fa. Your inability
to see the extraordinariness
of Buddha Fa’s divine powers results from
your reading the book with a human mindset.
You’re just reading those things that you
like. You don’t read, and
even reject, what your human thinking fails to grasp.
That’s precisely why you can’t make progress.
Question: Why is homosexuality
considered immoral?
Teacher: Think about it, everyone: Is
homosexuality human behavior? Heaven created man and woman.
What was the purpose? To procreate future
generations. A man being with a man, or
a woman with a
woman—it doesn’t take much thought to know whether
that’s right or wrong. When minor things
are done incorrectly, a person is said to be wrong.
When major things are done incorrectly, it’s
a case of people no longer having the moral code of
human beings, and then they are unworthy of being
human.
Let me tell you why today’s
society has become how it is. It results from there
not being an upright Fa to keep human beings in check. This Dafa is taught right
in the most chaotic environment, at a time when no religion can save people, and
where the circumstance is that no god takes interest
in people anymore. The Fa is almighty. The best time
periods wouldn’t require
such a great Fa to be taught. Only in the worst time
periods can the power of the Fa
manifest. There are other reasons, too.
Question: Why is it that homosexuals are considered
bad people?
Teacher: Let me tell you, if
I weren’t teaching this Fa today, gods’
first target of annihilation would be homosexuals. It’s not me who
would destroy them, but gods.
You know that homosexuals have found
legitimacy in that homosexuality was around
back in the culture of ancient Greece. Yes, there was a similar phenomenon in
ancient Greek culture. And do you know why ancient Greek culture is no more? Why
are the ancient Greeks gone? Because they had degenerated to that extent, and so
they were destroyed.
When gods created man they prescribed standards for human
behavior and living. When human beings overstep those boundaries, they are no
longer called human beings, though they still assume the outer appearance of a
human. So gods can’t tolerate their existence and will
destroy them. Do you know why wars, epidemics, and natural and man-made
disasters happen in this world? They’re precisely
because human beings have karma, and those events
exist to remove it. No matter how wonderful a
time period may be in the future, there will
still be wars, epidemics, and natural and man-made
disasters on earth. They are a way of eliminating
karma for people. Some people who have sinned can have their karma eliminated
through the death of the flesh body and suffering, and then they’ll be free of
that karma when they reincarnate. Their lives
don’t really die and they reincarnate again.
But the karma that some people have
accrued is too much, in which case the
fundamental elements of their existence will be
implicated and destroyed. Homosexuals not only violate the
standards that gods set for mankind, but also damage
human society’s moral code. In particular, the impression it gives children will
turn future societies into something demonic. That’s the issue. That kind of
destruction, however, isn’t just about
disappearing after they’re annihilated.
That person is annihilated
layer after layer at a rate that
seems pretty rapid to us, but in fact it’s extremely slow in that
time field. Over and over again, one
is annihilated in an extremely painful way. It’s terribly
frightening. A person should live in an upright
manner, living honorably like a human being. He
shouldn’t indulge his demon-nature and do whatever he likes.
Question: I want to achieve a Righteous Attainment. My
goal is set at Arhat Status. I haven’t
taken the initiative to help those who have no karmic connection to me, and this
includes spreading the Fa. Have I done wrong?
Teacher: You have. That’s your human
thinking at the surface. Do you know that I have arranged good things for where
each one of you should cultivate to, the extent of your ability to endure, the
amount of your virtue, and the level of your material
foundation? You want to arrange for yourself the path of cultivation, but that
can’t hold, nor would anybody recognize it. Why do you want to settle yourself
at the Arhat level? It’s because for now you can only
understand the Fa to this extent. You have many attachments that you’re
unwilling to let go of. It can only be said that
you’re thinking that way because that’s
how much you comprehend the Fa. In the future, when
you’ve understood the Fa at a higher level—when you’ve increased the number of
times you have read Dafa’s books—you will definitely change how you think. You
will feel that you shouldn’t have asked that
question, and at that point
you’ll feel embarrassed. Right now I can only tell you
that it represents where you’re at right now, so I don’t blame you,
but your conduct isn’t right. If you relax the demands
on yourself, the attachments you’re unwilling to break will make it hard for you
to progress diligently.
Question: I was quite involved and diligent when I
first took up this cultivation way. But
not long ago, I suddenly had doubts about Dafa. I’ve repeatedly made mistakes
and haven’t been able to pass the tests.
Is this thought-karma or demonic interference?
Teacher: Why do I ask you to return
to your origin and true self? What’s the purpose of
returning to your true self? It’s to return to what your true self is. Human
beings have many attachments, all kinds of notions,
and a range of emotions and desires. All
these thoughts are in your head, yet none of them are
you. I’ve said that this door is wide open and that only your heart
matters. It’s just up to a person’s heart
whether he can cultivate,
and whether he can
still have the thought and intention
of returning to his origin and true self.
So I’m telling you that
everything that interferes with your thinking might not be you. As
for some people who can’t forgo their self-interest while it is at stake among
everyday people, or those who can’t tell which
thoughts are theirs and which aren’t, and who even think that those bad thoughts
are theirs, we definitely won’t keep looking after them. Why? Because those
people have taken those bad
thoughts to be themselves, and yet these things of
ours are not to be given to those bad thoughts.
Question: In Zhuan Falun, it’s mentioned that
great enlightened beings
constructed the universe based on their
own characteristics.
Teacher: Let me tell you, a lot of
people have read [and wondered about] this section. It refers to things that
happened in the universes of multiple
realms in the vast cosmos that encompasses all
universes. The cosmos is simply vast.
What I was discussing wasn’t about the entire cosmos. Great
enlightened beings at different levels of the cosmos enlighten to the different
truths of the cosmos’s Dafa, and even what great enlightened
beings of the same level enlighten to is different. When some
universes of different sizes within the vast cosmos start showing signs of
degeneration, great enlightened beings who have
enlightened to a high level and to righteous laws will construct a new universe
at that level. This doesn’t refer to the greater, tremendously
vast cosmos that encompasses countless layers of
universes.
Question: In the article “Dialogue with
Time,” a god
is mentioned. How should we understand the concept of a god
and how it differs from a Buddha or Dao? What relation does it have to the
primeval gods?
Teacher: All those in the cosmos who
have abilities surpassing those of ordinary human beings are
gods. The microscopic, yet immense beings that
permeate the air are countless and formless gods,
that’s the idea.
Gods are in a variety of realms and are
of varied kinds.
Aren’t Buddhas
gods?
Aren’t Daos
gods? Collectively they are known as
gods. It’s only that they each have their own
cultivation features and appearance. Plus
they’ve formed their own unique
things. So one is called a Dao,
one is called a Buddha, and the other
is called a God. Everything in the universe has
thought and life. Could you say they
aren’t gods? The time in any dimension
strictly delimits the changes that occur in all substances of
that dimension. Could you say time isn’t
a god? It knows the thoughts of all lives within the range of its
control. If it wants to speak, it can speak; if it wants to assume a human form,
it can do that. Wouldn’t you say it’s a
god? Human beings think that time is just a concept.
The sun rises and
sets, people mark off some points
and put some numbers on a clock—and
that’s supposed to be time. That,
along with the rising and setting of the
sun, is how time is expressed in the society of
ordinary people. But I can tell you, even the rising
and setting of the sun and Earth’s
orbiting around the sun are
delimited and arranged—without
deviation—by this dimension’s
time.
Question: I’m determined to achieve
Consummation. Once Teacher stops
teaching the Fa, will I still be
protected by
Teacher’s Law Bodies?
Teacher: I’ve actually stopped
teaching the Fa. The period of my systematically teaching the Fa has passed. Now
I’m just here to participate in
the Fa conference and answer some questions for you
while I’m here. The assistance center coordinators always want me to
talk about more profound
things and tell you
a little more. My teaching the Fa was most important before.
Today, it’s your cultivation and improvement that are
most important. How could there be no Law Bodies
looking after you? When my Law Bodies no longer look
after you, you will have reached Consummation.
Question: Some new students who
have just obtained
the Fa really want to hear and watch the audio and videotapes of Teacher’s
Fa-speeches in North America prior to 1998.
Would that be okay?
Teacher: There is now a book of my
Fa-speeches from when I first went to the United States. Reading the book will
benefit your understanding of Fa a lot. The videos, on the other hand, might not
have any direct relevance to you since at that time I was speaking to the
specific situations of the students in the audience. The books, by contrast,
are suitable for a general audience, since they’ve
been reorganized. Moreover, you might have seen from the videos something very
peculiar when I give talks on Fa. As I speak, speak, speak, suddenly I switch
topics and start talking about something else. Maybe you’ve all sensed it. Why
do I do that? Because as I went on, I found that the students had grasped it
while I was talking. They understood it before I even finished speaking. So,
well, I stopped discussing it and went on to another thing.
Since that happens frequently in my videos,
in regards to a lot of things,
watching the videos might not necessarily be better
for you than reading the book. Reading the book would be better for you, that’s
what I mean. Coexistence of both a book and video results in interference. So as
soon as books of the Fa-speeches in different regions
are published, all of the recordings and videos need to be erased, and that’s to
protect Dafa. What a person can’t let go of is human emotion.
Question: My wife and I both practice Dafa. A few
months ago, one after another, the two of us each dreamed of an extremely
beautiful large bird. The bird
disappeared after it entered my body,
whereas my wife heard birdcalls. What
did it signify?
Teacher:
It’s just a bird. In your reincarnations lifetime
after lifetime, even a god who comes down from a very high level can reincarnate
as a human being in one lifetime and as an animal in another.
That’s how it is in the
human world. The first thing you see at the beginning
stage of your cultivation is probably your original form or an image of the
earliest place you ever were. It could be in the form of a human, an animal, or
this or that. Birds in the heavens are deities,
too.
Question: Can cultivators take nutritional
supplements?
Teacher: You
haven’t read the book, you simply have
not read the book. Think about it,
everyone: A cultivator’s body couldn’t
develop gong if it were sick. That
is, your impure body wouldn’t be suitable for cultivation. When you cultivate
your body needs to be cleansed to the point of absolute purity, and only then
can it start to develop gong. So
I’ve said that we don’t do healing. But I will cleanse
true cultivators’ bodies, and that kind of body is
free of illness. We intend to attain the kind of body found in a
Buddha’s realm. Can you attain that by taking
nutritional supplements? Definitely not. So why take them? It’s not like that
stuff is something delicious and worth sampling for its delicate
flavor. We make your body purer and purer
during the course of cultivation so as to have it gradually
reach the most natural and optimum condition. That’s something
taking medicine can’t achieve. Aren’t you still
doubtful about cultivation if you take medicine or
ingest supplements? You simply are not seeing yourself
as a cultivator.
Isn’t that the reason? If
you don’t see yourself as a cultivator, how could we?
Makes sense, right? Whether it
be Chinese herbal medicine or Western medicine,
it’s medicine all the same, for
sure. Your goal is
simply to have a healthy body, but our
cultivation achieves something well
beyond that. I’ve described how these things work. So
how do you think it should be handled?
Question: We are disciples who’ve come from China.
There are five other people who couldn’t
make it for various reasons. Was the
demonic interference too strong or was it arranged by Master
that they couldn’t
come?
Teacher: I didn’t want to let even
the five of you come. Why? As I just said, before my teaching the Fa was most
important, while today your cultivation and improvement are most important. Put
your mind entirely on cultivation and cultivate steadily and solidly—that’s what
is key. With the heart unsteady, wanting to find me, wishing to listen to my
talks on Fa, chasing me everywhere… that doesn’t benefit your cultivation at
all, not in the least. When the Fa conference was to be held in Singapore, a lot
of people from China wanted to go. Then I said to the Main Dafa Association,
“You need to pass this along: Tell the assistance centers of each region to
notify students that they shouldn’t go traveling all around, as it’s of no
benefit.” Originally, Law Bodies ordered the steps of your cultivation for this
time period. But you have disrupted it. Some of your attachments could very
possibly have been discarded in this time that was allotted for you to
cultivate,
but what should have been improved has been, in a certain respect, disrupted.
That’s the reason. Don’t regard as demonic interference all your attachments to
insisting on doing things you can’t do.
Question: My husband has never done the exercises,
although he has read Zhuan Falun once and watched videos of
Master’s Fa speeches. But his Third Eye has opened and he can even do Remote
Viewing.
Teacher: That’s because of
his predestination. His spiritual foundation might be quite good, which caused
his Third Eye to open as soon as he read the book. As for whether he studies it
or whether he cultivates, everyone in this complicated society has become
extremely complex. Before each of you here in the audience came to the human
world, sometime in the past the seeds for you to obtain the Fa today were sown
in the depths of your heart and soul. I have looked for and found you many times
in human society and conferred markings on you. All of these things play a
strong role, yet none of them can lessen your human attachments. And none of
them can make you feel the way you did back when you encountered the Fa: “Oh,
I’ve waited so many years. I’ve come just to obtain it.” A lot of people no
longer have that feeling, and it results in their cultivating on and off and not
being diligent. Some people who are predestined and have obtained the Fa still
can’t discard their attachments. There are all kinds of scenarios. Once the
predestination ends, it’s over.
Question: Master, when you talked about the srivatsa[4] symbol, you said,
“A Buddha whose level is twice as high as a Tathagata has two
srivatsa symbols.” Were you referring to the height of a
person’s gong column being twice as high as a Tathagata’s?
Teacher: I was referring to
a person’s xinxing and mighty virtue. Gong is just a manifestation
of that. It’s fine to understand it as a person’s gong column, too. But
it will have to be the gong column after a person Consummates. That is to
say, the height of the gong column after Consummation has to be double
that of a Tathagata’s. The gong column developed in the cultivation
process doesn’t count. That’s because it’s not yet finalized, for other parts of
you haven’t yet Consummated. So it’s just a form of energy’s existence. Yet from
a certain vantage point it does represent your level and xinxing while
cultivating.
Question: During the Singapore Fa conference, when the
disciples applauded, Master usually used both hands in the Heshi position as a gesture of
acknowledgment. But when giving Fa speeches before, you mostly used a single
hand to acknowledge. What deeper meaning is there in this?
Teacher: I use a single hand
toward my disciples. But there’s one thing: When I see everyone’s pure hearts
and that they’re advancing diligently and continually, I’m really happy, and
then I like to use both hands. Under normal circumstances a Master uses a single
hand toward his disciples.
Question: I’ve heard that when a person can recite
Zhuan Falun, he can forever carry Dafa with his main soul (zhu yuanshen),
regardless of whether he Consummates.
Teacher: Who’d be willing to just
remember the Fa but not Consummate? Why do you memorize the book? Isn’t it for
reaching Consummation? Memorizing Zhuan Falun helps you improve, since
both the microscopic part of your body and the human part at the outermost
surface are memorizing it together. But no matter how you memorize it—and this
goes even for people who’ve memorized it very well—at a certain time you will
suddenly find that you can’t recite it. Why? It’s that the main part of you, the
part that memorized it, separates from you after it has met the standard. You
suddenly feel like, “Oh, how come I can’t recite it anymore?” That’s because the
part that is up to par has been separated, and the human surface can no longer
recite the whole thing, for it has forgotten it. Some forget a lot, some forget
less. This kind of situation does occur.
Many of you have experienced a situation where
periodically you hear well or periodically your Third Eye sees things clearly.
When can a person see clearly or see the best? It’s when he is cultivating
really well in a given stage, while the separation hasn’t occurred and he’s just
about to meet the standard. He can see clearly, hear sharply with his ears, and
his body is sensitive. Once the separation takes place he finds that he’s lost
that state, and he’ll think, “Is it because I’ve dropped down? How come things
aren’t as good?” It’s not that you have dropped down. It’s that the part of you
that has finished cultivation has been separated, and what’s left is the part
that hasn’t yet finished cultivation and that should keep being cultivated. So
you’ll be sensitive from time to time. That’s how it is. This only happens when
practicing Dafa.
Question: Is it that as you cultivate to higher
levels, you sleep less?
Teacher: That’s not the case. It’s
related to the changes and elevation of the particles intrinsic to your
thoughts. But it does happen periodically. The matter I just talked about also
involves this factor. At the surface you will return to the normal state when
the well-cultivated part of you is separated from you. That’s what you will
experience all the way until you Consummate. All of this allows you to live like
regular people. Yet your human side will become weaker and weaker. And if you
hold yourself to high standards, perhaps you will conduct yourself among
ordinary people better and better. That’s the way it is.
Question: Time is pressing, but I still can’t sit in
the full-lotus position. How can I do better?
Teacher: Don’t be anxious. Nobody is
saying time isn’t adequate. I have never said anything like there isn’t enough
time. I ask that you hurry up cultivating, and you should just focus on
practicing. But that said, you should know that you need to have strict
requirements for yourself—that’s what I mean. Anyway, those who absolutely can’t
fold their legs into position are very, very rare. There are some whose souls
(yuanshen) in the heavens don’t assume a human being’s appearance but
that of other gods, who don’t fold their legs in the lotus position. Maybe that
factor is involved. But since you have a human body, a flesh body today, I
believe all of you can fold your legs into position, except for the extremely
unique ones. I’ll put it in a lighthearted way. Of those seated here, many
people really have cultivated quite well. Those Bodhisattvas in the heavens are
covering their mouths and laughing at those of you who can’t put your legs up,
saying “Look at that those cultivators who still can’t put their legs
up.”
Question: Could Master please talk about the concept
of attachments?
Teacher: What’s the reason people
can’t see the truth of the universe? Why is this dimension deluding? Let me tell
everyone: Among ordinary people, what you see and what you come into contact
with in the dimension of ordinary human society, along with the knowledge
learned among ordinary people, these all limit you and confine you. When your
knowledge of this dimension accumulates, when your understanding of everything
in this dimension becomes clearer and clearer, and when you seemingly become
more and more aware, you are actually closing yourself off more and more. What
you consider the truth in this dimension of ordinary human beings could well be,
in reality, wrong or the opposite. So you won’t see the truth of the universe if
you don’t let go of those understandings from the society of ordinary people.
Especially those things that we as human beings can’t relinquish for purposes of
survival, for protecting ourselves, or for benefiting for ourselves more, I call
them all attachments. Those attachments are just like a big, sturdy padlock that
locks you in. You have to open every padlock as you progress on your path. If
you don’t, they will lock you in and delude you, and you won’t see the truth.
And, if you fail to open those locks while on the path that returns you to your
origin and true self, you won’t be able to continue forward. That’s what a test
is. Everything you are attached to is your obstacle. These tests that you come
across in cultivation are in fact your own hardships. The point of my utilizing
them is to open the locks of your attachments, to allow you to see the truth,
and to have your mind elevate.
Question: How should we understand discarding all
attachments?
Teacher: It means letting go of the
attachments that can’t be released in the ordinary human dimension, because the
way you cultivate today is different from all past ways. I knew that many, many
people would come to learn it, and a social phenomenon would emerge. Even more
people will learn it in the future. Then this social phenomenon that emerges—the
masses that cultivate—will have a great influence on society. If everybody were
to cultivate with his abilities unlocked and everyone were to go around doing
supernormal things, the entire face of society would change. And then instead of
resembling a human society it would resemble one of deities. That can’t happen.
Since human society is just the way it is, we take advantage of this environment
and cultivate in it. Not only do we not disturb this environment, but at the
same time we need to conform to it as we cultivate. That’s because you would
have no way to cultivate if you didn’t conform to this environment. The approach
we’ve adopted today is like that. Now there are over 100 million people
practicing Dafa. It wouldn’t work if they all left their homes to become
Christian or Buddhist monks. There will be even more people in the future. What
would happen to this society? Who would feed you if everyone came to cultivate?
It wouldn’t work. So we should conform as much as possible to the society of
ordinary people. We’re utilizing this kind of societal form of ordinary humans
to cultivate, so we have to conform.
You all need to have a job, an environment, even a
family, and plenty of relatives in the society of ordinary people. Every aspect
of these things is a reflection of our ability to conform to the conventions of
ordinary people’s society. At the same time, they create good opportunities for
us to cultivate and they provide us with an environment for cultivation, for you
are cultivating among ordinary people. Then, since you’re cultivating among
ordinary people, we conform as much as possible to the
way of ordinary people’s society in regards to dealing with material items
or material possessions. But
there’s one point to make: You are not the same as other people.
Since you are cultivators your hearts and minds aren’t
attached to those things. You can have a lot of money, a family,
property—you can have lots of things. But you need to
let go of the attachment to them. That’s your way of
cultivation.
The total abandonment that we’re discussing
here doesn’t mean you have to give up material things for it to count as letting
go. On the contrary, if you give up every material thing but in your heart and
mind you haven’t released them, if you’re reluctant to part
with them, if you’re not able to sever
them, or if you’re even
thinking about them often and letting that affect your
cultivation sometimes, then I’d say that’s not letting
go but being forced to let go. So, superficially
taking material items lightly is a formality. As I see it, the real reason one
can ascend by way of cultivation is because the human heart and mind undergo a
change. Only when a person’s heart and realm of thought have reached the
standard has he truly ascended in cultivation. We take material things very
lightly. It doesn’t matter whether you have them or not. What’s critical is
whether you can let go of the attachment and whether
you can elevate—that’s what is most crucial. Moreover, our entire cultivation
form is arranged for cultivating among ordinary people, and this allows you to
progress diligently while not having your gong regress. All of the
arrangements, in every regard, conform to this form of cultivation that we have
today. So when I first started to teach the Fa years
ago, the gods were saying that this is a “Fa of High Virtue.”
They felt that it is really good.
Question: Should the methods of spreading Dafa be
adjusted to suit Europeans?
Teacher: It’s great for a cultivator
who has obtained the Fa to have this aspiration and think about how to spread it
and allow more people to learn it. Regardless of whether it’s in Europe or the
East, no matter how you spread it, it will be hard for those who aren’t
predestined to come learn it. Which people are
“predestined”? I’ve discussed predestination before. Then how are we to find
those who are predestined? Say you put an
advertisement in the newspaper, searching, “Who is predestined?”
That wouldn’t work. But there is one point everyone
needs to be clear on. Probably every one of our students know inside that there
are some people who will immediately feel struck or excited when you mention the
words “Falun Gong” or
“Zhuan Falun,” and those people instantly want to learn
it. It’s quite likely those are predestined ones. Some people’s
hearts aren’t moved no matter how you talk to them, and there’s a good chance
they aren’t predestined.
So as for how to spread it and
the methods of spreading it, actually, the best way is
for our students to do the
exercises in public areas so that those who are predestined can
find them. Another is to have our Dafa books be available in the bookstores of
various ethnicities and countries. I have countless Law Bodies
who can instantly see who is predestined and who is supposed to
obtain the Fa. If we have books in bookstores and our students are doing
the
exercises in parks, Law Bodies can find the
predestined ones and bring them to
look for this Fa. Some challenges will arise if we lack this type of
environment. But no matter the method
used, a predestined person will find the book and think it’s good when he reads
it. Since he’s predestined he will definitely think it’s good and seek it out,
and, since there are those of us doing the
exercises in the parks, he’ll find us right away. Since the time I
first started teaching the Fa a lot of people have obtained it
that way. But there are still many people
who heard
about it from our students. They thought it was really good and
told their family members to come learn it. If
they felt that it wasn’t good, they definitely wouldn’t have told their family
to come get duped. It was
precisely because they felt it was good that they told their family members to
come learn. Then their family felt it was good, and they told other friends and
relatives to come learn. People are strongly
impacted when students themselves talk about their personal
experiences and how they feel. They wouldn’t lie to their own family
members, nor would
they lie to their friends. So their
friends believe it. And if
they then
believe
it, they’ll
come learn it too, and they’ll
have their own
experiences. That’s how Dafa spreads.
But that said, there is a small number of
people who obtained the Fa from seeing articles
that our students placed in newspapers or magazines. I said yesterday that I
don’t object to obtaining the Fa that
way. But what
problems might come up
in this scenario? It’s that not only the highest type of men will
come, but the lowest, too. So the people who come will have different goals and
many different states of mind, and that is why some people
practice for some time and then leave. They
could well be among the lower type of men. Maybe they don’t want to obtain it,
or they’re
not supposed
to obtain it.
That’s
often the case. And it’s a good thing for students to write
articles
themselves or put information in newspapers. I don’t
object to that, since after all,
it does help predestined people to come—superior people will see
the newspaper and come. That’s why it can be effective. But there
are only two mainstream methods: One is that we have books in bookstores and
that we have practice sites, so Law Bodies can take people
to find them; the other is Fa conferences and our students sharing their
experiences with family. It’s mainly with these two methods that more people
come, and their quality is high. As for adopting other methods, be they Eastern
or Western, I think those are still the two main methods. People in many regions
at the initial stage don’t yet have an understanding of Falun Gong, so we
introduce it to people by writing articles
in newspapers or magazines and such. Of course that too spreads the
Fa, to be
sure.
Question: I’m Caucasian. When you come across
a
test, do you take it
or let it go?
Teacher: “When you…” That’s referring
to me, right? There’s something I’d like to
tell you all. It’s a very good
question. I think
it’s time to clarify
something for
everybody.
I can tell you that today, no matter how many people
are
practicing Dafa or how many students or disciples I have, you are
all cultivators. Nobody is an exception. So you’re all cultivating.
Whether you’re cultivating
well or poorly, diligently or not, or your level is high or not,
all of
you have to hold yourselves to strict requirements as you cultivate
and treat yourselves as
cultivators. I,
however, am not here to cultivate. You need to be clear on this distinction. I
don’t have my own ordeals, nor do I have cultivation factors like yours. There’s
a point I want to make: I’m taking you as my disciples, so I am offering
you salvation, I’m saving and transforming you. So from this you
can tell I’m different from you. You need to treat all of the troubles you
encounter as cultivation, because they are definitely cultivation. But if
trouble occurs for me, that’s a disruption and harming of Fa. Why should it be
looked at that way? This cosmos is primordial. The purpose of my doing this is
Fa-rectification. All of the cosmos’ beings have strayed from the Fa, so they
have to be rectified with Fa. What I
often say to you is that this is something one doesn’t
come
across even in thousands of years. To teach
the Dafa of the whole cosmos in the human world, a Fa that
even gods weren’t aware of before,
that’s something which has never happened in all of
creation.
Lives have become increasingly impure over endless
historical ages, and everything is deviating. If it continues like this for
long, even the most fundamental base of
Zhen, Shan, Ren will deviate.
That’s incredibly horrible. But I cherish the lives in the cosmos. I wish to
preserve
the original lives as much as possible and to avert the process of
elimination. That wish came forth, and so I came. (Applause)
Since I’ve
come here, I come in a manner such that I’m bringing with me everything that is
most original, most wonderful, and of the beginning of time—which is more
perfect. You know
that the Falun rotates.
The Falun you see is just a
superficial form of the Falun. It also has a Fa side that you can’t see. It’s
constantly rotating and has an automatic repair mechanism, returning everything
to its most original and optimum state. From the microscopic level to the
surface,
all
matter
and all lives are
like this, with everything turning and in
motion. I have created and restored all of this. What’s more, it’s continually
perfecting and harmonizing. There’s no question of cultivation for me. In doing
this undertaking, what I need to resolve is the obstructive effect of the evil
forces that formed after the universe’s lives became impure. At the same time,
there is the challenge presented to me by the karma created by all
beings
in human society. I often say that I know
why Jesus was crucified
by people,
why Shakyamuni had to
undergo Nirvana, and why Lao Zi hastily departed, leaving behind a book of five
thousand words. Say a person came to the
world and has reincarnated lifetime after lifetime. You
have no
idea how many lives and how many lifetimes you’ve been through.
But in each
and every lifetime you have accrued many debts to others and done much wrong.
Some people came from
various levels and have reincarnated onto this earth. They did wrong things as
they were descending step by step, which is to say they’ve spent time in some
high-level dimensions. Why couldn’t they remain in those dimensions?
It’s
because over there they again did bad things and descended further;
they
did bad things again and descended even further. So the debts
accrued from doing wrong
in the heavens were owed to gods.
The gods in the heavens won’t allow a
human being to return to the heavens! Without a Master to teach you, without a
master looking after you, you could never return no matter how great your
abilities. After
coming to
the earth
it’s forever impossible to return if you aren’t taken care of by the kind of
master who truly saves people. That’s
because even if you could really pay for the karma of the human
world, you still couldn’t pay for what is owed in the heavens. Jesus wanted to
save people and had great mercy, so he ignored all of that. He then had to undo
those hard-to-undo karmic knots that were tied onto people. Yet in this
universe there’s a law that states: “Those who don’t lose, don’t
gain; to gain,
you must lose; what is
owed must be repaid.” That’s absolute, it’s an absolute and
eternal law. Accordingly, if you release a person from it, who will pay for his
debts? So
those accounts or all of
those debts naturally fell on Jesus. “You
untied it for them, then you pay for it on their
behalf.” All of the knots that couldn’t be undone, everything that was owed,
and the things that those people being saved simply had no way to free
themselves from, all of it was fastened onto Jesus since he was on the earth.
There were karmic debts from all different levels; meaning, they weren’t only
from here, among humans. What extent did it finally reach? The more people he
saved, the more knots he carried.
He simply had no way to free himself, nor did he have the energy to do those
things.
The knots couldn’t be untied. So in the end, Jesus saved those
people, but his own human body couldn’t be freed. Jesus thus had no choice but
to abandon this body to pay the karmic
debts for them.
A lot of lives’ karma as well as great hatred all landed on Jesus. “Alright,
I
will pay them for
all believers.” He was crucified and died an agonizing death. All knots
were bound
to his flesh body, and with the death of his flesh body they were
released. Jesus was freed the moment that body was cast off.
That’s why Jesus had to be crucified, and why people say Jesus suffered for
people. That’s the reason.
You’ve all seen that many people have come to learn this
Fa.
In the future there will be even more. You know, for you to
cultivate, those things need to be done by the master. But I’m
different from them, for
whether it be Jesus or Shakyamuni, they are, after all,
enlightened beings of a small
scale. I’m not inside the cosmos, so I can resolve problems of the lives at
different levels and in different cosmic bodies of the
cosmos. I said that saving human beings isn’t my true
goal, but they are one level of beings that’s included—they are a level of life
that I wish to save. In fact, I myself don’t have any
ordeals, I’m not cultivating. The troubles I encounter rarely
manifest here on the ordinary human side, but there are those that do manifest
here, and most of them aren’t known to you. The reason I can free myself from
this problem is that I’m not within it. I won’t be like them, unable to
disentangle myself. I can disentangle myself, but the difficulty is extremely
great, it’s something none of you beings can imagine. I can give up to the
greatest extent possible everything of mine, and that is why
I can resolve all of it. (Applause)
By the way, let me
further emphasize something related to the question
that was just raised. There are often some students who accompany me, by my
side, and in each region
there are some people in charge—center coordinators or others in charge. You
need to understand something: Everything
you run into is about
dealing with hardships. Yet you
cannot represent Master. When it comes to any matter in which you know I’ve
participated, you have to consider the matter from my perspective. That’s
something you’ve neglected before. Troubles
created for me are damage
directed at this Fa. So it’s
completely different from your passing through your hardships. It’s definitely
not that your master is cultivating
or that your master is passing
tests. It
really is damage directed at the Fa and the cosmos, so they can’t
be equated. Be clear on
this. When I handle problems, I treat them as
real demons, but you
cannot! Everything you encounter is directly related to your cultivation. So you
always need to treat it as
cultivation and find reasons inside yourself. These are completely
different.
Question: It seems very hard for Europeans to enter
tranquility. Why?
Teacher: Actually, it’s the same
for
Asians and Europeans. A person who can reach true tranquility
while
cultivating in ordinary people’s society is really at a high level.
Since you
have a job in the society of ordinary people and you have to attend to ordinary
human affairs of every sort, so as you
sit there, you don’t want to think about anything,
but those things will affect your mind
to the
point that you think about them unwittingly. That’s why you can’t
become tranquil. In cultivation we’re constantly improving
ourselves and getting rid of attachments. As your attachments become less and
less, you will find that you naturally become more and more serene, more and
more serene. It reflects your level. It’s not realistic to expect that you
reach tranquility right from
the outset.
No method
can achieve that, except for cases where you have
extremely special circumstances; such persons’
human sides are really weak and the other side
is really strong. They’re in a state of being partly enlightened, partly not.
Those are
extremely special people
who can
achieve a certain degree of tranquility, and it mainly owes to their godly side
taking effect, not their human side. Apart from cases like that, others can’t
possibly on day one reach the point where they can become tranquil. So there is
no difference for different races, it’s the same for
Europeans and Asians.
Don’t be anxious if you can’t become tranquil. So long as
your body is comfortable and relaxed when you do the
exercises, just try your best to restrain
yourself from thinking all over the place. If you really can’t stop your mind
from wandering, then let it be, and
treat those unbridled thoughts as someone else: “Go ahead
and think. I’ll watch you think.” That’s also an approach. At least you can
clearly distinguish that it’s
not
you, and that is really precious. Or, you restrain it
and don’t let it think, in which case you’ve
achieved what a
cultivator is able to do. After the body is relaxed, one enters the optimum
state for transformation and
refinement. But what if
your mind can’t
calm down and you can’t achieve the best state for transformation and
refinement? You know,
our
cultivation begins from the microscopic level, so the microscopic
side of
us is tranquil. Starting from there, as that side becomes
increasingly tranquil and is cultivated
better and better, what’s on the
surface will be restrained and grow
weaker all the time. The surface is worse [than before], but it’s
weaker. That’s the
relationship. A lot of you have
cultivated for a long time and find that there are still bad thoughts in your
minds. You can suppress them if you want to. That’s
because even though they’re getting worse and worse, and more of
them are surfacing, they’re getting weaker since they
no longer have roots.
Question: How do we Western practitioners tell what’s
right, and how should we lead our lives? Should we let things happen
naturally?
Teacher: I’ll tell you what I
think.
Under different circumstances I’ve talked about
letting
things happen naturally. I haven’t told you to let things happen
naturally with regard to everything. When you work in a company,
your boss pays you. If you’re
muddleheaded with your work, you let things happen
naturally, and you don’t work
hard, then you really don’t deserve the pay. We should be good persons wherever
we are. I’m
saying that “letting things happen naturally” should be applied
according to the situation. In cultivation we follow
the natural
course of events, but we still have to make an effort to
repress the bad side of ourselves and we still need to work hard at
cultivation—doing
otherwise is not called “letting things happen
naturally.” This is in fact how all of you have
been cultivating.
We know
well that in
cultivation we are to
actively cultivate
ourselves, and that in our everyday lives we need to conform as much as possible
to the ways of
ordinary people’s society.
So you have
to separate your everyday human job from your cultivation—you
definitely should draw a distinction between them. Work is work, and cultivation
is cultivation. But there is one thing: Because you’re a cultivator, the high
standards you hold
yourself to
will be
reflected in your work, in
society, at home,
and in different social environments. In other
words, you’re always a good person no matter where you are, and
others will all say that you’re a good person. That’s how they go together. The
idea of letting things happen
naturally isn’t like what people said in the
past, where a person would no longer care about anything and would
just sit there as though he’d left
the secular world; a person who did that
was thought to be “letting things happen naturally.”
That’s not how
it is—that’s
definitely not the
idea.
If you encounter certain troubles, I think that as
cultivators
you
have to first examine yourselves:
“Is it because I myself didn’t do well
in some
regard?” If each of you
cultivators can’t do this, you will have no way to make
progress. So when any one of
you encounters any troubles, you have to always
examine
yourself first:
“Is it that I did something that wasn’t quite right?” I often talk about
a principle: Everything in the universe is in harmony; if you
do
something wrong yourself, it will
create a
kink, a discordance with others, and everything around you will seem to be out
of sorts. And interpersonal relations will become tense. At that point, look
inside
yourself for the reasons and correct your mistake. You will find
that everything becomes harmonious and right again. I don’t think we should
argue with
others
about things. If trouble really befalls you
and it looks like somebody is wronging to you, I
think it could well be that you, a cultivator, owed it from a
previous lifetime. Endure it
(ren) and let it
go. Even an
ordinary person knows that two people will leave upset after they have a clash;
friction arises and the two get entangled. When the friction persists
for a long time it will get increasingly harder to resolve, and in the end
they’ll become enemies. But we are able to tolerate it, disregard it, and take a
step back. In China there’s a saying, “Take a step back and you will find the
sea vast and sky boundless.” If you
keep on prodding and pushing ahead, you will find
that there’s really no way out. But take a step back, let the attachment go and
disregard it, and you’ll find that truly the sea is vast and the sky
boundless—it’s a whole new world. That’s the way it is. That’s how
it should be for a cultivator. If we argue and fight
just like ordinary people and have a hand in clashes like they do, I’d say we’re
just the same as ordinary people then. Isn’t that right? It
is, in fact.
Question: How can we know our own
level?
Teacher: Subjectively speaking, I’m
extremely reluctant to let you know your level at the beginning. For a person to
melt into such an immense Fa… I’ll give
an example. It’s like if a wood chip or a piece of sawdust were to drop into a
blast furnace of molten steel: instantly you’d lose sight of it. As you melted
into such an immense
Fa, your body’s karma, thought karma, and all kinds of things would be gone in
an instant. If we were to do it entirely that way, it would be the same as your
not having cultivated
and it would be equivalent to my having re-created life. It
wouldn’t count as you having cultivated. So we can’t do it that way. We need to
have you cultivate yourselves and change yourselves. This
Fa is immense.
During
the course
of your cultivation, as long as you take yourself to be a cultivator, cultivate
steadily and firmly, and keep reading the book, you will continually ascend and
improve. Add to that our supplementary method—performing
the
exercises—and your rate of improvement is very fast. It’s the
fastest way to cultivate.
If at the start I let you to know your level, you
wouldn’t be able to handle
yourself: “Whoa! I’m extraordinary!
I’ve already gotten this far in cultivation!” Suppose I
let you see the real changes that have occurred around your own body, think
about it: Since you carry emotions, desires,
and all kinds of attachments of ordinary people, wouldn’t your heart be swayed?
I can’t let you know too soon, for your
ordinary human thoughts are still quite strong. It’s
because I want to ensure that you constantly
elevate at the fastest speed in your cultivation. When a superior
person hears the Dao, he will achieve Consummation simply by way of
enlightening. That’s the most admirable. And it’s the most rapid—it
really is the most rapid.
We have some disciples whose situations are different, so
some people cultivate with their abilities unlocked and some are in a
half-locked
state. They can see, and some can even see quite
clearly and know everything. Those are
exceptional cases. Most
people
cultivate with their abilities locked. Just focus
on reading the book and cultivating, and you will be constantly improving
yourself and continually enlightening to heaven’s secrets. The laws
and principles of the Fa are themselves enough to
fill you
with confidence. Of course, people in today’s
society have been too deeply deluded by all kinds of false,
so-called “realities” of the society of ordinary people, and they
are too strongly attached. It’s just too hard for them to break out. They often
struggle in choosing between the Fa and their attachments to self-interest. A
person would even rather give up the Fa than give up his attachments.
These
things are hard to determine, as
today’s society has come to this stage where people no longer know their true
nature or the standards for human beings.
Bad as it is, however, it provides us with the best
environment for cultivating. Isn’t it that the more complicated the environment,
the more it can forge
highly accomplished cultivators? That’s the principle. Many masters
of qigong appeared in China a few years ago. Ordinary
people admired them: “Wow, amazing qigong grandmaster, you have all these
amazing abilities!” People
gave them favors and even money since they
healed people. Their pursuit of material grew ever stronger, and many thus
dropped and lost their
gong. They were totally ruined, and their masters wouldn’t watch over
them anymore. Why? Cultivation used to be practiced in settings that weren’t
known to ordinary people.
Cultivating in the mountains, in
obscure settings, in monasteries, or through other religious forms, they didn’t
come into contact with the realities and complicated stakes of ordinary people’s
society, nor did they enter into this big dye vat. If they were to come into
contact with society, they would immediately be contaminated by the complicated
society, they would
end up chasing after fame and gain like ordinary people, and they
would turn
into ordinary people, for their cultivation methods would lose
their effect when
among ordinary people. By contrast, we cultivate exactly inside this big dye
vat, and everything we meet with is of that kind. Aren’t you extraordinary if
you can
rise above it?! Do you know why you can cultivate to a high level?
One of the most essential factors that ensures your cultivating to high levels
is the fact that it’s so rotten here. If you can rise above it—even if your
heart is touched just a little and wants to cultivate today—you are
extraordinary, because in the midst of this kind of environment, soaked in
suffering, you still have that
wish.
Visible
suffering that’s on the
surface doesn’t count for much. What’s really excruciating is the suffering that
happens
when you’re severing and
breaking attachments—that
is when it hurts most. So this complicated environment provides the best
conditions
and allows you to cultivate to high levels. Conversely, the power
of this Dafa can only be revealed in
these most
adverse of
situations. This Dafa wouldn’t be necessary were everything good in a society.
And Fa-rectification wouldn’t be needed in a good environment. It would be
enough to just have Jesus’ and
Shakyamuni’s Tathagata-level Fa in the world. But why have religions now entered
the Age of Law’s End, wherein none of them can still save people? People even
dare to curse Buddha, and
statues of Jesus are even stepped on and urinated on. In this
age, asking people to learn
the Fa of [such Tathagatas] or saving them with those Fa wouldn’t do the
job.
Question: I really want to cultivate, but how can I
stop doubting Dafa?
Teacher: What I’ve told you is that
everyone in the society of ordinary people will
acquire many, many notions in his mind after birth and absorb
“knowledge” from the false realities of ordinary people’s society, which delude
him even worse here. The many
notions and set ideas formed in your mind
are all factors that block your gaining the
Fa. Aren’t
those doubts
that arise in
your mind caused by your assessing the Fa with what you’ve learned
from ordinary people’s
realities?
Isn’t that how
those doubts
surfaced?
Definitely. In other words, you are assessing the Fa by using notions formed
from ordinary human knowledge and ordinary human thoughts. Aren’t ordinary human
beings at the lowest level? Aren’t ordinary people lost in illusion? What can
they possibly have that can be
compared to the
truth of
the universe?
Nothing. Then again, this Dafa of ours is taught in the
lowest, ordinary human manner using human language—the lowest form of
expression.
So [Dafa] seems as though it too is superficial. But as long as you
keep on studying it you
will find that it becomes ever
more
profound. The more you study it, the
more it becomes too deep to measure and too distant to reach. Ordinary human
knowledge, on the other hand, doesn’t have that kind of profound
content. You’re making a huge mistake if you take all
of
the disbelief and doubts you have
to be your own thoughts. Those are notions formed after birth among ordinary
people. You’re thinking
that they are you, yourself, but they’re not you.
Question: My Third Eye had opened before I started the
practice. I make my living
by fortune-telling. Do I have to give up
my job?
Teacher: If you
didn’t
cultivate and were to remain an ordinary human, I wouldn’t
be against it. I’m teaching the Fa to cultivators to
enable them to cultivate. I’m not trying to get
everyone to come practice Dafa. If you think you
can cultivate,
then do
it. Otherwise,
don’t. Perhaps in man’s future society there will still exist these side-path
practices like fortune-telling, fengshui, and even
the healing of illness using certain methods. It’s possible all of them will
exist. They have always existed worldwide since ancient
times. But in the time ahead the things you, as a cultivator, will
see will be of higher and higher realms, and the power
of your words will become greater and greater. Problems will arise
when you tell other people their fortunes. Sometimes
things in the human world are not fixed;
they might not turn out a
certain way. Then if a person believes
what you say, and firmly
believes it, it will reinforce that likelihood. Once you have energy, it’s
possible that your words
might cause an element that isn’t fixed to become
fixed, resulting in something that wasn’t
originally supposed to happen. What you see isn’t the
real situation; there exist other karmic reasons. Yet
you will have fixed it when you speak of
it. In this case, you might
have done a bad thing. And karma of this sort is something extra
that you have added to your cultivation. Your trials
and tribulations are in front of you here, and you
have to pass each and every one of them. You
won’t be able to pass the extra tribulations that you
add on. If you do something that has a great impact or seriously
bad consequences, you won’t be able to pass the ordeal and
cultivate. So cultivators emphasize cultivation of
speech. Yet you failed badly to meet that requirement.
If you directly tell others what you see, you are
divulging heaven’s secrets, and you are casually
and irresponsibly telling them to
ordinary people. How could that be okay? That’s even less
acceptable.
Also, let me tell you
that the great majority of
fortune-tellers have external factors that play a role, apart from
their individual factors. So
it’s a frightening thing. That’s really
frightening for a living being! In that case there’s
no way to cultivate. I’m just telling people the principles of
the matter—I’m not against
ordinary people doing that. If you want to cultivate,
I have to tell you about it
and I have to be responsible to you. If you do
that, it will do nothing but harm to you.
That said, you’re sure to think, “So how
am I to make a living?” I’m simply
teaching the Dao, teaching the Fa, to cultivators. If you can cultivate, then
cultivate. I can only discuss it this way. I have to
be responsible to you. On the other hand, it will be
ensured that you, a Dafa
disciple, can make a living,
which is the way it should be.
Question: How can I get
rid of my fear?
Teacher: Fear is an attachment, too.
It’s a matter of whether your will is strong. You
should overcome it. Some people say, “I fall asleep
whenever I do the
exercises.” That too is something you
need to overcome with your own will. Although it’s not a demon, it
can have a demonic effect on cultivators. It will
effect you if you can’t conquer it.
Question: I can never feel the Falun spinning in my
lower abdomen.
Teacher: Not everyone can feel it.
Some people are so sensitive
that they feel it as soon as
the energy moves: “Wow! It’s so strong!” Some people
still don’t feel anything when earth-shaking things
happen in their bellies. Each person’s bodily
condition is different. Don’t judge the
height of a person’s level according to
what he feels. Be sure not
to judge it based on
feelings.
Question: Will
my Third Eye never be
opened?
Teacher: Are you pursuing it? If it
weren’t to open even when you succeeded in
cultivation, then I think something would be wrong.
What you mean is, “Won’t
it be opened in the course
of cultivation?” If you pursue it, if you have that
kind of thought—even just
slightly—you won’t be allowed to see. And even
when you do have the ability
to see, you won’t be allowed to see, since that attachment you have hasn’t been
eliminated. So you need to get rid
of that attachment and ignore it. Then see what
happens.
Caucasian students are different
from Asian students because the cultural origins of the
East—particularly
of China—are deeper.
It not only
has a culture
that’s five to six thousand
years old, but
has also inherited the prehistoric culture of the
previous period. So in its very bones and in its very
cells there is profound cultural substance. Yet the
culture in Caucasian society has only been around for two thousand years, so its
myths are easily ruptured. They can almost see as soon as the
myths fall away. Then by
contrast, in what way are Chinese people different? When you tell
them the reason why, they’re still
thinking, “Oh, that’s right, but
why the why, then?”
When you then tell them why the why, they’re still
thinking, “Oh, then why the why of the
why?” So you need to clear things up for
them all the way to the end before you can completely open their
minds. That’s why many of our Caucasian students can
inadvertently see once they start to learn—that’s the
reason. They’ve been sealed off very little by the
superficial things in the society of ordinary people.
It’s only the theories—the ordinary human theories—that
bind them. As soon as those
theories are punctured there’s nothing among ordinary people that can confine
them. That’s the idea. Of course, it’s not always that
way. A perceptual grasp and a rational grasp are two
different things. If a person can truly learn the Fa and absorb
it into his mind, truly
grasping the Fa in cultivation, then that’s different
from the perceptual grasp at the beginning. One will
transcend to understand the Fa
rationally.
Question: How does one spread the Fa to monks and
nuns?
Teacher: I often think about monks
and nuns. I’ve been especially concerned about them
the past couple years. Be it Shakyamuni or Jesus,
those great enlightened
beings founded their own cultivation ways
which disciples carry on. They’re
considered Buddha system disciples, after all, so I
have been thinking about them. But the Age of Law’s
End has come to this point, and there really aren’t many people in religions who
truly wish to cultivate. I’ve found a problem: Many
monks and nuns are upholding religions,
rather than upholding Gods and Buddhas. Their minds
aren’t on cultivation but fully on
preserving the formalities of religion, and this attachment has
resulted in a serious obstacle for them. Also, some people think that
beyond the religious forms there is no Buddha Fa,
but only wicked practices and crooked ways. It’s one
of the biggest factors that seriously blocks them from
obtaining the Fa. Still though, there are those who genuinely think things
through and can truly evaluate everything based on
reasoning, and such people
are extraordinary. They read my book, and after they
finish reading they know what this is, for people all
have Buddha-nature within.
It works just like
electricity: When the two
electrodes make contact,
“Bam!”—they connect. If they didn’t have Buddha-nature they
wouldn’t connect, they couldn’t strike up those
sparks, and electricity wouldn’t be conducted. So some monks and nuns are
different, and I think they are truly remarkable since
they know that their reason for leaving the secular
world is to cultivate. On the other hand, some people
don’t have that righteous a mind. Of course, I won’t
say much more about religious things, I’m just talking
about it in passing. You can talk to them if you are
their lay patron, friend, or relative. If
they want to cultivate,
they will. And if they don’t want to cultivate,
let them be. We really shouldn’t
drag people: “Come cultivate,
it’s really a shame if you don’t! You
have to come with me!” The
heart can’t be changed by
personal or emotional ties. People’s hearts have to be stirred of their own
accord.
Question: How should
monks who have set duties in temples
truly cultivate? Should they go back to secular
life?
Teacher: They definitely don’t need
to return to the secular world. Why not? The matter of
“practicing only one cultivation way” that I talk about mainly
relates to the Fa which we now
cultivate. In the past, behind every word in the
Buddhist scriptures there were the images of Buddhas. Now when you flip open the
scriptures you can’t see them; even behind Shakyamuni’s and Jesus’ names there
are no longer their images. That is, the books no longer have the power to save
people, for they are merely
black ink on white paper. Furthermore,
performing religious rituals
is just a religious formality, and I just consider them ordinary work. Actually,
many monks have come to treat those formalities as a
job—they think they’re working and
earning a salary. The monks in Mainland China are
classified into section level and
division level, and receive wages accordingly. I heard that there’s even a
bureau level. They’ve altered
Shakyamuni’s original teachings. People don’t know
that they are undermining the Fa taught
and spread by Shakyamuni. Now that it has reached this stage, of
course Shakyamuni doesn’t look after them anymore, and
things are what they are now. So I just
consider it a job. Be it chanting scriptures or doing
religious ritual, there is no
effect. Those people won’t be bound-up by
any forms so long as they cultivate in Dafa. As I
said, a great way has no form. No ordinary human forms are worthy of such a
great Fa. So we manage things loosely and only look at people’s minds. If you
cultivate,
I will look after you. And this kind of care-taking is
invisible to ordinary people, so it
doesn’t have to take on any
ordinary human form. Since we don’t have formalities,
I regard everything
done among ordinary people
as work—I can only look at it that way now. If you’re
a monk and want to conduct
religious rituals,
you can do them, provided you know that you cultivate
in Dafa. You need to put in
more effort to forge ahead vigorously—that’s how you
should handle it. The same
goes for other religions.
Question: Does having
“a clear and pure mind” mean
getting rid of all attachments
and
everything one is interested
in?
Teacher: It’s like that if one truly
attains the state of having a clear and pure mind.
But you cultivate starting from the level
of ordinary people. You’d immediately become a Buddha
if you could achieve it instantaneously. So it’s
impossible. In order to reach
a Buddha’s realm, you have to go
through a process of cultivation and have
a deep and substantial mental foundation.
That is, you are continually cultivating, continually
deepening it, and improving yourself more and
more. It’s attained gradually. If you were made to
truly reach that level immediately, you might be so scared you would no longer
dare practice. That’s because your thinking is not yet
at a level that high, since
you’ve just started from the
level of ordinary people. So it’s
reached gradually and
naturally, and it can be
attained without too much effort. You will attain it
as long as you cultivate
and read the book. The principles of the
Fa can resolve all of your problems. It’s not done
forcefully. Doing it
forcefully is itself an
action with intent. Just conduct yourself
as a cultivator—you’re clear on this. Everyone cultivates his own
heart and mind and tries his best not to
do bad things. That’s not called
intention-filled action. It’s called getting as
close as possible to your
innate, original
nature.
Question: You said
that science is a religion, yet I still have to do well in
my scientific research work. This is always a contradictory
scenario.
Teacher: I’ve said that science is a
religion and have discussed it in great detail. Why is it a
religion, and why is it a
comprehensive one? The
reason is, it neither pays attention to virtue
nor recognizes the existence of gods, and
since it can’t see the existence of gods, it doesn’t
recognize that people are punished for doing bad and rewarded for
doing good. It uses scientific theories to negate and attack anyone
who says that there’s good fortune as recompense for doing good, that there’s
retribution for doing bad, or that gods exist. It even
attacks upright religions. It is undermining human
morality. In the absence of moral restrictions
people dare to do any bad
thing. Based on this one point
alone, would you say this
science is upright or wicked? Isn’t it playing a
wicked role? Why has the morality of people today
degenerated to such an extent? It’s
precisely because people no longer have upright
beliefs. Actually—and this holds especially for
Westerners—what you truly believe in is not religion, but your science. Think
about it from the depths of your mind: What you believe in most is really
science. Everything else is secondary to you. Science
is very much foremost. I’m pointing this out to you
because it’s an obstacle in cultivation.
It’s said that in the past the Roman
Catholic Church disagreed with the
notion that human beings evolved from
apes. They believed that man
was created out of clay by God. I hear the Roman Catholic
Church has now publicly conceded that
humans evolved from apes.
Haven’t they
denied their Lord?
This science is so powerful
that everyone believes in it today. I can
clearly explain everything about humankind,
from major things to minor things; I can clearly
explain every part of the development of
humankind from antiquity to today.
But I don’t talk about such things since
those are all affairs of ordinary people. I only talk about things
that relate to your cultivation. The basis
of almost all understanding in
science is flawed, and that includes the basis for
understanding matter, the universe, and life.
Today’s science says that
the hole in the atmosphere
above Australia, that is, the breach in the ozone
layer that appeared in the sky above the
Antarctic, was caused by
industrial emissions—the fluorocarbons used in air
conditioners and other waste gases—and that it was
these things that caused the damage in the ozone layer. Actually, I want to tell
you: Everything in this universe is life—everything is alive.
The massive gaseous entities that
you can’t see are layer upon layer upon
layer upon layer—you couldn’t count how many there
are. They are all lives, all
deities. It’s the industry brought about by
modern science that’s been
seriously damaging humankind’s
habitat. That’s absolutely
true. It’s not the damage of the gaseous
entity that caused the hole in the
atmosphere above the
Antarctic. Human beings can’t harm
high-level beings. Why didn’t a hole appear in
Europe, an industrially
developed region? Why did it have to be in the
Antarctic, a place where there are no
inhabitants? It’s because gods saw that there was too
much waste emission and toxic gas on
earth, so they opened up a
window to let the waste gas out and then
closed it up. It’s not in the least what modern
science presumes.
Nowadays, humankind’s
development has reached a stage wherein science
controls all domains. So now
humankind can no longer break free of it, for it has become a
reality of man’s social development. It doesn’t work
if you are at odds with it. We act in conformity with ordinary people to the
greatest extent possible. So, do a good job with your
scientific research. It’s not your fault. It’s not something that an
individual, a people, or a nation can break free of.
Since it’s a job, you should
do it well, fulfill your duties, and do
your work well. That’s all. Don’t think that you are
doing such and such for the sake of science. In
reality, science has unsparingly occupied every domain
of humankind. Almost everything of
humankind exists for its sake, so you
can’t stop doing everything because of [what science is].
As for cultivators, I
just want you to understand the principle.
I’m not asking you to separate from this reality that
has shackled human society. It’s not that
I am asking you to give up your job.
I said that science is a religion and that it’s a
complete one. It leads you
to first recognize things in a material sense, which
makes you believe in it spiritually. True religions, on the other hand, have you
understand principles first—you come to truly comprehend things
in your mind. Your understanding develops
from the intangible to, at last, the tangible.
Eventually you can understand it in a material
sense and return to your heavenly
paradise after reaching Consummation. It’s that sort
of process. Science reverses the process.
It starts from material things that drive people’s
faith.
Religions, on the other
hand, start from spiritual understandings that
propel material changes. I
explain this principle so that you can
understand it. Since science has become a reality of society I’m
not against it—it’s
something human existence has come to
rely on. I’m just talking about the real
situation of contemporary science.
Question: Could Master please talk about causal
relationships and the heart of compassion?
Teacher: Since you’ve mentioned
compassion, I need to
correct your thinking. Let me tell you what
compassion is. People in the society of ordinary
people think that if they
live quite comfortably with
no disasters or hardships, if each day is
pleasant and carefree, and if they’re not
short of money and have everything
they need, then God is compassionate
toward them and is being really good to
them. Let me tell you though,
that God isn’t like that. If He were
really that way, He would be being terrible to people. That’s
because human reasoning is totally
reversed. You
know that people
living in this world are bound to have
social interactions, and so they will accrue karma.
Jesus said that people have sins. Because they have
sins they dropped down to this dimension of ordinary
people. They are accruing
karma in this dimension and committing
sins lifetime after lifetime. By wanting to be comfortable, aren’t you
unwilling to pay for your karma? If
you don’t pay for the karma and you
accrue more in this life, in your next
life you won’t even get a human body—you might
reincarnate into something worse. And if you accrue still more karma you can
only fall towards hell. If you fall even
further you will be destroyed. Then when it’s looked
at in light of this principle, tell me, how should God treat you if He is to be
considered “good to you”? That’s what
causality is.
What do I view as true
compassion (cibei), then? If a person is
truly good, he will encounter many, many hardships in
this life. The goal is to
have him pay his karmic
debts in the midst of these
hardships, to seize this lifetime in which he has a
human body and quickly pay for all of it.
After all debts are repaid
he can go up to a heavenly paradise to enjoy
happiness forever. So he
will suffer when among ordinary people. Think about
it, then: What is true
compassion? Buddhas’ take on things is
completely different from that of human
beings. Ordinary people think that Buddhas
or Gods are
compassionate to people if
they let them
enjoy ordinary, human fortune. They
complain to heaven and earth when they suffer, “Oh, God, why do you forsake me?
I’m a lost soul!” By having you pay for
karma, God is taking care of you so that you
may return. How wonderful it is to
return to a place where there
is no birth, annihilation,
or falling downwards. That
is true compassion. You
know that you’re cultivating. So why don’t I eliminate
all of your suffering? It would be unnecessary for you to go through
tribulations, as I’d simply take you up there and
that would be it, right?—and how
compassionate that would be! But
that wouldn’t do!
You yourselves have to pay for
what you owe. Hurry up and pay for it! Hurry up and
pay for it, and only this way can I save you as
quickly as possible. Isn’t that the principle? I’m
speaking from another perspective about compassion and
what compassion is. The Fa is taught to
you, not ordinary people. Don’t ever forget that.
Ordinary humans are forever lost in illusion. They aren’t allowed to know these
principles. Humans are humans,
whereas you students are students. Cultivators and
ordinary humans will always be different.
There’s
something I can tell you: Nothing in the world is by
chance—gods are watching. In this
dimension, there are those who
arrange reincarnation, those who are
responsible for order in society, those who arrange social systems,
those who control the stability of the earth, those who are in
charge of the air and the various
components of air, and those who watch over what
different gods are doing on
the earth. In this dimension
there are all kinds of gods. How could
they not be overseeing such things? Could the things
in human society just follow from what people want?
That’s absolutely impossible.
Question: With respect to
the principle of mutual-generation and
mutual-inhibition, is it
true that at high levels, one of these
two substances is closer than the other
to Zhen, Shan,
Ren?
Teacher: It shouldn’t
be understood like that. The entire universe is
composed of Zhen, Shan, Ren. Let
me put it this way: The two substances [you referred
to] are both created in the universe by Zhen, Shan, Ren. If
in this universe only the positive side existed, it
would be extremely pitiful for beings. They would have
neither happiness nor pain, and life would be a bore.
It’s exactly because there is
hardship and pain that people know to
cherish and treasure happiness when they have it; only
this way will they feel that life is interesting. So
since there exists a positive side in the universe, the existence of a negative
side was arranged for beings, and it can eliminate karma for
them.
Question: Since resolving my problem at the root, I’ve
felt my blood boil as soon as someone
mentions protecting Dafa. Master, is
this a correct state?
Teacher:
No, it’s not right. It’s not right. Everyone, pay
attention to this! Just now I talked about
there being a positive side and a negative side.
As the negative side gets to the
level down here, it becomes the bad side;
while the positive side, as
it gets to the level down here,
is the good (shan) side.
So I’m
telling you
that in the society of ordinary people we absolutely can’t do
things the way ordinary people do. We must always have
our good side be in command. Buddha Shakyamuni said that
all sentient beings have Buddha-nature. Actually, let
me tell you that all sentient beings have demon-nature
at the same time. That is, demon-nature and
Buddha-nature coexist in each being. In situations where a person
loses his temper or is violent or irrational, it is
his demon-nature at work. In
situations where a person is rational, kind, and compassionate, it is that
person’s Buddha-nature at work.
These two different natures
manifest under different circumstances.
So we always use the good side. Not so long
ago, when a television station
broadcast a groundless
report on us and we went to meet with them, everyone
talked to them rationally and with
goodwill. A lot of people went there that time, but
having a large number of people didn’t
necessarily make it a bad incident. The
attitude and approach that people adopt can be good or bad. They
explained things with reason and in an entirely kind
way. They didn’t get involved in the nation’s
political issues, nor did they damage public property.
Everyone managed to act like a
cultivator and explain our
reasoning. People [at the station] were
moved because they had never met people like that.
Conversely, why is there violence in human society? Ordinary people hold
demonstrations and protests when they want to take a stand
on some issue or to reason with someone. There is
violence and yelling, and they even
take up arms. That’s because
people have a demonic
side and those are ordinary people. Here we are
cultivators, and we should use only the good side, not
the bad side. Ordinary people use both the good side
and the bad side; ordinary
people employ both reason
and violence. They swear and lash out when they can’t
win an argument. Ordinary people have both a good side
and a bad side.
Question: Teacher said that when the universe was
cleaned up, there were alien beings who
escaped onto the earth. Do they exist in
the form of possessing spirits or in
some other form?
Teacher: Let me first explain what
alien beings are all about. You know that this Earth
isn’t the only planet with life in this universe, and Earth hasn’t existed just
this once. I’m saying that at Earth’s position there
were Earths that existed
before. Those previous Earths were
discarded. Some exploded. It happened many times—the number has been quite
large. The final stage of an Earth has always been a time
when its lives were the most corrupt and its matter was the most
impure, so the Earth could no longer be
kept. It would be eliminated since the
whole sphere had turned into a ball of karma. The reason is,
lives reincarnate. They
reincarnate into soil, rocks, plants or matter, and regardless of
what they are reborn as, they carry karma with them.
Earth would become a ball of karma when
karma was all over the place, so at that point it would
be eliminated. There would still be some
people on Earth who were relatively good, and
those exceptionally few or
extremely few ones were
taken and placed onto another planet within the Three
Realms. Yet through the ages this Earth has been replaced innumerable times and
each time there were people who remained. So over time those remaining lives
increased in number. The gods in each time period created humans with
a different appearance, so
the differences are quite substantial, and there are
some who were created on other planets. These are
alien beings.
They’ve become like a record of
history, placed there
like a page of history left behind.
That’s the function they serve, a minor one. They were left behind
from the final stage of Earth during those times, and
took with them the technology they had in those times
over to other planets, so
their starting point was more advanced. Over this
long period of time, the
knowledge of the universe they came to
grasp far exceeds that of the inhabitants of today’s Earth. Their
bodies can enter other dimensions and adjust to the mode of
those dimensions they are in;
they’ve developed to this
stage. Those things they ride in that fly back and
forth—those aircraft that human beings call flying saucers—can
enter other dimensions and fly into other space-times. If they travel in a fast
space-time, after being there for just a short while
they traverse a long distance. So
that speed is inconceivable to human beings. The types
of fuel they use aren’t in the least the kinds of
substances conceivable by the technology, theories, or concepts of
modern science.
Over the ages, these alien beings have continually been
developing and metamorphosing. So in this universe
there have really appeared the abnormal social
relations that these kinds of lives have. Greed and
lust have caused something like star wars to actually
happen over where they live. They haven’t yet
threatened humankind because
humankind doesn’t have the ability to pose a threat to
them. So they haven’t attacked
humankind. They would attack humankind if you were to
threaten them. Although alien beings haven’t attacked
humankind, they know that a
human body is the most
perfect. They’ve thus taken a fancy to the human body
and want to steal it. They
saturate all domains of
humankind with science to
make human beings firmly believe in science and
rely on it. When human
beings’ thoughts and way of existence
are completely assimilated to
theirs, they just have to replace people’s
souls and humans will become them, and
they will eventually replace
the human race.
It’s a long story. They have
been coming here full-scale since the beginnings of
the Industrial Revolution in the West. They
had come prior to
that time, but they didn’t control people
then. Their full-scale arrival began when
Caucasian society entered the industrial age. They made full preparations and
systematic arrangements for occupying this earth. It was they who created
science for human beings. So this science was
set up by aliens. Their purpose
was to unify human beings and
simplify their thoughts to the point of
being as uniform as machines.
And they unified
knowledge to make it easy
for them to later on control and
replace human beings. Furthermore, they’ve chosen a few
nationalities as the vanguards of their future, total
control of humankind. Japan
is the vanguard that drives technology. The United States is the vanguard in
breaking away from all ancient cultures
on earth. The cultures of even the most ancient and
closed-off nations haven’t been able to escape. The
whole world is being impacted by America’s modern
culture. England was the vanguard in the manufacture of machinery
during the early stages, and
Spain was the vanguard for mixing the human races. The way alien beings get
human beings to shake free of the gods is to mix the
races, causing human beings to become rootless people, just like the plant
hybrids people make nowadays. South Americans, Central
Americans, Mexicans and some people in South East Asia—all of these
races have been mixed. None of this can
evade the gods’ eyes. Alien beings have
made rather extensive preparations for overtaking
human beings.
Everyone who knows
how to operate a computer
has been
registered. Of course, our students don’t have this problem.
Once you obtain the Fa, I clean up that layer of your
body that’s been occupied by them. They have formed a layer of their
body within the human
body. It’s incredibly
frightening! Everything people learn from elementary
school right up through college is the science they
brought, and everything that human
beings use nowadays is the
product of this omnipresent science. Why
do the inspirations people get
make computers and technology develop with such
tremendous speed? It’s done by that layer of the body that alien beings formed
so as to control the human race. It’s
exactly because that system
of their technology and science that has formed in the human body is making
people’s minds do so. Today
it’s incredible how developed computers are. But it is
not a human technology. Man will be replaced by alien
beings if it continues like this for long. But think
about it, everyone: Alien beings are, after all, beings within the Three Realms,
where ordinary humans are. There are other
reasons why they dare to do this sort of thing. It has
happened because the Fa of the universe has
deviated and gods no longer look after things. So it
has to do with high-level beings as well. If this
situation is to be turned around, it has to begin from
high levels. That’s because they have
this idea that human beings are no longer any good,
their morality has degenerated,
and everything is perverted.
So they think it’s all right to just replace
them, given that they are
going to be eliminated all the same. Buddhas are merciful to people because
Tathagatas and Bodhisattvas are closest to
humankind—they’re the lowest-level Buddhas. When
Buddhas who are many levels above that level of Buddhas stop and take a look,
Tathagatas are to them likewise ordinary people. Then
what are human beings to them?
Human beings count for
nothing. When they see that human beings
are no longer good, they just destroy
them and start over. That’s their thinking.
Mercy to them is not towards
human beings but towards Buddhas.
When gods at even higher levels stop and
take a look, human beings are nothing to them and
more trivial than microorganisms. You see
the idea here, right? Some people are
even saying, “Teacher, you
should save us such-and-such way.” To
that I reply, “So you think that if a Buddha doesn’t
save you he’ll suffer withdrawal, just as if he were
addicted to doing that?” That’s not how it is.
Buddhas [save people] only out of their mercy upon people,
upon you. People want to
choose, they want to be
saved in some specific ways, and they
want to cultivate in certain ways.
They don’t know what they’re talking
about.
That’s the situation as far as alien beings go.
They are being swept out up there, and they found
out about the cleaning, so they scurried
over here, and in particularly large
numbers in recent years. Yet they don’t know that this
thing I’m doing has been systematically arranged, so no matter where they run to
they can’t escape. They have to pay for all of the bad things they’ve done, for
sure. The principles of this universe are absolutely reasonable toward any
life. So they have to answer
for everything they’ve
done. As for how their lives will
eventually be dealt with, alien beings definitely
won’t exist in the future. If there are truly good
ones among the alien beings, then their lives can
reincarnate as other lives. Bad lives will be
eliminated. So every thing that every
being does positions himself for the
future. And that
includes all human beings. Whatever
a human being does positions
him.
As of right now, most of the alien beings
who have come here did so fleeing
for their lives. They knew that in the end it would be hard
for them to escape, so some alien beings have married
Earth dwellers. But it’s not that they marry legitimately, because
no one would marry them. They catch a
village woman to leave
behind their offspring. And there are those who are
hiding among ordinary people. They can’t stay under cover no matter
how they hide. Immense gong is
coming up from the microscopic level. Whether
it be steel, iron, wood, the human body, water, rocks,
air, plants, animals, substances, etc., from the microscopic level
of everything gong is
coming up toward the surface. Tell me, where could they escape to?
The gong is
omnipresent and rushing up to the
surface. So they’ve
seen that there is no way to dodge it
or to hide from it. How do they exist?
They aren’t actually possessing spirits. But some of
them have assumed man’s appearance and walk the
streets. You have no idea
who they are. Some have hidden and don’t come out. But the number
is now small, very small. In the past
they could hide, and their flying saucers could fly up
and go to another dimension. But the other dimensions
have all been cleaned up. Immense
gong is rushing here
and they can no longer hide. They can only hide in a cave
or at the bottom of the sea in this dimension. Even
so, they can’t stay concealed. Anyway,
that’s the problem they
face. All lives are positioning
themselves in this affair.
Question: The science of ordinary people’s society is
wrong, so can we directly enter into cultivation without
being indoctrinated with ordinary human
knowledge?
Teacher:
From another perspective, we
can still increase our knowledge [by
studying science]. When I teach the Fa, I
also use modern people’s concepts to
explain the Fa so that people can understand. Knowledge can open
your mind, so it’s helpful for
obtaining the Fa. If a
person’s educational level is really low, it will be hard
for him to understand the modern
terminology that I use. But it’s not that
one cannot do without it. If the culture weren’t this
type—one brought about by science—I could teach the Fa
with an ancient language
instead of the way I teach
today. All the same,
society has
become this way, so it’s fine
for you to conform to the way of ordinary people’s society. For now
it can only be this way. Whether you’re an adult or a
child, I think that you should, as a cultivator, do
everything well in whatever position you have. If
you’re a student, learn your schoolwork well; if you
work, do your job well. If you come up with some
special approach, your way of cultivation might change
correspondingly and bring difficulties to your life and
cultivation. You should know that although alien beings brought their science to
human beings to achieve their goals, gods are in charge of everything and are in
turn using them.
Question: Should we spend a lot of time on cultivation
and less time on our jobs among ordinary people?
Teacher: That’s not the idea.
You should do your best to complete your work
within the work hours ordinary people have. I think
that no matter how busy you are, you have time to do the exercises and read the
book. That’s the way it is. I think that you should, as a diligent disciple,
want in your heart to use more of your
spare time to
cultivate.
Question: Do we need to intentionally seek a
complicated environment for cultivating?
Teacher: That’s not necessary. You
can’t always want to do things according to your own will, nor
arrange your cultivation path for yourself. Don’t go
by your own will in wishing to do this or
do that—your path is arranged by me. If you want to cultivate,
that’s the way it is. Just
do whatever you’re supposed to do. In
China there are some people who suddenly stopped
paying attention to their attire
after they started practicing.
It goes without saying that a
person should dress presentably and groom
himself neatly, like the way
a human being should.
But they became sloppy and
unkempt, to the point of almost being shameless.
That’s unacceptable. [The way we
cultivate] isn’t the way Zhang Sanfeng
cultivated the Dao years ago. You are cultivating in
the society of ordinary people. At the very least you should look like a decent
human being. Gods are higher than human beings and
should act even better—they need to
act better in every respect. Be sure
not to ignore everything and become
sloppy, unkempt, and grimy
once you practice Falun Gong—that’s
unacceptable. From a certain point of
view, you are damaging Dafa’s image. Isn’t that the case?
So for this conference I told everyone and notified
the persons in charge that everyone should dress
neatly and not look
inappropriate to others,
right? The Chinese economy has been good
these years, so it’s really not a problem
for someone to [buy and]
wear a decent outfit. I’m not
saying you have to wear expensive
clothes, but at the very least, tidy up and dress a little neatly. Remember, we
cultivate
in the society of ordinary people. This shouldn’t be a problem.
So, as far as cultivation goes,
you shouldn’t arrange for
yourselves a cultivation
environment.
Question: A four year-old child’s Third Eye has opened
and he can see Falun and Teacher’s name
emitting light.
But sometimes he’s
strong-willed, and if adults don’t
yield to him he will
cry and throw a tantrum. This agitation
makes me upset.
Teacher: “This
agitation makes me upset.”
Didn’t you just point it out? You’re
upset, and if you are upset,
your mind is perturbed. Isn’t the child helping you
improve?
Question: When this two year-old child sees a Falun,
she excitedly
says, “Falun.”
When she sees Teacher’s
picture, she
says, “Master.”
She often sits on
the floor with her hands in the
Heshi
position, saying, “Do the
exercises.” Sometimes when we play
Teacher’s audiotape she says, “Listen to
Master.”
Teacher: Then this child is really
special, as she is only two
years old. Children like this have
probably come to obtain the
Fa. Among our four to five year-old
and five to six year-old
little disciples, little students, there are a great many who’ve cultivated
well. They are really amazing.
Some of them possess quite a
few extraordinary abilities. There are
lots of people like that. The gods above
see clearly which family will obtain the
Fa in the future: “Oh, this family will obtain the
Fa.” Maybe they then
make arrangements to
reincarnate there, since
they can obtain the Fa that
way.
Question: Do
hospitals have
more karma than other
places?
Teacher: A hospital
in the society of ordinary people is
an institute that treats
diseases, and it does seem to have
slightly more pathogenic
qi. Then
again, what are you afraid of as a practitioner? It
has nothing to do with us
practitioners. Those things can’t harm us.
Question: Does
performing autopsies
in a hospital have a bad effect on [Dafa]
practitioners?
Teacher: If it’s your job, just do
it. There’s no issue since those people
are dead. We require that in cultivation
you conform to the society of ordinary people to the
greatest extent possible. Don’t alter the ways of
ordinary people’s society because you are now
cultivating. That wouldn’t do.
Question: If a person doesn’t
swear verbally but swears in his mind, will this person lose
virtue?
Teacher: Some people
say, “I’ve cultivated quite well and have
conducted myself quite
well,” but the
attachments in their hearts haven’t been discarded in
the least. Can that count as cultivation?
Isn’t that fake? So only fundamental
changes are true changes. What’s on the
surface is all show. Whether or not you swear verbally
is a formality. Whether or
not your heart and mind have changed is what’s real.
If you swear in your mind,
then of course your mind hasn’t changed. Whether or
not you lose virtue is a minor
issue. Dafa is
not being taught to preserve ordinary
people’s virtue.
Question: Some students are afraid of poisonous
animals and other creatures. Can one Consummate if these
fears aren’t
discarded?
Teacher: Those are two different
things. Just get rid of the attachment of fear
and you will be fine. Many of you
aren’t necessarily afraid of them, but
dislike those things
because they’re dirty. It’s not the kind of dirtiness
a person feels upon seeing
excrement, but rather, it’s
the kind of dirtiness he feels when he
thinks those things are bad. In the world of the future,
in the universe of the future, such creatures won’t
exist. Let me tell you that the universe initially didn’t have those poisonous,
wicked things. Why did they emerge
later on? Because lives’ karma became greater and
greater, the lives became worse and worse, and the
universe became more and more impure. So more and more
bad things emerged, and gradually they became more and
more poisonous. That’s how they
evolved.
Question: In the scripture
“Enlightenment,” it says, “pair after
pair continually arrive (liang
liang
xiang ji er
lai).” How should we
understand “pair after pair (liang liang)”?
Teacher: That’s ancient Chinese
syntax. Ancient Chinese syntax can explain things
clearly. The language is concise, yet the
meaning it conveys is profound and the
inner dimensions it encompasses are comprehensive.
It’s the best written language. In the past, people said it was the language of
the heavens, the written language of the heavens. Nowadays, man’s
morality has become corrupt and is no longer
good, so the vernacular is
used. If this “pair after pair continually
arrive” is to be explained, it
means: three in a group, two
together; once someone discusses it with
another person,
saying, “This Fa is pretty good, let’s go cultivate,”
that other person will think it’s pretty good
too, so he will come as well. Then he too will tell and bring his
family members, and people will come in pairs and
trios. Using the plain vernacular of our day,
I had to use so many words. Using
“liang
liang
xiang
ji (pair after pair
continually)” arrive, everything is
encompassed in just four words. That’s
what it means. As for “xiang
ji (one after another),”
it means coming at different times, one
after another, continually, continuously. Explaining
xiang
ji also takes a lot of
words.
Question: Can Dafa disciples who do business in books
and periodicals buy Dafa books at
wholesale price and sell them at retail price?
Teacher: Not so
long ago, I thought about something myself.
Since recently more workers had to leave
their duties (actually, they
became unemployed) in China and a small
number of them are our students,
I thought about whether to
let them sell Falun Dafa books. This way,
not only could they make a living, but
also ease the difficulty of students buying books. And
some students have done so. Afterwards, I thought
about it more carefully and it didn’t seem right. In
what way was it wrong? Think about it, everyone: Dafa—a Great Way this
sacred—can save us, yet we’d be using it to make money. Where would
we be placing ourselves? Where would we be positioning Dafa? It
really shouldn’t be done. So I didn’t let them do it.
Why can it be done [by ordinary people] in society,
then? Because I’m making use
of the society of ordinary people to spread the Fa.
The society of ordinary people is also a manifest form of the Fa at the lowest
level, so its various trades and professions just
exist like this, which isn’t wrong. Were our book
not to have dimensions
behind it and were it just black ink on white paper, it would just be a book. It
is because it has its dimensions behind it that it
has the effect of the Fa. It’s
no problem for bookstores and book
dealers in ordinary people’s society to sell them;
that is, it conforms to the Fa at the level of ordinary people’s
society. But as for our disciples,
the kind of problem I described does in fact exist. If
we used the Fa to make money, and since
most of the people buying
the books are our disciples, how could we
spend that money?
If you yourself own a bookstore and make use of
that convenient circumstance
to sell Dafa books, and if the bookstore
isn’t established specifically for Dafa and you owned
the bookstore beforehand, then I don’t object to your
doing this, since you were already dealing books prior
to this, after all. But that said, I
think that as you keep deepening your
understanding of the
Fa, you will have a new way of handling
it.
Question: I ignored everything and
fell out with my
family members in order to see Teacher.
Was
that right or wrong?
Teacher: If you came from Mainland
China, it is quite possible you weren’t allowed to
come. Or, it’s quite possible that my Law Bodies
didn’t want you to come and tried
to keep your mind on cultivation. If you
aren’t from Mainland China, then maybe there are other
reasons on your part. Maybe it
was to see whether you
are steadfast. Anything is possible.
You have to figure it out
yourself.
Question: I know that I need to make good use of time
to cultivate, but I also want to have
children. Does this count as an attachment?
Teacher: We’ve said that we should
cultivate while conforming to ordinary people to the
greatest extent possible. Now there are tens of
millions of young disciples who cultivate. If none of
them gets married and
has children, wouldn’t that be a
form of harming ordinary people’s
society? At the very least, I can tell you
that you wouldn’t be conforming to the way of
ordinary people’s society in your
cultivation. Then again, some people say,
“In this lifetime, I simply don’t want to get married. I’ve made up my
mind.” I’m not
against that, either. You
can cultivate that way. As long as it
doesn’t cause any
additional burden or
problems in your life or in other respects, I
won’t do anything about it. Matters in the human world
are decided and done by you, yourself. If
you are saying that having children would affect a person’s
cultivation, I don’t think it’s the case.
That won’t
happen.
Question: What
are the forms of Consummation?
Do they all require taking one’s
benti?
Teacher: I’ve
discussed this. Only those
who go to the Falun Paradise take the body. As for those who are
going to other places, since many of you
have come to obtain the Fa from different levels and different
realms, from the perspectives of the beings up there, were you
to take a body back, those Gods and Buddhas would think
it was as if you’d brought back with you some kind of
strange and bizarre thing. So they definitely don’t have
bodies there and do not want
them. If that thing were brought back it would
disrupt their entire
cultivation system. Please note that no
matter where you came from, I am
only assimilating your original things
to the new and most righteous Fa.
When it comes to the surface things of
your cultivation, I don’t touch any of them, so as to
ensure that you will return to your
original place. In other words, if you were a Buddha,
you will be a Buddha; if you were a Dao, you
will be a Dao; and if you
were a God, you will be a God. Your
appearance and anything that
you had before won’t change. Those who didn’t have an Attainment Status before
might be able to attain one
through this round of
cultivation, and then wherever you are
supposed to go, it will be arranged for you to go there.
Question: Whenever I do the exercises, I always hear
the same, non-Dafa music. I’m concerned that there is interference by other
dimensions’ messages.
Teacher: Music in other dimensions is
different from the music
for our cultivation. But
there is indeed beautiful music in other dimensions. If you hear
it, then let it be—don’t be concerned about
it. Those are sounds in other dimensions. And don’t
worry: Music itself doesn’t represent cultivation.
When you are cultivating in Dafa I let you exercise
with this music. The purpose is to replace
thousands of thoughts with one thought
until at some point your mind can reach a tranquil state.
That is to say, when you listen to the
music, your mind won’t run all over the
place but will just listen to the music. It benefits your doing the exercises.
But the music you use has to be the
one for doing our
exercises.
Question: My
body has encountered
a type of interference, which involves
words and pictures. It’s been half a year and I haven’t been able to
overcome
it.
Teacher: If you are a true
cultivator, no matter what your intention was when you
initially took up Dafa, you have to let it go and
not be concerned with anything. You have to be clear
that you didn’t come to cultivate
in order to resolve some issue. The
purpose of my spreading this Fa is to save people,
to enable people to cultivate, and to
enable people to return. It’s not to
resolve some problems of ordinary
human bodies. It’s a serious thing. You
have to be sure that
you yourselves are truly
cultivating, and then any
problem can be resolved for you. But if you just want
to resolve some ordinary human problems, then we can’t
resolve any of them for you. In a sentence: The Fa is for cultivation. For
example, some people know that healing is not Falun
Gong’s purpose, so they think: “Then I won’t
do it to get healed. I understand that
the purpose isn’t to heal my ailments, and I won’t
mention healing. I won’t ask for healing
either.” Yet in
their minds they’re still
thinking, “As long as I do the exercises, Master is
sure to clear out my ailments.” You see, in
their minds they’re still thinking, “As long as
I do the exercises, Master will surely clear out my
ailments.” That bit of thought is still
there, buried deep in their minds.
They still want me to resolve their health problems,
which is to say, they’re still attached to their
ailments. If they truly let
go of them, don’t think about them at all,
and aren’t concerned with them, then see what
happens. It’s called “gaining naturally without
pursuit.” Every cultivation way and method works like
that. In the society of ordinary people you can obtain whatever it is you want
by trying hard or even going after it doggedly.
But the principles in other
dimensions are precisely the opposite, they’re
reversed. You will get
nothing when you go all out trying to gain something
or do something, full of attachment.
You can only obtain it
when you let go more and
are less concerned with it.
So it’s called “gaining naturally without
pursuit.”
Question: When Master was doing the large hand signs
at the Singapore conference, some people felt comfortable, some people felt
the signs were wonderful, and some
people felt heartbroken and sad, and wept.
Was it related to cultivation
levels?
Teacher: Close enough—that’s
basically not far off. Each persons feeling and understanding is
different.
Question: In order to
Consummate in
cultivation, everyone has to
reach the realm of no selfishness and no
ego. Then why are there different levels [at which
people
Consummate]?
Teacher: Let me
put it this way. A person can
Consummate at the level of the
initial level Arhat Attainment Status
as well; attaining self-liberation is
adequate. It’s not necessary to think about saving all sentient beings, and a
person doesn’t need to think about taking care of others—the cultivator
just needs to work at [attaining liberation] himself
and achieve it. That’s the initial-level Arhat
Attainment Status. If you want to achieve the Bodhisattva Attainment Status—even
if it’s just the initial Bodhisattva Attainment Status—you need to cultivate
and develop a heart of great compassion as you
cultivate, and along with achieving self-liberation,
you have to also help others be liberated. Whether you
can accomplish that or not, you will have that
compassion, see all sentient beings as truly
suffering, and shed tears at the sight of them. It’s
not feigned—it
is real. It’s not something you will to happen. Of course, in
cultivation that state won’t occur all the time, but
it will occur. Your compassion will be
different if you cultivate into a Buddha. You definitely won’t shed
tears like a Bodhisattva does when looking upon
sentient beings. You will have compassion, will
more clearly understand the karmic connections among sentient
beings, and will view
everything with greater wisdom. When Buddhas who have cultivated to a level much
higher than a Tathagata stop and look at it, they’ll
think, “What kind of compassion is
that?” They think that the compassion Buddhas have
toward ordinary human beings is also an attachment. They can only be
compassionate toward those Gods, Buddhas, and sentient beings in the paradises
of Buddhas below them, but have no compassion towards
human beings. That’s not to say they aren’t compassionate, but
rather, their realms are too
high. To them, the lives down here are
so trivial that
they’re even lower than
microorganisms. They don’t think that those deficient
human beings are any kind of useful life form. When Buddhas
who have reached even higher
realms look back, they think: “Oh, these Tathagata
Buddhas are ordinary people too; what are those people doing down
there?” What do human beings look like to them?
Humans are nothing; they
burrow around in the dirt like extremely tiny microorganisms. Then
what about Buddhas in even
higher, and even higher higher realms? If you want to
achieve that state, you have to cultivate to that
realm. I’m only giving you a simple idea of what it’s like. It’s not
limited to just
this.
The True Fa can’t be made known to human
beings, because you still have human
minds. Beings
in different realms have different ways
of existence. Also, the physical
bodies of beings on this side
are constantly changing. If a Buddha’s
body is composed of atoms, then the bodies of those
even higher Buddhas, and the
bodies of the gods who are higher than
Buddhas, could be composed of what is equivalent to
neutrons. Further up, they could be composed of neutrinos or quarks. And that’s
only the microscopic scale that humans can recognize.
What about those that are composed of more microscopic, even more microscopic
matter? Their energy is visibly greater. The smaller a
substance’s particles, the greater its density. Their appearances are thus
extremely fine and lustrous. We can see pores
on the human body, but if you look at a god’s body,
there aren’t any pores. If you look at the beings in
the Three Realms with bodies that are one level higher than those of humans—that
is, the heavenly beings at different levels inside the Three Realms—you will see
that to the human eye, their bodies are smooth, fine,
and just wonderful. That’s because their particles are
smaller and denser than those of humans in the
secular world. In other words,
as a being continually elevates, the
entire form at the surface elevates in tandem; but
elevation of realms is a prerequisite. Consummation
can be achieved in different realms. No matter which
level you reach in
cultivation, what’s below your level will
no longer be a mystery to you. Everything below will be displayed before your
eyes, and you will see things as they truly are. Yet
everything higher than your level will forever be a
mystery to you, you will never know about
them, as [where you are] is the Attainment Status you have
enlightened to. You will get out however much you
put in and cultivate.
Question: I
realize that cultivation is a serious thing. On the other hand, is
it wrong to find joy in hardship and to cultivate
cheerfully?
Teacher: That isn’t wrong. If you can
remain cheerful at all times in your cultivation, and do so no matter what
problems you encounter, then I’d say you are really remarkable. Everyone will
truly admire you and hold you in high regard, as what you described is hard to
do. It’s hard to keep your
mind steady in the face of any difficulty and to
cheerfully handle things. But being able to maintain
an optimistic disposition and a compassionate heart at
all times—even when we don’t meet with
troubles or face
tests—is what a
cultivator should normally do. That is
the best state of mind.
Question: May practitioners have
sexual relations in their
marriage?
Teacher: We’ve
said that you are cultivating among
ordinary people and are not disciples who have left the secular
world to dedicate yourselves to cultivation. So
your way of life needs to conform to the
ways of ordinary people. We don’t deem the physical
forms found here among ordinary people to be important. Why is
that? What’s being
changed is the human heart and mind. If a
person’s heart and mind don’t change, it’s all
meaningless. If, say, on the surface you have nothing
and yet deep down inside you can’t let go of things
and are antsy when it comes to these [human] things,
it’s useless. If you say,
“Deep down inside I’m not attached to them and I just
see them as things that allow us to keep
a human state,” then I
would say you’re doing
pretty well. Of course, all of these
things are to be left behind
when you reach a high and profound level in
cultivation. What you do during this period of time can’t be counted as wrong.
I’ve discussed it clearly in Zhuan Falun—I’ve
talked about this situation.
Why are
you allowed to be this way during your cultivation?
The reason is, this cultivation way of ours, this Dafa that I’m
teaching today, is purposely brought out
to be practiced in the complicated society of ordinary
people, and only that way can people
from higher levels return. If the society of ordinary people
weren’t complicated enough—that is, if you didn’t have
such big ordeals and interference—those of you who came from higher
levels could never return. Since the Fa is great and
is spread in the society of ordinary people, it
has provided you with the convenience of being able to
live in ordinary people’s society. The transformation of your body
starts from the microscopic level, from the origin of
your existence—the fundamental particles that comprise your being—and expands
outwards from the inside, like the rings of a tree. It will expand outward like
the rings of a tree for as long as you cultivate, and will do so
as soon as you meet the standard. When it
expands out to the surface, just like tree rings
reaching the bark, the transformation is complete and
you Consummate. Before it has reached the bark, that is, before it
has reached the outermost surface layer of your physical body, your physical
body on the surface still has thoughts like those of ordinary humans and you are
bound to have a variety of ordinary human desires, lust, feelings, and other
attachments of all sorts. Those thoughts are not as strong as
ordinary people’s, but they are there, and they’re
purposefully left for you so as to make sure you can
conform to the setting of ordinary humans as you cultivate. The
side that has finished cultivation, however, won’t be driven by the
ordinary human surface body to get involved with human affairs. As soon as the
side that you’ve finished cultivating meets the
standard, it is separated.
What’s the benefit of
its being separated? No matter what activities the human surface on this side
engages in among ordinary people, no matter what it does, the side that has
finished cultivating sits over there and doesn’t move at all; it
doesn’t have any mental activities or thoughts. That body doesn’t
move and doesn’t engage in anything. This then ensures
that when the person is doing human things his godly side
doesn’t do them, and that it is the human
side—which hasn’t been fully cultivated—that
does those things. This ensures, then, that you will only keep
ascending, and not descend, as you improve yourself. If, instead, we had
chosen to start the transformation from the surface
and gone towards the depths, and done so in the society of ordinary people, then
you definitely couldn’t cultivate
in that society. Everything you did among ordinary people would be
equivalent to a god doing it, as a transformed body is equivalent
to the body of a god. So it would be considered as if it was doing
human things, and you simply couldn’t cultivate. Is it
permitted for gods to do ordinary human things? It’s absolutely
prohibited for gods to have ordinary human feelings. So we’ve
reversed it: We start transforming you from your
life’s origin. This way, it keeps expanding further
and further out toward the surface. Before you Consummate you
can always maintain the way of life among ordinary people at the
surface level. It’s just that you become more and more free of
attachments until finally you can take everything
lightly and let go of everything. You’re then close to
Consummation. You will have fully achieved Consummation when, as a whole, you
have expanded all the way to the surface. It’s natural at that moment and there
are no quakes. In the past, a person’s Consummation would
generate shock waves. When a person Consummated, landslides,
seismic sea waves, and earthquakes would occur across
a large area. Yet our form of Consummation
doesn’t generate shock waves. It’s thus suitable for more
people to cultivate in the
society of ordinary people, as it does not affect it. With so many people
attaining Consummation, I think there’s no way the earth could take it. So
we’ve arranged each and every facet to be suitable for cultivating
in the society of ordinary people.
Before the part that is yet to be
fully cultivated has expanded to your
surface, I wouldn’t believe you if you said that you
didn’t have ordinary human attachments.
You would be forcing yourself [to achieve that]. You can strictly hold
yourselves to high standards and conduct yourselves
like practitioners. At the same time, conform as much as possible to the ways of
ordinary people’s society. But what I’m talking
about applies to more than this one issue [of sexual
relations]. It’s not as simple as handling sexual
relations between husband and wife a certain way, that’s not the
case. You can choose for yourselves the
most suitable approach on this issue.
Whichever way you feel is best, that’s fine.
If you feel that you still have ordinary human
thoughts, that they are quite strong; if you still
want to get married, want to find a boyfriend or girlfriend,
and you like a particular young lady or
a young man… if you have these
desires and do these things, then it
indicates that your cultivation hasn’t
yet reached that point yet, so you can partake of such
things. Don’t claim that you
can immediately let go of everything today, that you can
do so instantaneously and be a Buddha. If
that were the case you wouldn’t need to cultivate—you
would already be a Buddha.
So cultivation is done little by little, it’s a
gradual process. Although I’ve said this, if you
think, “Oh, Teacher said that before I succeed in
cultivation I will have all kinds of ordinary human
emotions and desires at the surface level. Then I can do that sort
of thing,” then guess again! Although you have
those things and I am
telling you to conform to ordinary people as much as
possible, if you don’t strictly hold yourself to the standards for
a cultivator, you are just the same as
somebody who doesn’t cultivate.
That’s the dialectical
relationship.
Question: Caucasian students want to use all
of their time to listen to the Fa, but
there’s not yet any audiotape with simultaneous translation. Can they record
themselves reading Zhuan Falun and then listen to it?
Teacher: The result won’t necessarily
be too good. Why not? It’s because the Fa in my voice has power. Since you are a
cultivator, before you Consummate, everything you say
carries various kinds of ordinary human messages. So
when you play it back, you absorb them back. This repeated, reciprocal
contamination isn’t good. It’s a different matter when you read the book. We’re
now making a simultaneous translation. We’re speeding up our pace in making it;
it should be available soon and this problem will be resolved soon. Anyway, I’m
telling you this principle: What you say carries all of those ordinary human
attachments and notions of yours. The Fa needs to be at work. A person won’t get
much out of it by listening to just the superficial principles. What comes out
of your mouth is your understanding at your level. When you come back and listen
to it again, your understanding will always remain at that level. Simultaneous
translation is different since my voice is there.
Even though the volume of my voice is low and the
translator’s is higher, in actuality, he is translating, and it’s really me who
is teaching. The students can understand me as well as receive everything I
carry when I teach the Fa. That’s what I
mean.
Question: I
met, for a total of three times, a
little girl between three to five years old. When I was half asleep and half
awake, she would step on my pillow, jumping and laughing. Is
she a Cultivated Infant (yinghai) who has come out
of the Falun?
Teacher:
These situations are good things, generally, but not
always so. Cultivated Infants are little. Each person’s background is complex,
so don’t pay attention to these kinds of things. She could be someone you
brought along from the past, or there could be other reasons. Anyway,
she’s a little girl after all. It could be a good
thing. Don’t pay attention to her.
Just mind your cultivation.
It appears that I haven’t explained this clearly,
because some people haven’t grasped it yet. I’ll give
an example to illustrate the point, though it might not necessarily apply to
this situation. When some people come down and reincarnate, they are followed by
their child from the past. The child hasn’t reincarnated, though, and just
follows over on that side. Also, there are other people who had children in
previous lives, and when they reincarnated in one lifetime, their child didn’t
reincarnate in that lifetime. Yet the child is exceptionally intuitive and
always follows him. There’s also this situation. There are circumstances of all
kinds. Because you’ve obtained the righteous Fa, we’ll arrange all of this for
you if the child has a karmic connection to you. All of this will be
appropriately arranged for you, so you don’t need to be concerned
about it anymore.
Question: I racked my brain but still couldn’t come up
with a question. Is it that I haven’t cultivated very…
Teacher: Some of our veteran students
who’ve cultivated well can’t come up with anything to say when they meet me. I
know that they feel uneasy when they can’t come up with anything to say, despite
trying really hard. Prior to meeting me they have a belly full of things they
want to ask me, but as soon as they meet me they’re speechless. Let me tell
everyone why that is. As long as you’re a cultivator,
you will be like that when you meet me. The reason you
have nothing to say upon meeting me is because, as you continually cultivate,
the part of you that has become enlightened through cultivation—the part that
has been fully cultivated—is separated from you. It’s
separated from the part that hasn’t yet been fully
cultivated. So the part of you that hasn’t yet been totally
cultivated will always feel confused, so it will have questions and will even
want to ask them. But since you see the master when
you meet me, the part of you that has been totally cultivated will, like your
surface, also become attentive, and as soon as it becomes attentive the ordinary
human side of you is completely controlled by it. Why is it that you have no bad
thoughts and are so benign as you sit here? It’s because the part of you that
has been fully cultivated has become attentive, and
your entire body is controlled by it. Tell me, if the part that’s been
fully cultivated weren’t up to par, could it have
finished cultivation? In other words, it knows everything. It’s just the part
that has not been fully cultivated that doesn’t know.
Which is to say, at that point you will no longer want to ask, and there’s
nothing to ask about since you know it all clearly. Upon your parting with me it
will no longer pay any heed and will stay motionless,
so this part of you here will again become unclear about things. “How come I
didn’t ask Teacher just now?” Isn’t that the
situation? That’s in fact how it
is.
I’ll tell you all, you should read the book more, read
the book more, and read the book more—you must read the book repeatedly. These
teachings are the Fa of the cosmos. Since ancient times, each cultivation way’s
Fa that was transmitted in the society of ordinary people has been Fa at or
below the realm of Tathagata. Such an immense Fa as this has created different
living environments for the different beings in the cosmos. It is the great Fa
that has created the entire cosmos. It’s just that you can’t see
its content at high levels until you reach those
realms. But in it is everything you need to know in order to achieve an
Attainment Status and to Consummate. So you must read
the book more—read the book repeatedly. Of course, our veteran students know
that if they have a question, they just have to read the book and it’s
guaranteed to be resolved. Later on, new and
higher-level questions will arise as you enter into new realms. When at that
time you read the book over again, it will again answer them for you. After that
you will again have questions in yet another realm, and at that
time when you read the book some more, it will again answer them.
In this way you keep on cultivating and constantly ascend. This Fa will answer
questions when you have them. And as you hold yourself to strict requirements in
everyday life and constantly improve, you are advancing diligently with
force.
Question: Is
selfishness the root of self-interest, emotion, and the desire for
renown?
Teacher: Self-interest and the desire
for renown are both selfish. As for emotion (qing), I’ve revealed in
previous Fa speeches that it permeates this dimension of humankind
as well as the Three Realms. No being inside the Three
Realms can escape it—they are all within its control. Human beings are precisely
amidst this emotion. The more you are attached to it, the greater its power and
thus the more effect it has on you. In particular, when people lose their loved
ones or when young people have their hearts broken, the more it’s thought about,
the greater the power emotion has. Emotion is inside the Three
Realms, so you, a cultivator, must shake free of
it. You should shed this emotion and go beyond it. As
for self-interest and renown, those are things that human beings value highly.
But actually, they too come from emotion. With renown, won’t you enjoy the
happiness and good fortune it brings? You’ll then be
really pleased. Doesn’t a person pursue renown and self-interest to gain
satisfaction? If someone is satisfied, isn’t he then pleased? Isn’t that
pleasure you feel also emotion? Renown can bring you joy and honor, which are
emotion, aren’t they? If you’ve gained satisfaction over self-interest, aren’t
you again pleased? It’s again emotion. So human beings live precisely for this
emotion. Among ordinary people, whether or not you’re happy, whether or not
you’re against something, whether or not you want something, or whether you want
to attain a certain status, what you consider good or bad, what you do or don’t
want to do, all of it is emotion. I’ve
said that human beings just live for
emotion. Could there be no emotion in human society? If there were no emotion in
human society, human beings wouldn’t find living interesting—it really wouldn’t
be. That’s just how man is supposed to live.
As for selfishness, I mentioned
a principle to you earlier and you all applauded with
much delight. I spoke about the future universe’s not becoming extinct, and all
of you were happy about it. Do you know why it can be that way? Some people say,
“If a person is not out for himself, he’ll be damned by the heavens.” Some
people have taken this as their motto. Actually, you don’t yet know that this
selfishness reaches all the way up to very high levels. As a matter of fact, for
cultivators in the past to say, “I’m doing such and such,” “I want to do such
and such,” “I want to obtain such and such,” “I’m cultivating,” “I want to
become a Buddha,” or “I wish to attain such and such,” none of that was outside
of selfishness. But what I want you to do is to truly, purely, and unselfishly
Consummate with the real righteous Fa and righteous Enlightenment—only then can
you achieve eternal non-extinction. So I’m telling you that you have to consider
others first in everything you do. Some people are happy if others give them
money. When someone gives them money they don’t consider whether it will bring
the other person trouble, whether his financial situation will become tight, and
so on. “As long as others give me something, I’m happy, but I don’t consider
others. As long as others are nice to me, I’m glad, but I’m not concerned about
others.” Sometimes, even when some people are extremely distressed and have no
choice but to say something to please you, you aren’t understanding of them.
There are all kinds of situations. In other words, from now on in your
cultivation, in everything you do, you have to think of others.
Question: In [Zhuan Falun] Volume 2 it mentions that
there are people in the ocean, and that there are several different kinds of
people.
Teacher: Yes. Some live in
this dimension of ours, some don’t. Not only are there people in the ocean, but
in the dimensions existing at the same level as ours, too, there are other
people—people who are the same as you and people who aren’t the same as you. You
can call them humans, or not. Since they have certain feelings but don’t have
sexual desire as ordinary human beings do, the lower half of their body is in
the form of some material; only their upper body is in human form. So they can
float and fly around. Most of the people in the ocean belong to human races that
were eliminated from the earth during different time periods. And there are some
people that are just people from the bottom of the ocean: There are those who
are similar to human beings, there are those whose upper body is human and lower
body is that of a fish, and there are those whose upper body is that of a fish
and lower body is human. Also, underneath the continental plates too there are
people from the past, that is, human races that were eliminated in the past.
They can’t come back up because they were weeded out from the human world—from
the earth, that is. So a portion of them that didn’t have that much karma and
that many sins burrowed into the earth. That’s how they are, and they don’t come
out—they just live there. Their number is quite small. They’re often a little
more capable than human beings and not as deluded. Okay, don’t be curious or
concerned with these things, as they don’t have much to do with your
cultivation.
Question: In
the future, after the new Japanese version of Dafa is officially published, how
should we dispose of the old-version books that have translation errors?
Teacher: It can’t be said that they
have errors. It’s just that the translation was inadequate or that the words
chosen were inaccurate. We can only describe it like that. How should they be
disposed of? Don’t dispose of them, just leave them as is. No foreign-language
version could possibly be translated from the Chinese without being somewhat off
from the original. I’d even suggest that it is actually better to have more
translation versions. When people read them, they will realize, “Oh, there’s
this meaning… Oh, and there’s that meaning too… So that’s the way it is.” So
there are actually some benefits, if you ask me. Just leave them as they
are.
Question: Is timidity an attachment or a physiological
factor?
Teacher: Timidity is caused by a
factor called “timidity” that exists in this universe. It causes you to be
afraid. The more scared you are, the more its effect on you. You have to conquer
it with willpower—it’s a matter of willpower. This too needs to be accomplished
in your cultivation.
Question: While I do the exercises, I often think
about matters related to cultivation, spreading the Fa, and
Teacher’s words. Is this right?
Teacher: It’s a state
during a particular time. In the future it won’t be a problem.
Question: If someone takes lives on my behalf, is the
karma still accrued by me?
Teacher: If you do this kind of work…
I don’t want to discuss this matter in this kind of setting. I’ve written two
articles that discuss and explain this matter, but some people can’t seem to
realize what I’m saying. Let me talk about it this way: Do you know how many
lives you have harmed over the course of all your lifetimes? Each person has
harmed many lives. With a lesser Fa you couldn’t succeed in cultivation in this
lifetime, and you would have to pay for the lives that you owe from each
lifetime. In Buddhism it’s believed that cultivation can’t be completed in one
lifetime. So they too have seen that the lives which are killed have to be paid
for. But today we’re allowing you to reach Consummation, so there isn’t that
much time remaining. Then what’s to be done about those lives that you have
taken? Aside from the portion of suffering that you owe them—a portion for which
you are dissolving karma and paying through suffering—I have to eliminate the
great majority for you. The remainder is left for you to pay, ensuring that you
can pass this trial. At the same time, a portion of the lives that you harmed
will become beings in the paradise you will have after you Consummate, so it
will turn into a good thing. If the to-be-harmed life knew, “Oh, I’ll go to a
Buddha’s paradise in the future,” it would stretch its neck out to let you kill
it. It would happily, cheerfully let you kill it. Of course, it wouldn’t have an
Attainment Status. It would just go to that paradise to be a common being, it
would go to your Buddha paradise to be a regular citizen, a flower, or an animal
such as a bird. Anyway, there are different arrangements per the different
lives.
Yet after I talk about it this way, some people might
understand it in the opposite way: “Oh, it’s alright for me to take lives,
then.” If you can’t Consummate, you will never, ever be able to pay for all of
the lives you’ve killed, though you have to pay for them. That is how tremendous
the karma you have accrued is. In other words, your repayment process would be
terribly excruciating and almost endless. So it’s a really horrific situation.
Yesterday a student said: “Teacher hasn’t talked about hell.” I’d say that I
can’t talk to you about it. This setting of ours is so sacred, and it’s
terrifying to talk about that. Of course, it’s not terrifying for me, but to
some people it’s really horrifying. So I think that even though I didn’t
directly answer you just now, I’ve nonetheless explained it clearly.
In China there was a student who was a Ph.D. candidate in
medical science. He was doing dissection experiments. He was going to receive
his doctorate after completing the experiments. That is, he had passed all of
his exams, but he still needed to do some experiments and dissect a thousand or
maybe five hundred mice and then he could receive his Ph.D. Later on, he brought
up with his teacher that he couldn’t do this. He said, “I’m now practicing Falun
Dafa and I know that killing generates karma.” Then he told his academic
advisor, “I can’t take lives—I’d rather give up the degree.” Let’s think about
it. If a person can’t pass the trial of life and death, he cannot achieve
Consummation. But it’s not that you will definitely have to go through exactly
something like that for it to count as laying down your life; that’s only the
form of it. I don’t deem that important. What I look at is whether or not your
mind can truly do that. Think about it, everyone: Human beings live in this
world for nothing but renown and self-interest. If he were to receive his Ph.D.
degree, he would have a good job and future ahead of him. And naturally, his
salary would be high—that goes without saying. It would be higher than that of
regular people or an average person. Don’t people just live for those things? He
could even let go of those things. So think about it: He dared to forgo even
that. He was able to let go of those things as a young person, so wasn’t it that
he could give up anything? Wasn’t it that he dared to lay down his life? Don’t
people just live for those things? The cultivation realm of people who can do
that is up there, in fact. With regard to these people and these types of
situations, I said that since they could let go of their emotion, renown, and
self-interest, why not also let go of the very fear of taking lives itself?
Wouldn’t that be discarding the final attachment? I’m just telling a point. It
would be different if you couldn’t reach that realm, couldn’t pass the trial of
life and death, couldn’t abandon all of those things, and you did it this way.
All of the lives you took would have to be paid for in your own, endless payment
process—that’s how frightening it is. I’ve spelled out the principles of the Fa
and the underlying laws. But as for how you should act, that still remains for
you to determine for yourself. The principles of Dafa teach that you cannot take
life. For as long as you cultivate you cannot kill. At a higher realm, however,
Dafa is all-encompassing and the Fa displays principles that are in a Buddha’s
realm. I’ve said that some of the lives that you have harmed will be consummated
and become common beings in your future paradise, but everything will come to
naught if you can’t Consummate! All of your karma will have to be repaid by you,
yourself. That’s the relationship. I don’t want to discuss the Fa at high levels
precisely because even after I had revealed it, many people still wouldn’t truly
comprehend the principles I would have talked about.
Of course, the Fa is higher than the principles among
ordinary people. You wouldn’t find it even if you rummaged through all
books—ancient, modern, Chinese, and foreign—and you wouldn’t find it even in
other scriptures. That’s why everyone likes to hear it. But don’t regard it as
knowledge—I’m not here to satisfy your attachment to seeking knowledge. I’m
teaching the Fa in order to save you.
Question: Teacher, you often use the word “we.” How
should we understand this?
Teacher: I’m using the phrasing used
in modern Mainland China. I feel that you’re all members of Dafa and thus a part
of Dafa, so I’ve referred to you as “we.” I feel that when you hear it perhaps
you will place yourself in true cultivation. That’s the thinking behind
it.
Question: When is a person considered to have
psychosis?
Teacher: Psychosis is just that a
person can’t control his own body and is very weak. As soon as this type of
person encounters troubles, he doesn’t want to deal with anything. It’s as
though his main consciousness (zhu yishi) is asleep, pays no attention to
anything, and has suddenly let go of this body. At that point the person is in
what ordinary people call a psychotic state. And why is that? When his main
consciousness doesn’t control his body—that is, when he’s not rational—the
various thoughts of his that are generated by karma and the various notions
which formed after birth start to control his body, mouth, eyes, and everything
else of his. So he will talk nonsense and act insane without any reasonable,
normal behavior, and people will say he’s psychotic. I have said that psychosis
is not a disease. It doesn’t have any pathological condition; it’s merely that
the person’s main consciousness is too weak. There are also congenital illnesses
where the person’s main consciousness is weak from birth and his body is always
controlled by other beings; it constantly gets handed over to others to control.
Add to that strong interference by messages from other dimensions, and the
person will do anything. The brain is a ready-made machine and anyone can
operate it. If you don’t operate it, and you turn it over, others will come to
operate it and then it won’t follow human standards. So a person has to have a
strong will. The will must be firm!
Question: Are
there people who will have neither their innate body (benti)
transformed nor an Immortal Infant (yuanying) cultivated at
the time of Consummation?
Teacher: I’ve said that many of our
Dafa disciples come from different levels, so there might exist different
situations. All the same, don’t be concerned with which situation yours is. I
guarantee that as long as you cultivate I will allow you to reach the state that
you will be most satisfied with. The same goes for everyone. Isn’t my giving you
the best my creating the best for this cosmos? (Applause)
Question: When reading Zhuan Falun, I rarely feel that the
Buddhas, Daos, and Gods are clearly pointing out something to me. But in the
course of lived cultivation, I do enlighten to the Fa’s
principles.
Teacher: You are able to
enlighten on your own, so it’s not necessary to point things out to you.
Managing to do that on your own is enlightening to the Dao on your own, and that
is excellent. Some people really can’t enlighten to something, yet we see that
they are good prospects. So what’s to be done? We drop them a hint.
Question: Of late I have often had an awful state of
mind, my thoughts haven’t been good, and my thinking has been a mess. Have I
really fallen that much?
Teacher: Karma will attack like mad
when you slack off. If you are strong on this side you can suppress it. When you
have suppressed and controlled it, if I see that you are really good and indeed
a cultivator, I will have to look after you and eliminate those things for you.
That’s how it works. It won’t do if you fail to handle it yourself. You might
say, “Oh, then as long as I suppress it Teacher will eliminate it for me. Then
I’ll start to suppress it.” It’s similar to what I said earlier about the
thinking people with illness have: It won’t work if you practice only because
you want me to eliminate karma for you! The bottom line is, you shouldn’t be
attached to anything. You must have righteous thoughts.
Question: May
we play the videotape of Master teaching the exercises when we are doing group
exercises in the park?
Teacher: That’s all right if the
environment permits it and the government doesn’t intervene. Whether you may
play the video depends on the situation and the location.
Question: I’ve cultivated for more than a year and it
is as though the more I cultivate, the more fragile I become. A tiny attachment
can cause my heart much unrest.
Teacher: It’s also possible that you
have become increasingly sensitive and are afraid that you aren’t doing well
cultivating. Don’t develop that attachment, either. Cultivate openly and with
dignity. On the other hand, you have to hold yourself to strict requirements.
Every one of you will make mistakes in the course of cultivation and will have
trials that you can’t pass. If you could smoothly get over every trial, then I,
as your master, wouldn’t have arranged it well. So every trial is challenging to
pass. You will either pass it or fail to pass it, and you will either pass it
well or pass it poorly. But when you pass it poorly, you agonize over it and
know that you haven’t cultivated well and regret it deeply. You make up your
mind to cultivate well next time. Then the next time you will try again to pass
it. It’s precisely in this state of being able to pass it, not being able to
pass it, examining yourself, and doing this constantly that you are cultivating.
If you could pass every trial well you wouldn’t need to cultivate. If no trial
could stop you, you would be about to Consummate. On the other hand, if you
think, “Teacher said that it doesn’t matter whether we pass it well or not, it’s
fine as long as we cultivate,” and from here on out you slack off and don’t mind
when you fail to pass trials well, then you are no longer cultivating. That’s
how these things work. It won’t do if you do not hold yourself to strict
requirements.
Question:
What is Consummation? Is it dying like an ordinary person, or is it
arranged by Master?
Teacher: Consummation takes many
different forms. As you might know, Shakyamuni taught Nirvana in order to
discard human attachments to the greatest extent. In his cultivation way they
didn’t even want the human body. So a person in his practice shouldn’t be
attached to the human body, and should just cultivate that way. Tibetan Lamaism
teaches Light-Transformation. That is, the person sits there at the time of
Consummation, and if his entire body is successfully cultivated, at the moment
of Consummation his body is transformed into a beam of red light and his own
Soul leaves with the successfully cultivated Buddha-Body. Since the Buddha-Body
that is successfully cultivated doesn’t contain matter from this ordinary human
side, human beings can’t see it, and can see only light and that a shape made of
light rises up. There are people who haven’t cultivated that well and who can’t
undergo Light-Transformation of the entire body. So at the time of
Light-Transformation his body instantly shrinks, “Shwa!” to a full person about
one foot tall. It looks exactly like him but has been reduced to about a foot
tall, with a proportionate body. That is because he didn’t cultivate enough and
was not completely transfigured in Light-Transformation.
There
are other scenarios too. In the Dao system in China, they take the form of
“deliverance from the corpse” when they Consummate. What is “deliverance from
the corpse”? In ancient China, many people practiced the Great Dao.[9] The cultivation
way of Great Dao requires that after a person succeeds in cultivation he takes
the body with him—their way even wants the body. But this type of person’s flesh
body is no longer an ordinary human body, for it has been completely transformed
into high-energy matter and become his Dao-body. Their method of deliverance
from the corpse is as follows. The person knows that he has cultivated to
Consummation and that his entire body has been fully cultivated. How is he to
leave the secular world? Most Daoists don’t resolve their unfulfilled wishes
among ordinary people until after their Consummation. The Buddha system isn’t
like that, though, as things are resolved in the midst of one’s
Consummation.
Deliverance from the corpse would
stop people from looking for the person after he leaves. He will fake his death,
though by that time he is in fact capable of going up to the heavens or entering
into the earth. As he is about to leave, he tells his family: “I will pass away.
I have succeeded in cultivation and I’m about to leave. Prepare a coffin for
me.” Precisely at the time he predicted, he lays down in bed and a moment later
stops breathing. Family members see that he has passed away, so they put him in
the coffin and bury him. But in fact, he has used the ability of
“camouflaging”—he has used a supernormal power. What his family saw that day
wasn’t his real body. So what was it? It was conjured from an object he had
pointed at. He used a shoe, a whiskbroom, a wooden pole, or a sword, and
transformed it into his own image. He had pointed at an object and transformed
its image. It knows how to say whatever is needed, and it says to his family:
“I’ll lay down here and in a moment it’ll be over. Just put me in the coffin,
that’s all.” So in actuality, it was that piece of wood, that whiskbroom, or
maybe a shoe [laying there]. The real person had left and gone far, far away. So
the family buries him. After being buried, in a few hours that object will in
fact return to its original form; it will return to a shoe, a bamboo pole, or a
piece of wood. That is what’s called “deliverance from the corpse.” Sometimes a
person will return from somewhere else and say: “Oh, I saw so and so from your
family in a really far off place. We even spoke to each other when I went there
for business.” His family will say: “That can’t be. He passed away.” That person
will then respond: “I saw him. He hasn’t died. I really did see him. I even
spoke with him and had a meal with him.” “That’s bizarre, he really did die.”
His family knows that he was a Daoist: “Let’s dig him up and take a look, then.”
When the coffin is opened they see a shoe in there.
In the
Dao system there is also a form called “Ascension in Broad Daylight.” The
Ascension in Broad Daylight form is used when a person’s body has been fully
cultivated and he has fulfilled his wishes in the secular world prior to
Consummation. It’s time for him to leave since there is nothing left to do. At
that point something called “opening of the heavenly gate” takes place; in other
words, the gate of the Three Realms is opened. Then, for some a heavenly god
comes to receive him, or there comes a dragon, a crane, or whatnot, on which he
rides and flies away, or a heavenly chariot comes to carry him. Such things
happened a lot in ancient times. There is Ascension in Broad Daylight of this
sort. In our practice system, I use the method of Ascension in Broad Daylight
for those who are to go to the Falun Paradise. There are people in some
cultivation ways who don’t want the body. Everything in that person’s entire
paradise would be thrown into disarray if he were to be given a body. It’s just
like with Shakyamuni’s Nirvana: If you were to give him a body it wouldn’t be
Nirvana—wouldn’t the entire cultivation system be spoiled? His paradise
is composed of the elements of Precept, Concentration, and Wisdom, and so he
doesn’t want the body. Many of you think with a human mindset, “Oh, this
Ascension in Broad Daylight is awesome. People will see me fly up.” You are thinking
about divine matters with a human mindset, and that is totally unfitting. Put
another way, at the time of Consummation there will naturally be a form for it.
I can tell you, though, that with so many people reaching Consummation this
time, I will definitely leave a profound lesson for the people who didn’t
believe. So when my disciples Consummate in the future it will very likely be a
magnificent sight, one that human society will never forget.
(Applause)
With
that said, you still have to discard all attachments and not be concerned with
these things. Just keep cultivating. If your cultivation fails, everything is
for naught.
Question: In
the book Zhuan Falun, are
there different Buddhas, Daos, and Gods behind different words?
Teacher: Yes, for sure. That’s why I
tell you all to read the book. Some people understand something, “Aha!” and that
instant when they realize that thing their bodies experience a sudden
shudder and feel a warm current. Though they only have
a subtle sensation, at that moment, the changes in the
body are in fact extremely substantial, and
on the other side
churning is occurring everywhere. That’s
because you have ascended to yet another
level, and the body experiences
different forms of changes at different
levels. As you know, in
Chinese temples some Buddha
statues have another four heads on top of
the head, or yet another three heads on
top of those four heads, and one
more head grows atop those
three heads.
Actually, it is a manifest
form of a Buddha’s Fa-image at different levels. Which
is to say, at different levels the changes in bodily states are quite profound.
It’s not only magnificent, but
solemn, majestic, and
incredibly wonderful. So
there is a reason why you aren’t allowed to see it.
Since you have ordinary human thinking,
you will understand it with human thoughts, and
might even act insane as a result. We
can’t have anything like that happen.
Question: Does hand-shaking and bodily contact
transmit karma?
Teacher: If you are a true cultivator
that will do no harm to you, no matter how sensitive you are. Your cultivated
body has gong: how could
it fear something lower than
gong?
There is a big gap between the two in terms of realm
and level, so you shouldn’t fear
it.
Hand-shaking among people, that is, contact and
hand-shaking among ordinary people, can indeed transmit karma.
At the very least there is contamination. That’s for
sure. Nowadays everyone shakes hands. Hand-shaking came from the
Western, Caucasian society. Asian people in the past
didn’t shake hands. When they met, they would cup a fist in the other hand. That
was pretty good. Women
wouldn’t cup their fists
like that because it would
look bad. They would cup a fist to the
right front of their abdomen like this; when
they met people
they would cup a fist to the side of the body and
slightly bend their legs.
It seems that hand-shaking appeared only after the
Renaissance took place in the West; earlier on they didn’t shake hands, either.
They had different kinds of greeting
etiquette—some of this, some of that. Anyway, there were
different kinds, all kinds of
them. The handshake came into use
later on. Don’t we have
Heshi?
It is the Buddha system’s
custom.
Question: In
more than a year of cultivation people have rarely made trouble for me. If it
continues like this, how can I get rid of the many
attachments I have?
Teacher:
It’s not like that. Everybody’s circumstances are
different. Maybe it’s this way, maybe it’s that way,
maybe… There are all different sorts of
factors. So make sure you don’t get
attached to these things [here]. The day hardship
really does arrive you will find it
difficult to pass,
yet when there are no hardships you want them.
There’s a reason for
everything. Actually, some people truly
don’t have that many hardships. That’s also true.
Question:
There are dozens of people at our practice site, and the vast majority of them
have bad complexions. Is it because we aren’t cultivating
solidly?
Teacher: There are a
small number of practice sites that really aren’t
right, where gossip
circulates among the students and they
“enlighten” to things indiscriminately.
Some people indiscriminately “enlighten”
to things that really have nothing to do with the Fa I
teach, and they even lead students to think in one way or another
and let their imaginations run wild. They even comment
on the Fa, saying how
this Fa is, how this section is,
and how that section is. Are human beings worthy of
commenting on the Fa? At the very least you still have
a human mindset, so it’s not right to do that.
You should just cultivate yourself, read, study, and
perform the exercises in groups in accordance with
Dafa. Use more of your time to read and study the
Fa, and less time to talk about your own
experiences and views. Or,
after you finish doing the exercises you
may discuss things together—that’s all
right too. If you use the time meant for cultivation and reading the Fa to
instead discuss your experiences, I don’t think that’s
good. The things that some people talk about carry
various selfish thoughts and emotions, and
even have nothing to do with
the Fa. In that case they can lead students astray
and even indulge irrelevant
thoughts. Human beings all have an ordinary human mindset. Our
students, whether veteran or new, couldn’t possibly be allowed to talk about or
know the principles that are higher than the words’ surface meanings.
After all, what you talk about is the words’ literal
meaning and principles at the surface, for Heaven’s Fa
cannot be discussed among ordinary people. I don’t know what has
gone wrong with some people. I don’t know
how they “enlighten” to
those messed up ideas. You
must pay attention to this!
Question:
What’s the translation of “yin”?[10] Why does
one need to do “Jieyin”?[11]
Teacher: Buddhas don’t call it
yin. It’s a manifestation of Buddha Fa’s
dignity. It’s a term from ancient India that was translated
directly, called yin.
Jieyin, large
shouyin,[12] and small
shouyin are other expressions of the
majesty of the
Fa’s manifestation and
language.
Question: I
have cultivated for almost a year now, yet I have never seen the Falun.
Teacher: Let me put
it this way. If you say that you haven’t
had any changes in yourself, haven’t experienced any
changes that the Fa has brought you, or don’t know or
have not enlightened to anything that goes beyond how
ordinary people are, then I
don’t believe you unless you aren’t a cultivator. If
you need to see something,
have it manifest, or have it concretely shown just as clearly as when one looks
at ordinary people, then I don’t think that
will work. The reason being, there
are different ways to handle each person in accordance
with his own condition, his
different mental states among
ordinary people, and what he
will achieve when he reaches Consummation in the
future. In doing this task, I absolutely won’t do things uniformly
in every situation. You might seek to see the Falun, but you won’t
see it if the attachment isn’t discarded.
Question:
Since Buddhas at higher levels see human beings as
nothing, please tell us why Master has
come to save us?
Teacher: The Fa of the cosmos created
living environments at
different levels for the beings
at all of the many levels of
the cosmos. It follows that there have to
be lives in these living
environments. Ordinary human beings are
at the lowest level of the
different levels created by this Fa for the entire cosmos. So from my
standpoint, I need to take into consideration the entire Fa and the entire
cosmos. Have I explained it clearly? (Applause) So from my standpoint,
I view lives—lives of both the
positive and negative sides—differently
from you. It’s not something you can comprehend.
Question: As I
continually study the Fa, the things I think about become fewer and fewer, to
the extent that sometimes I don’t want to think about anything. Is
this because my main consciousness is weak? Has my cultivation has
gone astray?
Teacher: It’s not
so. And I can even tell you that it’s a
good phenomenon. Why do I say that it’s a very good
phenomenon? I will tell you. A person’s brain
works really astutely among ordinary
people. In order not to lose
out, a person’s thinking is
extremely quick in this respect, and his memory is
sharp. What I’m saying is, using your
brain that way isn’t good, for you will generate
karma. When your brain is too developed
like that, it interferes
with your cultivation. So what’s to be done? We use an
approach whereby at first we restrain this part of
your brain. In other words, we first lock it up,
adjust it, replace it with
the portion of your thoughts that can
think like a cultivator, and have
this part of your thinking develop. Then the cunning
part is adjusted and we gradually loosen the
restraint. At that point you will be able to handle
yourself properly. When you can’t
even detect those bad thoughts of
yours—since that part of your brain is so well-developed—as soon as you think
about something you burrow into that part of the
brain. That part of your brain severely interferes
with your cultivation. So, many people
will experience what I just described. It is
temporary. The thoughts that you often like to use to protect your
self-interest, the thoughts that
can hurt
others, and those brain cells that are
too developed are all sealed off and adjusted.
So this situation will
occur, but it’s temporary. After they are sealed off,
they need to be taken care of for you
so that they won’t be so developed and
will be just adequate for normal use. We have
your righteous thoughts and cells develop. That’s how
it goes. Otherwise… Let me use a
colloquial expression that can describe it more
fittingly: You are an upright and noble person
cultivating Buddhahood, so your mind can’t be cunning,
crafty, slippery, and sly!
Question:
Listening to others’ experiences inspires and enlightens me, but I
find it not as solid as enlightening to things on my
own.
Teacher: That is
right. Of course that’s how it is. What you enlighten to yourself,
which is mainly through your own
cultivation, is the most solid. On the
other hand, you can indeed draw lessons from what
others say. That can
facilitate your progress too, so it is
beneficial. Fa conferences won’t be held often. Our
conferences do have benefits. But don’t
share experiences too often.
You should focus your energy
on studying the Fa and reading the book.
Some of the questions that were raised
were pulled out since were relatively low
level or repetitious, or they can be resolved by reading the book.
Due to time constraints
we’ll stop answering questions here. (Loud Applause)
Download DOC File
benti “innate body,” “original body,” or “true being.”
Dafa “The Great Law,” or “The
Great Way”; short for the practice’s full name, Falun Dafa, “The Great
Way of the Law Wheel.”
Dao
1. Also known as “Tao,” a Daoist term for “the Way of
nature and the universe”; 2. An Enlightened being who has attained the Dao.
Fa
“Law” or “Way.”
gong “cultivation energy.”
Heshi The position formed by placing the
palms together vertically in front of one’s chest; sometimes in the West called
“prayer pose.”
qi
In Chinese thought, this substance/energy is said to assume many forms
in the body and the environment. Usually translated as “vital energy,” qi is
thought to determine a person’s health.
qigong A general name for certain Chinese
practices that cultivate the human body. Qigong has been immensely popular in China in recent decades.
xinxing “mind-nature” (lit.), “thought,” or “character.”
Zhen, Shan,
Ren – true, real,
truth; Shan
– good, kind, compassion, benevolence; Ren
– to endure, tolerate, forbear.
[4] (
“sree-vat-sah”) Also known as “the swastika.”
[5]
(“fung-shway”) Chinese geomancy, the
practice of reading landscapes.