(Clearwisdom.net) On July 20, 1999, I suddenly found out from TV about the decision to ban Falun Gong. This was the day I first heard of Falun Gong.
I first made contact with religion in 1990 when I was 14. I met a lady who was evangelizing on the street when I was walking with a classmate. The lady gave each of us a small piece of paper with hand-written praises and prayers most commonly used in Christianity. Several months later, I found a church and started my belief in Christianity. In 1994, I met a Catholic missionary, who taught me theology, anthropology, and philosophy. I spent six years improving my knowledge of theology and philosophy.
Back in 1999, when I was 24, I experienced some huge changes in my life, including separation from my girlfriend, betrayal by business partners and bankruptcy of my business, being fined, involvement in debt, losing a close family member, losing a job, addiction to alcohol, indulging in play day and night, condemning heaven and earth, and running away from home. All these things happened within several months. When I was at the edge of total collapse, I suddenly saw the light and understood "sin" and "love" one day at 3:00 a.m. in the morning. After thanking and praising God, I started a new life of abstinence and austerity. Within less than a year, I rebuilt my human nature.
I neither paid much attention to the attacks on Falun Gong by the media, nor noticed Falun Gong practitioners' efforts to resist the persecution. However, from the rising coverage of Falun Gong in the media, I learned more and more, and started to pay attention to Falun Gong and read emails that I received related to Falun Gong. I downloaded and read the first lecture of Zhuan Falun and it seemed to me that it was just a qigong book with some theories from Buddhism. Because my Catholic belief was against qigong and Buddhism, I did not make much effort to conduct further investigations. Nonetheless, my first impression of Zhuan Falun was that there was nothing bad in it. On the contrary, I found it to be mild and benevolent.
Through the Internet I contacted a Falun Gong practitioner, and this allowed me to develop further understanding. At first, I only wanted to have my questions answered on the objectives and methods of the persecution, and then we turned to the principles of Falun Gong. I found out that there were in fact some unique characteristics in the principles of Falun Gong. Although some of them were very hard to believe for me at the time, in general they were very comprehensive and peaceful. I developed a desire to understand Falun Gong more deeply.
In September 2000, during the Sydney Olympic Games, I arrived in Beijing. Under the arrangement and with the help of that Falun Gong practitioner, I settled down in a very quiet area and obtained the book Zhuan Falun. In Christianity, Jesus taught his followers what to do and what not to do, and he attributed the source of benevolence to the love of God, and the existence of evil to the sins of human beings. Thus there was very little description about why things are the way they are. Thus there remains "agnosticism" in western theology, where such questions are assigned to the "unanswerable" category. Under the love of God, we left all these questions to God. Thus after ten years of belief in Christianity, I had accumulated many questions that needed to be answered.
This time, my experiences with reading Zhuan Falun were drastically different from the time I downloaded it the first time. I read very slowly, and the first lecture alone thoroughly shook my thoughts, suddenly answering many of my questions and making it difficult for me to follow the reading. After reading each lecture, I could feel that a lot of messages collided in my brain, and it was as if I were riding a whirlwind. The practitioner was a little worried, seeing me reading so slowly, but I told the practitioner that my reading was still too fast. Two lectures a day made me feel that it was almost beyond my ability to digest.
When I was reading Zhuan Falun, I saw many segments that had been used by the media as evidence against Falun Gong. I started to understand why the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) tried to destroy all Falun Gong books at the beginning of the persecution. It is so easy to see how the media simply took incomplete sentences out of context and then fabricated sentences for disreputable purpose. The truth is, anyone can discover for themselves that it is impossible for Zhuan Falun to stir any bad thoughts or to hurt people, nor can it make people choose not to go to the hospital and die at home from illnesses. On the contrary, Zhuan Falun clearly points out the function of hospitals in curing diseases. I was surprised that so many people refused to investigate a little on their own before believing such lies.
When I read,
"It is impossible for everyone to attain the Tao. Even for those who can continue their cultivation practice, it remains to be seen whether you can succeed and if you are determined to practice cultivation. It is impossible for everyone to become a Buddha." (Zhuan Falun, Lecture Two, "The Issue of Pursuit")
I said in my heart, "I surely can."
When I read,
"Others asked him again: "What doesn't a person want these days?" He replied: "No one wants the pieces of stone on the ground that are kicked here and there. So I'll pick that up." (Zhuan Falun, Lecture Nine)
I could not control myself and cried out loudly. I felt that I was that stone on the ground and was eventually picked up, and I suddenly understood the meaning of "Truthfulness, Compassion, Forbearance." Truthfulness without pursuit of fame or profit, Compassion with kindness to all living beings and willingness to give oneself up for them, and Forbearance with persistence no matter what one is facing are exactly the essence of Jesus, and faith, hope, and love are all included in them. I tried very hard to hold my tears and emotions to finish reading Zhuan Falun, after which I decided to practice Falun Gong.
On the ninth day after I arrived in Beijing, when I was finishing the last several pages of Zhuan Falun, I felt very tired, feeling anxious and somewhat tight. I climbed onto a bed to continue the reading, but suddenly I felt some uneasiness in my stomach. The matting was cold, and my whole stomach was cold. But I did not feel the coldness in an area about 10 cm in diameter under my navel, and it was as if there was a cushion under my stomach. I thought that I was lying on a compact disc. However, I did not find anything after searching several times with my hands and then with my eyes. I pushed my stomach but found nothing, so I began worrying. When my practitioner friend arrived, I told him about the disk in my stomach, but he replied without surprise, "That's wonderful! You have a law wheel now. Read more of Zhuan Falun because Teacher is already taking care of you."
As a believer of Catholicism, it was not easy for me to make such a conversion in ten days, especially when I had changed from universal Christianity to stringent Catholic and re-discovered the love of God with the power of belief after a series of huge blows in my life. What should I do facing Falun Gong? After careful thinking, I made the following decisions:
I have been a Catholic for the past ten years. I give my glories and praises to God, and I thank God, Jesus, and the Virgin Mary for taking care of me over the past ten years. Falun Dafa is a broad and deep Buddha Fa that has taught me the essence of the love of God, otherwise universally believed to be "unknowable" in Christianity. Thus I believe that I have entered the cultivation practice of Falun Dafa under the love of God.
