The Relationship Between Work and Cultivation

In the course of spreading the Fa, I have met quite a few righteous people, such as the supporters of human right movements, the advocates of democracy and freedom as well as the proponents of religions. They all support Dafa and oppose the persecution based on the principles in the dimension of human beings. When seeing them actively doing things for Dafa and thinking of the practitioners around me, I often wondered what the fundamental difference between ordinary people doing Dafa work and cultivators doing Dafa work would be. Especially after experiencing the incident that a phony practitioner pretended to enthusiastically take the so-called “proactive actions”, I further realised the importance of discerning working and cultivation.

In the past, I only partially understood what Teacher Li mentioned about the relationship between personal cultivation and cultivation in the Fa-rectification period. I thought that we have completely begun cultivating in the Fa-rectification period, and that my cultivation would be no problem as long as I actively participated in Fa-rectification activities and totally denied evil’s interference because Teacher Li has never arranged any tribulations for our personal cultivation after the 7.20 incident. As a result, I thus ignored the improvement of my personal xinxing. I especially had a strong mentality of doing things with pursuit and the mentality of competition. I was also self-conceited, and never noticed I had the mentality that I was right while others were wrong. Furthermore, my mood often remained in a state of excitement. As a result, I often went to extremes, and only focused on superficial achievements. In particular, when seeing some fellow practitioners slacking off in their cultivation, I always wanted to urge them to step forward and do something. Therefore, most of words I uttered were irrational.

During that period of time, my excuses were: Time and tide wait for no man. As the practitioners who have reached a high xinxing level should do the Fa-spreading and Fa-rectification work, so should those who haven’t reached a high xinxing level and have attachments. Having attachments will still happen, because we can improve ourselves while doing Dafa work. Doing something is always better than sitting there and doing nothing. With these excuses, neither could I study the Fa deeply nor listen to other practitioners’ opinions sincerely. I was only considering how to deal with one thing today, and another tomorrow. Therefore, I became overwhelmed by the things around me.

Now that I look at things from another perspective, I find that the principles are quite simple. Since a long time ago, Teacher Li has already repeatedly stressed that cultivation is to cultivate our hearts, and other things are not so important. No matter how much Dafa work has been done, if it was only done by ordinary people, then how magnificent would it be? In retrospect, it was really silly for me to focus on the superficial and neglect the essentials. Are those excuses I used in the past just the barriers arranged by the old evil forces to hinder my improvement?

When it comes to the mentalities of an ordinary person and a cultivator in doing things, the difference is obvious. An ordinary person’s mind is volatile, and is longing for the return due to fame, fortune and sentimentality. However, a cultivator’s mind is peaceful and unaffected, and is always with gentleness and kindness. What we need in the course of Fa-spreading and Fa-rectification is not the worldly heroic stories about Liu Hulan or Qiu Jin, but true internal firmness, rationality, peacefulness and harmony.

I still remember a minor thing that took place not long ago. I worked for a company, and worked very hard in order to squeeze some time for doing Dafa work through the Internet. My workload was almost twice as much as others, but the pay I got was not much more than others. Theoretically, the management should have been satisfied with my performance; however, my manager always found fault with me, and repeatedly stressed that I was not supposed to do personal business during office hours, and that I should take the initiative to help others more actively. At that time, I regarded the picky criticism as an evil interference, and took some serious actions to counter it. The situation thus came to a deadlock. Later I realised that as a cultivator, I am supposed to be a nice person wherever I am, and I should volunteer to do more work. Seemingly I might have less time to do Dafa work, but my xinxing level was improved. Since I looked at things from others’ perspectives, and took others’ situation into consideration, then I was able to yield twice the result with half the effort when I did Dafa work later. In the past, I couldn’t understand the reason why Teacher Li once mentioned that our studying for ordinary people’s degrees won’t affect our cultivation, and our dedicating time to Dafa won’t affect our studies. Now I finally realise that ordinary people’s stubborn way of thinking is invalid in higher dimension. As a cultivator, only after we fundamentally change our conventional human notions can we upgrade our understanding of the Fa.

Certainly, cultivation is the process of continuous improvements. If we are able to step forward to take part in Fa-spreading activities, then we are making progress. Nevertheless, while we are doing Dafa work, we must continuously improve our own xinxing level at the same time. The more we cultivate the righteous Fa, the more our personal cultivation can catch up with the progress of the Fa. Otherwise, it would be tantamount to ordinary people doing Dafa work.

The above is my personal understanding, and your comments are appreciated.

Chinese version available at http://www.yuanming.net/articles/200304/19021.html