In May of 1999, I was close to fifty years old when the agency I worked for became an independent company. After July, of that year, the persecution of Falun Gong began. Both the local Chinese Communist Party (CCP) secretary and my labour union boss asked me to discontinue my practice and "Not get into trouble." I knew these people very well, and they seemed to have my welfare in mind. I was not prepared for this unexpected event, and agreed to stop practicing Falun Gong. Then, a police officer came to see me and asked me to sign a guarantee statement (statement to declare that one is remorseful for practicing Falun Gong and guarantees not to practice Falun Gong again, not to go to Beijing to appeal for Falun Gong, and never again associate with any Falun Dafa practitioners) to not practice, which I did. Clearly, I did not pass my first test in cultivation.
After I calmed down from these events, I continued my Fa study, and gradually began to see the problem. As a practitioner, it is my duty to validate the Fa. All the propaganda from the government slanders Dafa. It was wrong for me to stop my practice. I needed to validate the Fa, starting at my workplace.
As I learned and improved my understanding of the Fa, fellow practitioners encouraged me to distribute flyers, fact sheets and posters clarifying the truth about the illegal persecution of Dafa. While I performed these activities, I was able to identify the attachments that I did not recognize before July 1999. The first time I hung a flyer on someone's door, I was afraid, but I did it anyway.
Some people claimed that distributing fact sheets was politically motivated. I said, "I don't know the political issues. Courts and police stations are set up to uphold justice for the public. However, they are being used to persecute whoever they want to. People have no freedom of speech. We did not give out flyers before, but this was forced upon us by the CCP. God has given everyone the right to speak, but the CCP has taken that away. For the CCP, there is no law."
Practitioners have been persecuted for over nine years now. There is constant pressure from society and also from family. History has witnessed massive numbers of people murdered by the CCP, which is the reason why our relatives do not want us to get into trouble. However, members of the CCP lie about Dafa, and it is my duty to clarify this point to my relatives and others. I face these conflicts daily. No amount of reasoning can resolve these conflicts. I have decided to demonstrate to them the power of Falun Dafa by showing forbearance in all situations, whether it is dealing with money, material needs or just hard work. One day a fellow practitioner said to me, "Sister, you are great. You don't seem to have any problems."
Actually, I have faced many tests, but I use Masters' words in Hong Yin to help me.
I always recite,
"Cultivating gong has a path
mind is the way
On the boundless sea of Dafa
hardship is your ferry" ("Falun Dafa" from Hong Yin)
and
"He who regards not
ordinary sorrows and joys
A cultivator is he
He who has not attachment
to worldly loss and gain
An Arhat is he" ("Breaking Free of the Three Realms" from Hong Yin)
I travelled to Changchun in 2000 on a business trip. I returned on a train loaded with new soldier recruits. I saw one empty seat near the window and asked, "Is this seat occupied?" A thirty-year-old man answered, " Why don't you sit there first. If it is taken, you can get up later." The train started moving and no one came for the seat. After awhile, I heard this young man talking to the soldiers. When they talked about Falun Gong, they seemed to believe all the propaganda that they heard from television. I calmly remarked to them in a serious tone, "One should do some thinking instead of blindly believing a piece of news. If Falun Gong is truly bad, why are there so many people practicing it? Furthermore, those who do practice turn out to be good people. I am a simple woman, and do not understand politics. For forty years I believed and followed the CCP. Now I know that I should change, because all the propaganda on television about Falun Gong was fabricated." My sincerity moved this young man. It turned out that he had previously read Zhuan Falun. He had been mysteriously saved from a serious accident. He sensed that there was something wrong with what the CCP claimed about Falun Gong, but it was not clear to him exactly what that was. I told him that although he stopped studying the Fa, Master was still taking care of him, and that he should not believe what the CCP had to say. He left the train at Dunhua, and told me that he felt relieved and uplifted, and gave me his name and cell phone number. I knew that he understood what I told him.
One day in August 2008, I went home in a van. I heard a lady say to the driver, "That day when they passed the Olympic torch, the entire street was closed, including all the windows. I really don't understand why." The driver replied, "That was to avoid Falun Gong." I added, "I heard that some tourists at Tiananmen raised their hands to shade themselves from the sun. Immediately, five police officers went over to arrest them. The tourists were angry and fought back. Then, another police officer came shouting, 'They are not Falun Gong practitioners. The real practitioners won't fight back.' " All the passengers on the van laughed.
I was moved by the compassion and unselfish actions of many fellow practitioners that were described in articles on the Clearwisdom website. I used these articles as a reference for my own cultivation. As long as Fa-rectification is ongoing, I will follow Master and the Fa, and will not miss this very special and rare cultivation opportunity.
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