On Killing
Killing is a sensitive subject. We have a strict rule for
practitioners: practitioners can’t kill. Whether it’s the Buddhist system,
the Daoist system, or the Qimen practices, it doesn’t matter which discipline
or which school it is, true cultivation disciplines are absolute about this: no
killing. There’s no two ways about it. That’s because killing causes some
huge problems afterwards. We’ve got to explain this to you in detail. In the
original Buddhism, "killing" mainly referred to killing people, which
is the most serious type. Later on, large creatures, large livestock, and other
creatures that are pretty big were also considered serious. So why have they
taken killing so seriously in the cultivation world? It’s been said in
Buddhism that if lives that shouldn’t die are killed, they become lonely souls
and roaming ghosts. And it was those beings that the old saying about
"releasing souls from purgatory" referred to. If those beings aren’t
freed from purgatory, they suffer from hunger and thirst, and it’s awfully
tough for them. That’s what Buddhism used to teach.
We say, when a person does something bad to somebody, he’ll
give that person a lot of virtue as compensation. That’s what we’re
referring to when we talk about people taking things from others in normal
situations. But suddenly ending a creature’s life, be it an animal or some
other being, that generates quite a lot of karma. "Killing" used to
refer mainly to killing people, and that generates a pretty big amount of karma.
But killing an average creature isn’t minor, either, and it directly generates
a lot of karma. A little bit of tribulation is arranged at different levels, and
this is especially so for practitioners in the process of their cultivation,
that’s all your own karma, they’re your own tribulations, and they’re
placed for you at different levels to help you improve. As long as you improve
your character you’ll be able to get through them. But if so much karma was
suddenly piled on, how could you get through it? With your character, you really
wouldn’t be able to handle it, and that might be the end of your cultivation.
We’ve found that when a person is born, many, many him are
born at the same time within a certain range of the space of this universe. They
look the same, have the same name, and do things that are more or less the same.
So, they can be called part of his whole being. This causes a problem, then: if
one of the beings (and this goes for other large animals’ beings, too) dies
all of a sudden, and the him in all other dimensions haven’t finished the
course of life that was originally arranged, and they still have a lot more
years to live, then the person who died will fall into a situation where he has
no resting place, and he’ll float around in the space of the universe. People
used to believe that he’d be a lonely soul or roaming ghost, that he’d
suffer from hunger and thirst, and it would be awfully tough. And maybe that’s
true. We can say for sure, though, that we’ve seen he is in a terrible
situation, and that he’ll keep waiting until the him in every dimension have
finished their courses of life, and only then can they find their final resting
place together. The longer the time, the more he suffers. And as he suffers
more, the karma that causes his suffering will be continually piled onto the
person who killed him. So think about it, how much karma would that put on you?
That’s what we’ve seen with abilities.
There’s another thing we’ve seen. When a person is born,
his whole life is already laid out there in a specific dimension. Meaning, where
he is in his life, what he’s supposed to do, and so on—it’s all there. So
who arranged his life? It’s obviously done by higher beings. For example, in
our ordinary world, after he’s born, he’s in a certain family, he goes to a
certain school, and when he grows up he works at a certain company, and through
his work he establishes contact with people from every walk of life. That tells
us that the overall design of the whole society is arranged like that. But,
because that being suddenly died and isn’t following the original, specific
arrangement anymore, and things have changed, that higher being won’t let
whoever disrupted it off the hook. Let’s think about it: as cultivators, we
need to cultivate up to high levels, but if that higher being doesn’t let him
off, would you say he can still cultivate? Even some masters’ levels aren’t
as high as the higher beings who arrange these things, so even his master runs
into disaster, and he’s cast down. Then think about it, is that an ordinary
problem? That’s why it’ll be really hard for someone to cultivate after he
does that kind of thing.
Now out of all our students who cultivate Falun Dafa, there
might be some people who’ve fought in times of war. Wars are a state of
affairs brought about by major changes in the overall celestial phenomena. You
were only one small part of those affairs. If nobody made a move under changes
in the celestial phenomena, it wouldn’t bring about that state of affairs in
the ordinary world, and it wouldn’t be called a change in the celestial
phenomena. Those things change based on larger changes, so you can’t be held
totally accountable for that thing. What we’re talking about here is the karma
that’s brought about when you insist on doing bad things to benefit yourself,
or to get ahead, or when something of yours is on the line. So when it comes to
changes that affect the entire, large space, and major changes that involve the
state of society, those aren’t your fault.
Killing will generate a lot of karma. So some people are
thinking, "So I’m not allowed to kill things now, but I do the cooking
for my family. If I don’t kill things what’s my family gonna eat?" I’m
not going to get into the specifics of that. I’m teaching the Law to
practitioners—it’s not like I’m just randomly telling ordinary people how
to live their lives. When it comes to specific things, just evaluate them based
on the Great Law, and do what you think is best. Ordinary people can do whatever
they want, that’s ordinary people’s business. There’s no way everybody can
truly cultivate. But practitioners should set their sights on high standards, so
these are requirements set for practitioners.
Human beings and animals aren’t the only ones with life in
them, plants have it too. All matter appears in the form of life in other
dimensions. When your Third Eye reaches the Law Vision level, you’ll discover
that stones, walls, or whatever will all talk to you and greet you. Now maybe
some of you are wondering, "Then the grains and vegetables we eat all have
life in them… And what should we do when flies and mosquitoes get into our
homes? In summer they bite us and it doesn’t feel good, so we’ll have to
just watch them park there and bite us? We’ll have to just watch flies land on
our food, since we can’t swat them? That’s gross." I can tell you that
we shouldn’t just kill things on a whim or without a reason, but we can’t be
like overcautious goodie-goodies either, and always focus on those petty things,
like being so afraid of stepping on ants that we hop all over the place when we
walk. I’d say it would be so tiring for you to live that way. Wouldn’t that
be another attachment? If you jumped around when you walked, sure, maybe you
wouldn’t crush any ants, but there’d still be a lot of microorganisms that
you’d step on and kill. At the microcosmic level there are tons of smaller
beings, like fungi and bacteria, and maybe you stepped on them and killed a
bunch. Then we might as well just call it quits, right? We aren’t trying to be
that kind of person. We couldn’t cultivate like that. We should focus on the
big picture and cultivate openly and with dignity.
We human beings should have the right to sustain our lives.
So our living environment has to meet the needs of human living. We can’t
intentionally harm anything, but we can’t be too restricted by those trivial
things, either. For example, the vegetables and grains people grow all have life
in them, but we can’t stop eating and drinking just because of that. How would
you be able to practice then? We should look at the big picture. For example, if
you’re walking and some ants and insects run under your feet and get stepped
on and killed, then maybe they were supposed to die, since you didn’t harm
them intentionally. There’s the issue of ecological balance among organisms
and microorganisms, and when there are too many of them they’ll spread
unchecked. We talk about cultivating openly and with dignity. When there are
flies and mosquitoes in our homes we can drive them out and install screens to
keep them from getting in. But if you can’t drive them out sometimes, it’s
okay to kill them. If they bite people and harm people in people’s residences,
of course we should drive them out. And when they can’t be driven out, we can’t
just watch them bite people there. You’re a practitioner so it’s not a
problem for you, you’re immune to them. But your family members don’t
practice, they’re ordinary people, so there’s a concern about getting a
contagious disease. So you can’t just watch them bite your kid’s face and
not do anything about it.
I’ll give you an example. There was a story about
Shakyamuni during his early years. One day in the forest Shakyamuni wanted to
take a bath, so he asked his disciple to clean the bathtub. His disciple went
there and saw that the bathtub was covered with bugs, and that if he cleaned it
the bugs would be killed. The disciple came back to tell Shakyamuni that the
bathtub was covered with bugs. Without looking at him, Shakyamuni said, "Go
clean the bathtub." The disciple went to the bathtub and found that he didn’t
know where to begin, since the bugs would be killed if he started cleaning it.
He circled around it once and headed back, and asked Shakyamuni, "Venerable
teacher, the bathtub is covered with bugs. If I clean it I’ll be killing
them." Shakyamuni took a glance at him and said, "What I asked you to
clean was the bathtub." The disciple suddenly got it and cleaned the
bathtub right away. That illustrates a point: we can’t stop taking baths
because of insects, and we can’t look for other places to live just because of
mosquitoes, just as we can’t tie up our necks and stop eating and drinking
because grains and vegetables have life in them. That’s not the idea. We
should keep these things in perspective and cultivate openly and with dignity.
It’s fine as long as we don’t harm living things on purpose. At the same
time, human beings need to have their living spaces and living conditions, and
these need to be maintained and protected. Human beings need to sustain their
lives and live normally.
Some fake qigong masters used to say that it’s alright to
kill on the first and the fifteenth of the lunar month, and some even said that
it’s alright to kill two-legged animals, as if two-legged animals aren’t
alive. If killing on the first and the fifteenth doesn’t count as killing,
what would you call it then, digging dirt? You can tell that some qigong masters
are fake just by their words and actions, by what they say and what they want.
Usually the qigong masters who say those things and do those things are
possessed. Just look at the way those qigong masters who are possessed by fox
spirits eat chicken—they wolf it down and don’t even want to spit out the
bones.
Killing doesn’t just generate a serious amount of karma, it
also has to do with the question of compassion. Shouldn’t we cultivators have
compassion? When our compassion comes out we’ll probably see that all sentient
beings are suffering, that everyone is suffering. You’ll come to see that.
On Eating Meat
Eating meat is another sensitive subject, but eating meat isn’t
killing. You’ve studied the Law for quite a while now, but we haven’t asked
you to stay away from meat. As soon as you walk into a lot of qigong masters’
classes they’ll tell you that you can’t eat meat anymore. You might think,
"Just like that I’m not allowed to eat meat? You’ve caught me off
guard." Maybe what’s cooked at your house today is chicken or fish, and
it smells pretty good. But you wouldn’t be allowed to eat it. Religious
cultivation is the same—they forbid eating meat. That’s also taught in the
usual Buddhist practices and in some Daoist practices—no eating meat. We aren’t
asking you to do that here, but we do teach about this. And what do we say about
it? Our way of practice is one where the Law refines the person, and in
practices where the Law refines the person, certain states will arise from his
gong and Law, so in the course of practicing, different cultivation states come
about at different levels. So one day, or after I finish the class today, some
people will experience this state: they can’t eat meat, and it smells bad to
them, and if they eat it they’ll want to throw up. It’s not that you’re
forced by somebody not to eat meat or that you hold back from eating it, it
comes from within. When you reach that level your gong will take effect in a way
that makes you unable to eat meat. You’ll throw up if you actually swallow it.
Our veteran students all know that this state will come up in
Falun Dafa cultivation, and that different levels correspond to different
cultivation states. There are some students who have a pretty strong desire to
eat meat, they have a strong attachment to it, and they can usually eat a ton of
meat. When other practitioners find meat unpleasant they don’t, and they can
still eat it. So what’s done to have them get rid of that attachment? Their
stomachs will ache if they eat meat, and won’t if they don’t. That will
happen, and it means they shouldn’t eat meat. Will our practitioners have
nothing to do with meat from today on? No, it’s not like that. So what do we
make of it? When you can’t eat meat it truly comes from within. And what’s
the purpose? In monastic cultivation when they force you not to eat meat, it’s
actually for the same reason as our induced state of not being able to eat meat:
it’s to get rid of that desire and attachment people have to meat.
Some people can hardly force down what’s on their plate if
it doesn’t have meat in it. That’s an ordinary person’s desire. One
morning, as I passed by the back entrance of Triumph Park in Changchun, three
people came out of the entrance, talking loudly. One of them said, "What
kind of qigong is that—it doesn’t let you eat meat! I’d rather lose ten
years off my life than give up meat!" What an intense desire. Now think
about it, shouldn’t that kind of desire be removed? It definitely should. What
a person does in the cultivation process is remove his different desires and
attachments. To spell it out for you, if the desire to eat meat isn’t removed,
isn’t that an attachment that hasn’t been removed? Could you cultivate to
Perfection? So as long as something is an attachment it has to go. But it’s
not that you’ll never be able to eat meat again. Not letting you eat meat isn’t
the point, the point is to not let you have that attachment. If you get rid of
that attachment during the time when you can’t eat meat, you might be able to
eat it again later on, it won’t smell bad, and when you eat it, it won’t
taste that bad. So at that time you’ll be able to eat it, and it won’t be a
problem.
When you’re able to eat it again, your attachment will be
gone, and your desire for meat will be gone. But a big change will happen: when
you eat meat again, it won’t be that tasty, and when your family cooks it you’ll
eat along with them, and when your family doesn’t cook it you won’t miss it,
and when you do eat it, it won’t taste really good anymore. That cultivation
state will appear. But cultivating among ordinary people is so complicated. If
your family always cooks meat, after a while you’ll think it tastes really
good again, and the cycle will repeat itself. That cycle could even repeat
itself a number of times while you’re cultivating, and all of a sudden you won’t
be able to eat meat again. When you can’t eat it, don’t eat it—you really
won’t be able to eat it, and if you eat it you’ll throw up. When you’re
able to eat it, eat it. Just let it happen naturally. The point isn’t to eat
meat or not to, what’s key is to get rid of that attachment.
You go pretty fast in our Falun Dafa discipline. As long as
you improve your character, you’ll be able to break through each level
quickly. Some people aren’t too attached to meat in the first place, so they
don’t really care whether there’s meat or not. For those people it will pass
after a week or two, and their attachment will be whittled away. For some people
it lasts for a month, two months, three months, or maybe even half a year, and
only in extremely special cases is it more than a year before they can eat meat
again. That’s because meat is now a main part of the human diet. But full-time
monastic cultivators still shouldn’t eat meat.
Let’s talk about how Buddhism looks at eating meat. The
earliest, original Buddhism didn’t prohibit eating meat. Back then, when
Shakyamuni led his disciples in cultivating diligently in the forest, there
definitely wasn’t any precept that banned meat. And why wasn’t there?
Because when Shakyamuni taught his Law 2,500 years ago, society was backward,
and some regions had agriculture while others didn’t, there weren’t many
cultivated farmlands, forests were everywhere, and grain supplies were awfully
tight. The people had just emerged from a primitive society and they lived
mainly on hunting, so in a lot of regions they mainly ate meat. So to have his
disciples give up human attachments as much as possible, Shakyamuni didn’t let
them have any contact with things like money or material things, and he led them
in begging for food and alms. They ate whatever other people gave them, since as
cultivators they couldn’t choose their food. And the food that people gave
them probably would have included meat.
Some foods actually were dubbed taboo back in the original
Buddhism. So taboo foods go back to the original Buddhism, but nowadays people
say meat is what’s meant by "taboo food." But the truth is, taboo
food back then didn’t mean meat. It was about things like onions, ginger, and
garlic. And why did they call those things taboo? Even among monks there aren’t
many people who can explain it today, and that’s because a lot of them don’t
truly cultivate, and there’s a lot they don’t know. What Shakyamuni taught
was called "Precept, Concentration, Wisdom." "Precept" was
about doing away with all ordinary people’s desires. "Concentration"
was about cultivators cultivating with utter calm of mind while meditating, and
being in total stillness. So anything that interfered with that, or that blocked
their cultivating, was considered serious interference. And if somebody ate
onions, ginger, or garlic, they’d give off a strong odor. Back then monks
meditated in forests or caves in groups of seven or eight people in a circle. If
somebody ate those things, it would produce a strong, pungent odor that would
affect other people’s meditation and their ability to become still inside, so
it would seriously interfere with other people’s practice. That’s why there
was that precept. They considered those foods taboo and made them off limits. A
lot of beings that are developed from the human body through cultivation get
really bothered by such foul odors. Onions, ginger, and garlic can also
stimulate a person’s desires, and when you eat a lot of them you can get
hooked. That’s why they were considered taboo.
In the past, a lot of monks who’d cultivated to very high
levels and who were Unlocked, or semi-Unlocked, also knew that in the
cultivation process precepts don’t matter, that when a person gets rid of the
attachment it turns out that physical item doesn’t have any effect, and that
what really interferes with a person is the attachment. So past generations of
high-level monks also saw that the question of eating meat isn’t what’s key.
They knew that what’s key is whether he can get rid of the attachment, and
that if there’s no attachment it doesn’t matter what a person fills his
stomach with, anything’s fine. A lot of people are used to that, since that’s
how they’ve been cultivating in monasteries all this time. And it’s no
longer just a precept, now it’s a chartered rule in monasteries, so they
definitely can’t eat meat, and people are used to cultivating like that. Let’s
talk about monk Jigong, for example. They’ve really put him in the spotlight
in literature, since monks are supposed to abstain from meat but he went and ate
it. They’ve made him out to be unique. But the truth is, it’s just that
after Jigong was driven out of Lingyin Monastery food naturally became a real
problem for him, and his survival was at stake. He’d eat whatever he could get
his hands on to fill his belly. He just wanted to fill his belly and he wasn’t
attached to any specific food, so it didn’t matter. He’d cultivated to that
point, so he understood that truth. Jigong actually only ate meat a few times,
maybe once or twice. As soon as somebody mentions monks eating meat, writers get
interested, since the more sensational the subject, the more people want to read
about it. Art needs to be larger than life, as they say, so they publicized it.
The truth is, when you really get rid of that attachment it doesn’t matter
what you fill your belly with.
In areas of Southeast Asia and Southern China, especially in
Guangdong and Guangxi Provinces, some lay Buddhists don’t say they cultivate
Buddhahood—it’s as if the phrase "cultivate Buddhahood" was
old-fashioned. But they say they’re vegetarian, or that they don’t eat meat.
What they mean is that they’re vegetarian, and by virtue of that they’re
cultivating Buddhahood. They take cultivating Buddhahood to be something that
simple. You’re saying you can cultivate into a Buddha just by being
vegetarian? You know, that’s only one kind of attachment people have, it’s
just one desire. So you’re only getting rid of that attachment, that one
attachment. But you also need to get rid of jealousy, competitiveness, being
overly happy, showing off—all kinds of attachments. People have so many
attachments. You have to get rid of all your attachments and every kind of
desire, and only then can you cultivate to Perfection. So just by getting rid of
that attachment to eating meat, you can cultivate into a Buddha? That’s not
the right idea.
So when it comes to eating, it’s not right to be attached
to any kind of food, not just meat. Some people say, "I just like to eat this."
Well, that’s another desire. A cultivator doesn’t have that kind of
attachment when he gets to a certain point. Of course, we’re teaching a
high-level Law and what we’re teaching is based on and integrates different
levels. There’s no way to achieve that all at once. If there’s a certain
food you just want to eat, when you truly cultivate to the point when that
attachment should go, you won’t be able to eat it, and when you do eat it, it
won’t taste right. Who knows what it’ll taste like. Back when I used to put
in time at a company, the company’s cafeteria was always losing money. Later
on it went belly up, so everybody brought their own lunches. It was a pretty big
hassle hustling and bustling to prepare food in the morning before going off to
work. Sometimes I’d buy two steamed buns and a piece of tofu in soy sauce. You’d
think such light things would be alright, but it still wasn’t okay to eat them
all the time—that attachment had to go. As soon as I saw tofu my stomach would
go sour and I wouldn’t be able to eat it. It was to keep me from getting
attached. Of course, that only happens when your cultivation hits a certain
point. It doesn’t happen at the beginning.
Buddhists make a point of not drinking alcohol. Ever seen a
Buddha holding a wine jug? Never. I’ve said that if you can’t eat meat, it
won’t be a problem to eat it again later on after you get rid of that
attachment by cultivating among ordinary people. But after you quit drinking
alcohol you shouldn’t drink again. Don’t practitioners have gong in their
bodies? Gong of every kind and shape. Some abilities manifest at the surface of
your body, and they’re all pure. As soon as you drink alcohol, "whoosh—"
they leave your body instantly. At that time you’ll have nothing on your body,
they can’t stand that smell. Drinking is a nasty habit because it can really
throw off your reasoning. So why do some Great Dao practitioners drink in their
cultivation? Because they aren’t cultivating their master souls, and they
drink to numb their master souls.
Some people are so hooked on alcohol that they value it as
much as their lives, some others are fond of alcohol, and others have drunk so
much they’ve gotten alcohol poisoning. If there’s no alcohol they don’t
even want to eat, and they can’t get by without a drink. We practitioners
shouldn’t be like that. Drinking is definitely addictive, it’s a desire.
Alcohol stimulates a person’s addictive nerves, and the more a person drinks,
the worse his addiction. You’re a practitioner, so let’s think about it,
shouldn’t you get rid of that attachment? That attachment has to go. Some
people might be thinking, "There’s no way. I meet with people all the
time," or, "I do public relations, and I meet with guests all the
time. It’s not easy to get things done without a drink." I’d say that’s
not necessarily true. Usually when people do business, especially when they do
business with or deal with foreigners, you might ask for a soft drink, he might
ask for mineral water, while another person might want a beer. Nobody’s about
to pour it down your throat or anything—you pick your own drink, and drink
whatever amount you want. And there’s even less of that among well-educated
people. That’s usually how it is.
Smoking is another attachment. Some people say that smoking
can give them a lift. I’d say you’re only fooling yourself, really. Some
people have a cigarette when they’re tired from working or writing something
and want to take a break. They think they’re more alert after smoking. But
that’s not how it really works. It’s just because they had that moment’s
rest. People’s minds can give them the wrong impression and create a kind of
illusion. So afterwards a concept really forms, and a wrong impression develops,
so that you have the sense smoking gave you a lift. But it didn’t at all, it
doesn’t have that effect. Smoking doesn’t do the body one bit of good. If a
person has smoked for a long time, when a doctor does an autopsy he’ll find
that his trachea is all black, and even the insides of his lungs are black.
Aren’t we practitioners trying to purify our bodies? We
want to keep purifying our bodies, and keep moving up to higher levels. So what
are you putting that in your body for? Isn’t that the opposite of what we’re
trying to do? Besides, it’s another strong desire. Some people do know it’s
bad, but they just can’t quit. I can tell you that it’s actually because
they don’t have the right thoughts guiding them, so it’s not easy for them
to just up and quit. See yourself as a cultivator, and treat it as an attachment
today and try to quit, see if you can quit. If you really want to cultivate I
urge you to quit smoking today, and I guarantee you can quit. In the field of
this class nobody thinks of smoking. If you want to quit, I guarantee you can
quit, and when you next pick up a cigarette it won’t taste right. Reading this
talk in the book has the same effect. Of course, if you’re not interested in
cultivating, then that’s fine, and we won’t stop you, but if you do want to
be a cultivator I think you’d better quit. I’ve given an example before:
have you ever seen a Buddha or a Dao sitting there with a cigarette dangling
from his mouth? How laughable! Now that you’re a cultivator, what is it you’re
trying to achieve? Shouldn’t you quit? That’s why I’m saying that if you
want to cultivate you’d better quit. It harms your body, and it’s a desire—it
couldn’t be further from what we cultivators have to do.
Jealousy
When I’m teaching the Law I often talk about jealousy. And
why is that? Because jealousy is really intense in China, so intense it’s
become natural, and people can’t sense it in themselves anymore. So why are
Chinese people so intensely jealous? There’s a reason. Chinese people were
strongly influenced by Confucianism in the past, and their personality is pretty
introverted. When they’re angry it doesn’t show, and when they’re happy it
doesn’t show. They make a point of polite restraint and enduring things. Since
it’s been so deeply ingrained, our people have developed a very introverted
personality overall. Of course, there’s something good about this, because a
person like that is smart but unassuming. But it has its drawbacks, and it can
bring about bad situations. Here in the Age of the Law’s End especially, the
negative side of it is even more obvious: it can make people’s jealousy worse.
If somebody has good news and lets other people know, they’ll get incredibly
jealous right away. If somebody gets an award at his company or somewhere else,
or if he gets something good, he won’t dare say a word about it because other
people will get upset when they hear about it. Westerners call this
"Oriental jealousy" or "Asian jealousy." The whole Asian
region has been strongly influenced by Chinese Confucianism, and this jealousy
is everywhere to some degree, but only in our China is it so intense.
This is somewhat related to the absolute egalitarianism that
we used to practice. "If the sky falls, everybody dies together, after all;
everybody should share equally in anything good; when there’s a pay hike,
everybody should be entitled to the same share." The logic seems
right—everybody
is being treated the same. But how could they be the same? They do different
jobs, and they fulfill their responsibilities to different extents. You see,
there’s a law in this universe of ours, called, "no loss, no gain."
To gain something, you have to lose something. Ordinary people say, "No
work, no gain. More work, more gain. Less work, less gain," and that a
person who makes more sacrifices should gain more. Back when absolute
egalitarianism was practiced, they said that people are all born the same, and
that it’s things after you’re born that change you. I’d say that idea is
too absolute, and anything so absolute is wrong. Why are some people born male
and others female? And why are there differences in their looks? Some people are
born with sickness or disfigured, so they’re not all the same. When we look at
it from a higher level, a person’s whole life is laid out there in another
dimension, so could people be the same? Everybody wants to be equal, but if
something isn’t part of your life, how could you be equal? People aren’t the
same.
The people in Western countries are more extroverted, and
when they’re happy it shows, just as when they’re angry it shows. That has
its pros and cons, like a lack of ability to endure. These two personalities
stem from different values, and they lead to different results when people do
things. With Chinese people, when a person is praised by his superior or given
something good, other people get upset. When a person gets a larger bonus, he’ll
quietly slip it into his pocket and not let anybody know. Nowadays it’s even
hard if you’re Employee of the Month—"You’re Employee of the Month
and you’re so good at your job, you should come to work early and go
home late. Why don’t you do all this work? You’re doing so well, and
we’re not good enough..." People use biting sarcasm. Even being a good
person is hard.
It’s totally different outside China. For example, a person’s
boss thinks he did good work today, so he gives him a little bit of money as a
thank you note. He excitedly counts the bills one by one in front of everyone,
"Wow, the boss gave me so much money today." He happily tells other
people about it as he thumbs through the bills one by one, and there aren’t
any consequences. In China when somebody gets a bonus, even the boss tells him
to quickly tuck it away and not let anybody see it. Outside of China, when a kid
gets a hundred in school, he runs home shouting with joy, "I got a hundred
today! I got a hundred!" He runs all the way home from school. A neighbor
opens his door and yells to him, "Attaboy Tom!" Another person opens
her window, "Hey Jack, great job!" If this happened in China it’d be
pretty bad. "I got a hundred! I got a hundred!" The kid runs home from
school yelling. Before one of his neighbors opens his door, he begins to fume in
his home, "What’s the big deal? It’s just a hundred. What’s he got to
brag about! Who hasn’t gotten a hundred before?" These two different ways
of thinking bring about different results. So that can stir up jealousy, and
people then get upset when something good happens to other people, instead of
being happy for them. That’s what happens.
Some years ago absolute egalitarianism was practiced, and it
really messed up people’s thinking and values. I’ll give you a specific
example. Let’s say there’s this person who thinks nobody at his company is
as good as he is, and that he’s good at whatever he does. He thinks he’s
just something else. He thinks to himself, "If they ask me to be factory
director or manager, I can do it. I could even handle a higher position. I think
I could even be Premier." Maybe his boss says he’s really capable and
good at whatever he does. And maybe his coworkers say this guy is really
capable, too, that he knows his stuff, and that he’s got talent. But there’s
somebody in his work team or who shares an office with him, and this guy can’t
do anything well or can’t ever come through, and one day this incompetent guy
gets promoted to a supervisory position. He isn’t promoted, and that guy even
becomes his boss. So he thinks it’s just so unfair and he can’t get over it.
He goes around to everyone trying to do something about it, fuming and burning
with jealousy.
Let me tell you this truth, a truth ordinary people can’t
grasp: maybe you think you’re good at everything, but it’s not in your
destiny, while that person isn’t good at anything but it is in his destiny, so
that guy gets the managerial position. We don’t worry about what ordinary
people think, because those are just ordinary thoughts. In the eyes of higher
beings, society just develops according to the specified patterns of
development. So what a person does in his life isn’t arranged based on his
talents. Buddhism talks about karmic retribution, and that things are arranged
according to your karma, so no matter how capable you are, if you don’t have
virtue you might not have anything in this life. You think that somebody isn’t
good at anything, but maybe he has a lot of virtue, so he becomes a high-ranking
official or gets rich. Ordinary people can’t see it, so they always think they
should do what they’re fit to and supposed to do. So they fight tooth and nail
for things all their lives, they feel badly hurt, they think life is hard and
tiring, and they always think things are unfair and they can’t get over them.
They can’t enjoy their food, they don’t sleep well, and they get really
discouraged and hopeless, and by the time they’re old they’ve ruined their
bodies from head to toe, and all kinds of health problems come along.
So we cultivators should do that even less. We cultivators
always let things happen naturally. If something is yours, nobody will take it
away, and if something isn’t yours, you won’t be able to get it even by
fighting for it. Of course, that’s not absolute. If it were that absolute,
there wouldn’t be a question of people doing wrong. So in other words, there
could be some unstable factors. But you’re a practitioner, so under normal
circumstances you are looked after by your teacher’s Law Bodies. If other
people want to take your things they won’t be able to budge them. So that’s
why we just let things happen naturally. Sometimes you think that something is
yours, and other people tell you it is, when in fact it’s not. So maybe you
think it’s yours but it turns out it’s not. That will reveal whether you’re
able to let it go. If you can’t let it go it’s an attachment. That method
has to be used to get rid of your attachment to personal gain—that’s the
idea. Ordinary people can’t grasp this truth, so they compete and fight when
there’s something to gain at stake.
Jealousy is incredibly strong among ordinary people, and it’s
always been really evident in cultivation circles, too. People who do different
qigong practices get all in a huff over the idea of somebody else being good.
They go off about such-and-such practice being good, and go on about
such-and-such one being bad—they make all kinds of comments. As I see it, they’re
all at the level of healing and fitness. Most of those practices that fight with
each other are brought about by spirit possession and they’re a mess, and they
don’t even care about character. Suppose someone has practiced for over 20
years but hasn’t had any abilities come out, while another person gets them
soon after he starts. He’ll think it’s unfair, and he won’t be able to
stand it. "I’ve practiced for over 20 years but I haven’t developed any
abilities, and now he’s got them—what abilities has he got?" He’ll
be furious. "He’s possessed, he’s got qigong psychosis!" Or when a
qigong master holds a class, some people sit there in a huff, "Pfff, what
kind of qigong master is he? I don’t want to listen to any of the stuff he
talks about." Sure, maybe that qigong master doesn’t talk as well as he
does, but what that qigong master talks about are the things from his own
practice. That person will go and learn anything, and he’s got a big old pile
of completion certificates. He’ll attend any qigong master’s class, and
sure, he knows a lot—he knows more than that qigong master. But what’s the
use? Those are all just about healing and fitness. The more he’s filled with
them, the more jumbled and complicated his messages get and the harder it is for
him to cultivate, it’s just one big mess. Real cultivation teaches you to
commit to one practice, and you don’t go off course at all. But this problem
also shows up among true cultivators who don’t admit that other people are
good and don’t get rid of their competitiveness. They’re likely to get
jealous.
Here’s a story for you. In Canonization of the Gods,
Shen Gongbao thinks that Jiang Ziya is old and inept. Yet Honorable Divine of
the Origin asks Jiang Ziya to grant titles to the Gods. Then Shen Gongbao thinks
it’s unfair, and he can’t come to terms with it. "Why was he asked to
grant titles to the Gods? See how powerful I, Shen Gongbao, am—I can put my
head back on my shoulders after it’s cut off. Why wasn’t I asked to grant
titles to the Gods?" He gets incredibly jealous, and makes trouble for
Jiang Ziya all the time.
In Shakyamuni’s time the original Buddhism did involve
abilities, but nowadays nobody in Buddhism dares to talk about them. If you talk
about abilities they’ll say you’ve gone crazy. "What abilities?"
They don’t acknowledge them at all. And why don’t they? Monks these days don’t
have a clue. Shakyamuni had ten great disciples, and he said Maudgalyaayana was
number one in divine powers. Shakyamuni also had female disciples, and one of
them, named Uppalavanna, was number one in divine powers. When Buddhism spread
to China it was the same, with each generation having lots of accomplished
monks, and when Bodhidharma came to China he rode on a reed to cross the river.
But as time has gone by, divine powers have been rejected more and more. The
main reason is that people such as senior monks, presiding monks, and abbots in
monasteries don’t necessarily have a great base. Sure they’re abbots or
senior monks, but those are just ordinary people’s positions. They’re still
cultivating, too, only they do it full-time, while you cultivate at home
part-time. You just have to cultivate your mind, whether you can succeed in
cultivation or not. That goes for everyone, and it won’t work even if you fall
short just a bit. But a junior monk who cooks the meals doesn’t necessarily
have a small base. The more hardship the junior monk goes through, the easier it
is for him to become Unlocked. While the more comfort the senior monks have, the
harder it is for them to become Unlocked, since there’s the issue of
transforming karma. The junior monk always works his fingers to the bone and
exhausts himself, so he pays off his karma quickly and he reaches Enlightenment
quickly. And maybe one day he’s suddenly Unlocked. With his Unlocking, or
Enlightenment, or his semi-Enlightenment, his divine powers come out. All the
monks in his monastery come to consult him, and everybody is impressed by him.
But then the abbot can’t take it. "How am I supposed to be the abbot now?
What Enlightenment? He’s gone crazy. Get him out of here!" And they drive
him out of the monastery. In the course of time, it’s come to be that nobody
in our Han region who practices Buddhism dares to talk about abilities. Look at
how powerful Jigong was—he moved tree trunks from Emei Mountain and threw
those logs out of the well one after another. But in the end he was thrown out
of Lingyin Temple just the same.
Jealousy is very serious, because it directly impacts whether
we can cultivate to Perfection. If jealousy isn’t eliminated, all the thoughts
you’ve cultivated become fragile. There’s a rule: a person who doesn’t get
rid of jealousy while cultivating cannot achieve a True Fruition—he definitely
won’t achieve a True Fruition. Maybe you’ve heard people say that Buddha
Amitabha mentioned going to Heaven with karma. But that won’t happen if you
don’t get rid of jealousy. You could fall a little short in some other way, go
to Heaven with a little karma, and cultivate further. That’s possible. But
that’s definitely not possible if you don’t get rid of your jealousy. Today
I’m telling practitioners: stop turning a blind eye to your problem. Your goal
is to cultivate up to higher levels, so you have to get rid of jealousy. That’s
why I’ve singled it out.
On Healing
I’m bringing up the topic of healing, but it’s not to
teach you to heal. No true cultivator of Falun Dafa may heal people. As soon as
you do healing, my Law Bodies will take back all the Falun Dafa things that your
body carries. Why do we take this so seriously? Because it’s something that
damages Dafa. Not only does it harm your own health, but some people just itch
to do it again once they’ve healed something, and they’ll grab whoever they
see to treat them and show off. Isn’t that an attachment? It will have a
serious impact on your cultivation.
A lot of fake qigong masters have capitalized on the desire
to heal people that ordinary people get after they learn qigong. They go and
teach you those things and claim that sending out qi can heal. Isn’t that a
joke? Yours is qi, and his is qi—and when you send out qi it’s going to heal
him? Maybe his qi will actually overpower yours! One qi can’t suppress
another. When a person develops gong in high-level cultivation, what he emits is
high-energy matter, which can definitely heal and suppress illness, and it can
have a restraining effect. But it can’t remove it from its root. So to truly
heal something, a person needs to have abilities if he’s going to completely
heal it. There’s a specific ability for healing each health problem. I can
tell you that there are over 1,000 kinds of abilities just for healing health
problems—however many kinds of ailments there are, that’s how many abilities
there are for healing them. If you don’t have those abilities, it doesn’t
matter what fancy tricks you do, it still won’t do the job.
Some people have made a mess of the cultivation world in
recent years. Of the qigong masters who came to the public to truly heal people
and keep them fit, or of those qigong masters who came to the public to pave the
way at the beginning, who taught people to do healing? All of them either healed
you themselves or taught you how to cultivate or tone up your own body, they’d
teach you a set of exercises, and then you could heal yourself by exercising on
your own. Later on, fake qigong masters came to the public and made a foul mess
of things. Anyone who wants to heal people is just asking to get possessed, no
question about it. In that environment back then there were some qigong masters
who did healing, but that just happened to match the celestial phenomena back
then. But it isn’t an ordinary person’s skill, and that couldn’t last
forever. It resulted from changes in the celestial phenomena at the time, it was
the product of that time period. Later on, when people got into solely teaching
others to do healing they were totally out of line. Could an ordinary person
heal somebody after learning it for just three to five days? Some of those
people claim, "I can heal this illness, that illness..." I’m telling
you, all of those people are possessed. Do they know what’s latched on their
backs? They’re possessed, but they don’t sense it, and they don’t know it.
They think it’s pretty good and that they’ve got special abilities.
Real qigong masters have to go through years of grueling
cultivation to achieve that. Then think about it, when you give somebody a
treatment do you have that kind of powerful ability to eliminate that karma?
Have you ever received any true instruction? Can you really heal somebody after
just a couple days of learning? Can you heal with your ordinary person’s
hands? All the same, those fake qigong masters have taken advantage of your
weaknesses. They’ve taken advantage of people’s attachments. "Aren’t
you trying to heal people?—Okay!" So they hold treatment classes
specifically to teach you healing techniques, like that qi-needle stuff, that
light therapy stuff, that discharging and supplementing stuff, that acupressure
stuff, that so-called grabbing method—they’ve got lots of fancy names for
that stuff. They’re just trying to get their hands on your money.
Let’s talk about the grabbing method. Here’s what we’ve
seen. Why do people have health problems? The root cause of their problem and
all their misfortune is karma, that black-matter karmic field. It’s yin in
nature, and it’s something bad. Those bad beings are also yin in nature, they’re
all black, and that’s why they can come onto the body—the environment suits
them. That’s the root cause of people’s health problems, it’s the chief
source of them. Of course, there are two other forms. One of them is really,
really small, high-density tiny beings. They’re something like a cluster of
karma. The other is as if it’s transported through a conduit, but it’s
pretty rare, and all of it is accumulated through the generations. That also
happens.
Let’s just talk about what’s most common. When a person
has a tumor somewhere, an infection somewhere, a bone spur somewhere, or
whatever, in another dimension there’s a being crouching at that place. In a
deep dimension there’s a being there. A typical qigong master can’t see
that, because the usual supernatural abilities can’t see it, and they can only
see that the person has black qi in his body. Wherever there’s black qi there’s
illness—they’re right about that. But, black qi is not the root cause of the
problem. Instead, it’s a being in a deeper dimension, and it’s that being
that produces the field. That’s why when people talk about expelling and
purging black qi, you can go ahead and purge away!—it’ll regenerate in no
time. Some beings are strong, and soon after it’s expelled they’ll drag it
back. They can retrieve it themselves. Blindly treating away won’t do it.
People with supernatural abilities see black qi there, and
they consider it pathogenic qi. What doctors of Chinese medicine see is the
energy channels blocked there, that qi and blood are blocked, that the energy
channels are congested. What doctors of Western medicine see is the symptoms of
an ulcer, tumor, bone spur, inflammation, or whatnot—these are the forms it
takes here in this dimension. After you remove that thing you’ll find that
there’s nothing in the body over here. You’ll see that the slipped disc or
bone spur is immediately healed after you remove that thing and wipe out that
field. You can take another X-ray and there won’t even be a trace of the bone
spur. The root cause was that thing which was at work.
Some people claim that you can heal people after three to
five days, and they teach you the grabbing method. Show me your grab! Human
beings are the weakest while that being is fierce, it controls your mind, plays
you like a puppet on strings, and can even take your life easily. You say that
you can grab it. How could you grab it? You can’t get a hold of it with your
ordinary person’s hands. When you flail your hand around over there, it
ignores you and it even laughs at you smugly. It thinks your grabbing aimlessly
is pretty funny. But if you really did reach it, it would hurt your hand
instantly, and that would be a real wound! I’ve seen people before whose hands
had nothing physically wrong with them, and by any examination there wasn’t
anything wrong with their bodies or wrong with their hands. But they just couldn’t
lift their hands, and they dangled there, limp. I’ve come across people like
that. Those bodies of theirs in other dimensions were injured, and that’s true
paralysis. When that body of yours is injured of course you’re
paralyzed. Some people have asked me, "Teacher, am I able to practice? I
had a sterilization operation," or they say they had something removed. I
tell them, "None of that matters. Your body in that other dimension hasn’t
had an operation, and when you practice it’s that body that functions."
That’s why I just said that when you try to grab it, you can’t touch it and
it’ll ignore you. If you did touch it, it might damage your hand.
To support the country’s large-scale qigong events, I took
some disciples with me to participate in the Asian Health Expos in Beijing. We
stood out above the rest at both Expos. At the first Expo, our Falun Dafa was
pronounced the "Star Qigong." At the second Expo, there was such a
huge crowd at our booth we were swamped. There weren’t many people at other
booths, but our booth area was packed. There were three waiting lines: there
were so many people in the first line that by the end of the early morning all
the slots for the first half of the day were gone; the people in the second line
were waiting to register for afternoon treatments; and the people in the other
line were waiting for my autograph. We don’t do healing, so why did we do
that? It was to support the country’s large-scale qigong events, to contribute
to that cause. That’s why we participated.
I divided my gong among the disciples who I brought along.
Each of them got a share, and they were energy clusters composed of over 100
abilities. I sealed their hands, but still, some of them suffered bites to the
hand that broke the skin, caused blisters, or made them bleed, and that even
happened a lot. Those things are so fierce. You think you’d dare to touch them
with your ordinary person’s hands? Besides, you couldn’t reach them—it won’t
work without those abilities. That’s because in another dimension they know
what you want to do, and they know it as soon as you think about it. When you
try to grab them they’ll have already run off. The moment that patient steps
out the door, it will get back on him instantly and his health problem will
return. To subdue it you need an ability where you extend your hand and
"Bam!" pin it there. After it’s pinned, we have another ability that
used to be called the Great Soul-Catching Method, and that ability is even more
powerful. It can pull out a person’s whole master soul, and instantly that
person won’t be able to move. That ability targets specific things, and when
we grabbed we specifically aimed at those things. You know how that Tathagata
Buddha aimed the bowl in his hand at Monkey King, right, and you know how big he
is, and still it shrunk him instantly. That’s what the ability can do. It
doesn’t matter how large or how small the being is, in one fell swoop it’s
caught in the hand, and right away it turns tiny.
Also, you can’t stick your hand into a patient’s flesh to
grab it and bring it out. That would throw people’s thinking in the ordinary
world into disarray, and there’s no way that’s allowed. You can’t do it
even if you have the ability. The hand a person reaches in with is his hand in
another dimension. Let’s say somebody has heart disease. When you move your
hand toward the heart to grab, your hand in another dimension goes in and
immediately snatches it. Then your outside hand grabs, and the two hands close
together and then it’s in your hand. It’s so fierce, sometimes it moves in
your hands and tries to drill into them, sometimes it bites, and sometimes it
even screeches. It looks small while you cup it in your hands, but if you
release it it’ll become pretty big. It’s not something that just anyone can
have an effect on. Without those abilities you can’t do a thing to it—it’s
not nearly as simple as we think.
Of course, that form of qigong treatment might be allowed to
exist in the future. It was always around in the past. But a condition has to be
met: the person must be a cultivator, and then he can do that out of compassion
for a few good people while he is cultivating. But he can’t completely
eliminate their karma, he doesn’t have enough benevolent might, so their
tribulation is still there and it’s only the specific ailment that’s healed.
An ordinary, lesser qigong master isn’t somebody who has attained the Dao in
cultivation. He’s only able to postpone it for them, or maybe he transforms it—maybe
he transforms it into other adversity. But he might not even know about the
deferral process himself. If what his practice cultivates is the subordinate
consciousness, then it’s done by his subordinate consciousness. The
practitioners in certain practices might be pretty famous, but a lot of big-time
qigong masters don’t have gong—their gong grows on the bodies of their
subordinate souls. So in other words, that’s allowed during cultivation,
because some people stay at that one level, and they practice for over a decade,
or even several decades, without getting past that level, so their whole lives
they’re giving treatments. Since they are at that level they’re allowed to
do that. But disciples who cultivate in Falun Dafa absolutely cannot do
healings. You can try reading this book to a sick person, and if he can accept
its contents, it can heal him, but how effective it is depends on how much karma
he has.
Hospital Treatments and Qigong Treatments
Let’s talk about how hospital treatments and qigong
treatments are related. Some doctors of Western medicine don’t believe in
qigong, and you could say that’s true for most of them. Their version of the
story goes, "If qigong can heal people, what do we need hospitals for? Why
don’t you just replace hospitals! Your qigong can heal people with bare hands
and without injections, medication, or hospital stays, so why don’t you just
come take over our hospitals?" Those ideas make no sense. Those people aren’t
being rational. Some people don’t know what qigong is about. The fact is,
qigong treatments can’t be like ordinary people’s healing methods—it’s
not an ordinary person’s skill. It’s something higher. And are higher things
allowed to disrupt the ordinary world on a large scale? A Buddha’s
capabilities are just awesome—with the wave of a Buddha’s hand all of the
human race’s sicknesses could vanish. Then why don’t any Buddhas do that,
especially when there are so many of them? Why don’t they have mercy and heal
you? Because that’s just how the ordinary world is, and birth, aging,
sickness, and death are just a fact of life, they all have causes from the past
and are karmic retribution. If you owe a debt you have to pay it off.
If you heal someone, it’s the same as violating that rule,
as letting people do bad things and not pay for them. How could that be alright?
People who are cultivating are allowed to treat patients out of compassion when
they aren’t powerful enough to fully solve the problem. You’re allowed to do
that because your compassion has come out. But if you were really able to solve
that kind of problem, and solve it on a large scale, that wouldn’t be allowed.
Then you’d be seriously damaging the way of things in the ordinary world, and
that’s not allowed. That’s why replacing ordinary people’s hospitals with
qigong flat out won’t do. It’s a higher Law.
If you went and started to put up qigong hospitals all over
China, supposing that was allowed, and all the great qigong masters got
involved, think about it, what would that look like? That’s not allowed,
because people all maintain the way of things in the ordinary world. When qigong
hospitals are put up, when qigong clinics, rehab centers, and health spas are
put up, once those are put up, those qigong masters’ healing abilities drop
dramatically, and the results of their treatments go downhill right away. Why?
Because they’re doing ordinary people’s things. It has to be on par with the
Law for ordinary people, it has to be at the same level as the normal human
condition, and the effectiveness of treatments has to be the same as that of
hospitals. So their treatments go downhill, and they start talking about how
their treatments need several sessions. That’s usually how it goes.
Whether qigong hospitals are put up or not, nobody can deny
that qigong can heal. Qigong has been spread in society for a while now, and a
lot of people really have met their goal of getting healthy and fit through
practicing it. Whether the ailment was postponed or shifted by a qigong master
or however it was treated, whatever happened, that ailment isn’t there right
now. So in other words, you can’t deny that qigong can heal. Most of the
people who see qigong masters for treatments have unknown or hard-to-cure health
problems. Hospitals can’t cure them so they go to qigong masters to try their
luck, and lo and behold they’re cured. The people who manage to get cured at
hospitals don’t see qigong masters. That’s how people looked at it,
especially at the beginning. So qigong can heal, only it can’t be done like
other things in the ordinary world. Large-scale disruption definitely isn’t
allowed, but doing it on a small-scale, or doing it quietly and not making that
big of an impact, that’s allowed, though it won’t completely heal the
ailment, for sure. The best way for a person to heal himself is to do qigong
exercises.
There are also some qigong masters who say that hospitals can’t
heal people, and they go off about the effectiveness of hospital treatments
today. How should we put it… Of course, there are all sorts of reasons for
that. The main one, as I see it, is mankind’s poor moral standard, which leads
to all kinds of bizarre diseases that hospitals can’t cure and that medicine
can’t do anything for. And then there’s a lot of fake medicine. All this
stems from the world’s degenerating to this degree, it’s people’s own
doing. Nobody should blame others for it, though, since everybody has added fuel
to the fire. That’s why everybody has hardships in cultivation.
Some health problems can’t be detected at the hospital,
even though the person really does have something wrong. And some people’s
problems are detected but they can’t identify them—they’re things that
haven’t been seen before, and hospitals lump them all together as "modern
diseases." Can hospitals heal people? Of course they can. If hospitals
couldn’t heal, why would people believe in them and go there for treatments?
Hospitals are able to heal, it’s just that their treatment methods are at
ordinary people’s level while illness is beyond the ordinary, and some
diseases are pretty serious. So hospitals say that diseases should be treated at
the early stages, since once a disease gets too serious hospitals can’t cure
it, and a high dosage of medicine will poison a person. The level of today’s
medical treatments is just like that of our science and technology, they’re
all at the level of ordinary people, so their healing effectiveness is the way
it is. And there’s one thing I have to clarify: what typical qigong treatments
and hospital treatments do is postpone and shift the tribulation, the root cause
of the health problem. They push it off to sometime later in the remaining years
of your life or to the future, and the karma isn’t touched at all.
Now let’s talk about Chinese medicine. Chinese medical
treatments are very close to qigong treatments. In ancient China, most doctors
of Chinese medicine had supernatural abilities. The great physicians such as Sun
Simiao, Hua Tuo, Li Shizhen, and Bian Que had supernatural abilities, and that’s
all documented in medical texts. Yet those things, the essence, are often
denounced these days. What Chinese medicine has inherited are only
prescriptions, or experiences gained from trial and error. Ancient Chinese
medicine was quite advanced. It was ahead of today’s medical sciences. Some
people think, "Modern medicine is so advanced—CAT scans can examine the
inside of the body, and we can do ultrasound, imaging, and X-rays." Sure,
modern equipment is pretty advanced, but I’d say it’s still not as good as
ancient Chinese medical science.
The physician Hua Tuo once saw a tumor in Emperor Cao Cao’s
brain and wanted to open his skull to operate and take it out. When Cao Cao
heard that, he thought that Hua Tuo wanted to take his head, so he locked Hua
Tuo up. Hua Tuo eventually died in prison. When Cao Cao became sick he
remembered Hua Tuo and went looking for him, but Hua Tuo was already dead. Later
on Cao Cao did in fact die from it. So how had Hua Tuo known? He saw it. That’s
a supernatural ability we human beings have, and it’s something the great
physicians of old times all had. After a person’s Third Eye opens, from one
side he can simultaneously see four sides of a person’s body—from the front
he can see the back side, left side, and right side. He can also section it to
look layer by layer, and, he can see through this dimension to look at the root
cause of the health problem. Can modern medical means do that? Not even close.
Maybe in a thousand years! CAT scans, ultrasound, and X-rays can also see inside
a human body, but the machines are awfully bulky and those big guys aren’t
portable, and they don’t work without electricity. The Third Eye, on the other
hand, goes wherever you go and it doesn’t need a power supply. How could they
be compared?!
Some people talk about how great today’s medicine is. That’s
not how I see it. Ancient Chinese herbs could really get rid of sickness
efficiently. A lot of things were lost as they were passed down, while a good
number haven’t been lost and have been passed down as folk medicine. When I
held a class in Qiqihar City I saw a street vendor who was pulling teeth for
people. You could easily tell that he was from the South since he wasn’t
dressed like a Northeasterner. He wouldn’t turn anybody away, he’d pull
teeth for anybody who came along, and he had pulled a whole pile of them. His
point wasn’t to pull teeth but to sell his chemical solution. The solution
gave off strong yellow vapors. When he pulled somebody’s tooth he’d open the
solution’s bottle and hold it next to the person’s cheek where the bad tooth
was, and ask the person to suck in the vapors of the solution a few times.
Barely any of the solution would be consumed, and he’d cap it and set it
aside. Then he’d take a matchstick out of his pocket, and as he talked about
his solution he’d just flick the tooth with the matchstick and it would pop
out. It wouldn’t hurt, and there’d just be a few flecks of blood, but no
bleeding. Just think about it, the matchstick would have broken if he’d used
any force. But he used it to pop the tooth out with just a flick.
I’d say that some of the folk things that have been passed
down in China actually beat Western medicine’s sophisticated instruments. Let’s
see which works better. That person flicked the tooth with a matchstick and it
popped out. When a doctor of Western medicine pulls a tooth, he first injects an
anesthetic, he jabs all over the place, and the jabbing hurts badly. Then, when
the anesthetic kicks in the doctor pulls the tooth with a pair of pliers. After
all that pulling, whoops, the tooth might even snap off with its root still in
there. So then he uses a big hammer and a chisel to dig it out, and the pounding
scares you out of your wits. Then he uses this sophisticated instrument to drill
into you, and it’s enough to make some people jump out of their seat. It
really hurts, you bleed a lot, and you keep spitting out blood for a while. So
whose would you say is better? Whose would you say is more advanced? We shouldn’t
be looking at how the tools look, but at how effective they actually are.
Ancient Chinese medicine was quite advanced, and it’ll be years before today’s
Western medicine catches up.
Ancient China’s science was different from the science we’ve
learned from the West in modern times. It took a different path and could bring
about a different scenario. So we can’t use our current ways of understanding
things to understand ancient China’s science and technology, because it
focused on the human body, life, and the universe, they studied these things
directly, so it took a different path. Back then school students put value in
meditation, they emphasized good posture in sitting, and it was considered
important to control the breathing and direct qi when they picked up their
brush-pens. People in every line of work made a practice of clearing the mind
and adjusting the breathing, and the whole society went by that.
Some people say, "If we’d taken the path of ancient
China’s science, would we have the automobiles and trains we’ve got today?
Would we be as modernized as we are today?" I’d say that you shouldn’t
try to understand another way of life from the perspective of this environment.
Your thinking and concepts need to undergo a revolution. Without TVs, people
would have their own in their foreheads, and they could see whatever they
wanted. They’d also have abilities. Without trains or automobiles, people
would be able to sit there and levitate, and they wouldn’t even need
elevators. It would bring about a situation in which society developed
differently, and it wouldn’t necessarily be limited to that framework. The
flying saucers of alien beings travel back and forth incredibly fast, and they
can become large or small. The route they’ve taken is even more different, and
that’s yet another scientific method.